Let the Phoenix Stay Dead // Comics to Cinema
Before the last X-Men movie, Dark Phoenix was released, we at YRDC did an examination of the Dark Phoenix adaptations that came before and hoped the upcoming movie would be a better adaptation. While it did share the same creator as the previous adaptation attempt in X3: The Last Stand, Simon Kinberg, there were still hopes that he would do a better job this time around. The movie was released in June earlier this year, and it was a spectacular bomb critically. It did make $252 million off of a claimed $200 million budget, which means it never lost Fox money… but that didn’t change the 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes or the overall inept execution of the movie.
But what actually happened? Was there a way to salvage this train wreck?
I have to admit, there are some good aspects to this movie. James McAvoy is acting his heart out as Charles Xavier, and he does his best to make some of the strangest lines seem genuine. An early scene in the movie has 1975 Charles Xavier meeting young Jean for the first time and explaining how her new powers don’t make her evil or a freak. Instead, it is what she chooses to do with those powers. While the dialogue is weirdly awkward and filled with poor metaphors, McAvoy makes it clear that this is Xavier’s awkwardness more than poor dialogue. There’s also a wonderful scene where 1992 Xavier is forced to walk by Jean, and McAvoy’s body language is fantastic.
The few scenes of Scott Summers and Jean Grey interacting are actually quite nicely done as well. Tye Sheridan does a solid job with subtle motions showing how Scott cares for Jean. However, the camera focusing on these motions makes it about as subtle in execution as a Michael Bay explosion. The earliest scenes between Sheridan and Sophie Turner’s Jean are excellent, and Turner does an excellent job with the material she has.
Always a delight to see in the comics as well, a lot of characters spend their time calling Charles Xavier out on his crap. Mystique spends her time calling Xavier out for his putting the lives of humans above any of his students, intentionally putting them at risk. Beast calls Xavier out for similar attitudes, and even Cyclops gets to have his moment in the “Calling Xavier out for his stupidity” conga line.
Tragically, that is the entire extent of the good pieces I personally found in Dark Phoenix. Even the good has its flaws as well. Xavier takes the complete focus of the movie, despite the original story being about Jean. The movie is about how Xavier reacts to Jean’s uncontrollable powers, about how Xavier responds to Jean finding her lost father. Jean’s agency is stripped away from her by the alien threat and by Xavier until the very end of the movie, where Jean chooses to commit suicide to take out the threat… while a voiceover claims that she “evolved.” Even those scenes I praised between Sheridan and Turner are brief, as Scott is basically kicked from the A-Plot to the background 32 minutes into the movie.
There are two very large, very glaring problems with the movie amidst several smaller ones.
The script is a complete mess. Since Simon Kinberg was the sole writer (as well as director and one of the producers), it’s hard to say what actually happened here. There are massive moments in the movie that feel like they were lifted from somewhere else, or that multiple drafts were pulled apart and stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The motivation of multiple characters, particularly the unnamed aliens and Jean herself, varies wildly from scene to scene. Dialogue refers to items or scenes that don’t seem to actually exist, such as when the head alien declares that everyone was right - that emotions made Jean weak. Which was never mentioned in the movie at any other time. Jean replies with the allegedly powerful line that her emotions make her strong, and the music swells as she makes her tragic move. Again, without a setup for it, the line falls flat and cold.
The absolute strangest piece of script leaving that made it into the movie was the state of mutants in the world. At the opening of the movie, the X-Men are directly called by the President of the United States (who seems to be a Richard Nixon look-alike in 1992) to help rescue a space shuttle. Once the X-Men land with a successful mission, there are crowds cheering for them, with hand-made signs, action figures, and children with their faces painted like Nightcrawler. The movie shows Jean wrecking a cop car (with zero listed fatalities), killing Mystique accidentally, and then destroying a military helicopter… and after that, the entire world is talking about starting up concentration camps for mutants. There is literally no in between, and it just feels like Kinberg wanted to show how mankind could “hate and fear” mutants and setting up some new status quo where the X-Men are hunted, or at least feared like they were in the first movie back in 2000.
Character motivation is all over the place as well. Jean Grey veers wildly between being unable to control her powers, to outright being evil, and treated as such without warning or question. The movie tries to pass it off like the power is driving her mad by using CGI flares of energy across her face, or by using dramatic stings of music. However, Jean pinballs from Charles and a desire to be helped, to needing to see her father, to panicking over her powers being unleashed uncontrollably, to just plain evil and destructive, to finally a puppet and plot device for the aliens themselves. She has zero actual independent motivation, and the one lone decision she makes is to kill herself. This movie makes “crazy Jean” from X3 look sane and lucid, frankly.
