okay, yes, so maybe in this new timeline jean grey caused her parents to get into a horrible car accident, but in the old timeline she was Smug™ so who can say which was the worse version of events
so one of the realities of having a franchise that lasts twenty years over the course of thirteen movies (and two TV series!) is that occasionally you're going to have some shit films. this isn't necessarily a death knell or anything, hell, the X-Men series itself managed to survive the double whammy of The Last Stand and then Origins: Wolverine. But with those films (and X-Men: Apocalypse), there still manages to be something fun about them, whether it's spectacle or some kind of goofy bad-movie-schlock factor.
so dark phoenix sucks, right
and like it sucks in particularly unfortunate ways. it's not like fun schlocky badness like Origins: Wolverine or have the absurd spectacle of something like Apocalypse. it's pretty blatant that almost none of the actors really want to be here and there's a lot of incredible phoned in performances, with one in particular that i'll get to when it becomes relevant. i think the only person who actually gave a shit in this movie is fichael massbender just judging by performance (but then Magneto's always been the most interesting character in any of these films).
one has to wonder how much of the "we really wish we weren't here right now" energy was because of the impending announcement of 21st century fox's acquisition by disney, which was announced 2 months after initial filming wrapped. they almost certainly were aware of the possibility that it was happening, right? not to mention the plot threads they ended up needing to cut out of this and The New Mutants (which had its own wacky brand of behind the scenes issues) when it became clear that the story wouldn't be continuing. Remember all the setup the Essex Corporation got over the last few movies? almost kind of bums me out that we'll never find out how they planned to justify a goofy codename like "Mister Sinister" in this franchise.
oh, and shoutout to Fox being like "we don't NEED the X-Men branding for our movie to be successful, we're just gonna call it DARK PHOENIX" only for every single home release to be updated to "X-Men: Dark Phoenix." Way to commit to the bit you guys.
okay so let's talk about mystique real quick
so if i recall correctly, jennifer lawrence was pretty adamant about how she couldn't wait to like. not have to play mystique anymore. i think her main issue was with the scenes where she had to be in full makeup and how long of a process that was. which, okay, fair. i've heard about movies where extensive makeup and prosthetics are used, it sounds like a long and tedious process to have to do multiple times over a shoot.
now mystique in Dark Phoenix (left) looks noticeably different to how she looked in the last couple films (right, from Apocalypse). The shade of blue is maybe a bit closer to what they had for her in First Class, but overall the look seems... well it looks like less effort went into it. this isn't necessarily a criticism, if she hated being in the makeup chair for hours on end that much then i'm glad they could find a look that would accommodate her. except the wig maybe. the new wig sucks.
this does compound with the fact that jennifer lawrence is one of the many, MANY actors in this film that just totally phone in their performance, which is then further compounded by the fact that this is the movie where mystique fukken dies. so we're talking about an actor who clearly doesn't want to be here for anything more than a paycheck, in low-effort makeup, and her character isn't going to be here for very long anyway. sort of a "they clearly don't care, so why should i" kind of situation we find ourselves in.
so one of the more interesting things that seemed to be suggested by Days of Future Past is that because Xavier now knew all the events of the original timeline he could potentially avoid all the mistakes the original Xavier made, resulting in the happier timeline at the end of DoFP. this was further supported by the finale of Apocalypse where Xavier encourages Jean to unleash her dormant Phoenix abilities (which in the movies were something she always had, just sort of simmering beneath the surface), in contrast with Xavier in The Last Stand forcibly suppressing Jean's