Nightcrawler is particularly tragic as well. Painted as a kind soul, and a general pacifist whose powers are more defensive in nature, Kurt Wagner barely receives any screen time in this movie. Aside from hanging out with Scott and looking for Jean, there is precisely one moment that defines Kurt as a character. After seeing a soldier die in front of his eyes, Kurt goes completely insane, screaming and growling like a bootleg Wolverine while he uses random knives and his tail to stab people to death. He also viciously drops an opponent in front of a moving train, which is out of character for nearly any incarnation of Kurt, much less who we saw in X-Men: Apocalypse.
Magneto has no motivation or point to his inclusion. Kinberg does try, to his credit. He wants to avenge Mystique’s death, which makes some sense. However, he is merely a plot device to let Xavier and the others find their way to Jean in order to set up the final battle between the random aliens and the X-Men. To again give credit, Michael Fassbender acts the hell out of several scenes that don’t involve physical motions. I blame the director on this, with Fassbender’s best Magneto acting being “holding up a large, heavy invisible rock.”
Speaking of those aliens, it’s impossible to nail down what their deal is. It is well known that Dark Phoenix went through some last-minute rewrites and reshoots with a delayed-release. The irony is that these reshoots came from the fact that the original release of this movie made use of Fantastic Four villains the Skrulls. They were tangentially involved in the Dark Phoenix Saga, so it does make some sense to throw them in here. However, the heavy use of them in Captain Marvel resulted in their being changed to the D’Bari, an alien race exterminated when Jean devoured their sun in the comics.
The problem is, they now go unnamed in the movie, have shapeshifting powers like the Skrull, are nigh-invulnerable, have super strength, telekinetic powers in one scene, telepathy in another scene, and never use these powers reliably. Finally, it almost feels like the head alien, with her long platinum blonde hair, may have been intended to be some sort of Emma Frost originally. Her biggest scene is in a fancy New York home, with ornate and old fashioned decorations. For those not in the know, those settings belong to the Hellfire Club, of which Emma is a member. It almost feels like Kinberg chose to blend in any possible villains into a single group of ill-defined characters without motivation other than “lol evil.”
But enough beating a horse that’s already been beaten enough to become ground chevaline. What could be done to improve this movie?
With the scattered directions this movie takes, there are a few solid directions that Kinberg could have taken. It all depends on the angles you want to focus on for the movie.
With the early Scott and Jean scenes, it could have become a romantic tragedy, with Scott and Jean running off together and finding Jean’s father while trying to keep her mind together. Once the scene with her dad plays out and continues with Raven’s death, Scott tries to keep Jean grounded as the guilt over multiple deaths of parental figures starts to eat at her sanity. The movie could end with the aliens (better defined, I hope) or the Hellfire Club corrupting Jean, and with her sacrificing herself in the end. By focusing on the romantic pairing and more on Jean, we have a story that would keep Jean’s agency, give Scott things to do aside from mope, and even give them both a reason to exist in the movie.
Another angle could have been focusing on the relationship and trust between Jean and Xavier if you have to have McAvoy in the starring role. With this angle, most of the major plot structure could have been much the same, but with the story focusing on Jean’s story rather than making it all about Charles (and Erik) again.
If you’re going to go full alien invasion, do it. Another possibility would be the D’Bari infiltrating the government and turning humans against Mutants with lies, pushing Xavier and his school into a corner, so Jean has to team with them to stop the lies.
The Dark Phoenix Saga has a lot of potential and a ton of great moments. However, it is just that: a Saga. It is remarkably safe to say that Simon Kinberg does not have the writing chops to safely compress 37 issues of comics into 2 hours of movie. In fact, it’s very telling that the only successful adaptation has been the 1992 animated series version, which took over 12 episodes with some plot spilling out over earlier episodes in the season to set up some characters.
Marvel, if you’re listening, please don’t try to adapt the Dark Phoenix again for the MCU or XCU, or whatever you call it. Do something else, like the Brood Saga, or Extinction Agenda. There are a ton of awe-inspiring and incredible stories for you to adapt. Let the Phoenix rest; it can always rise again.
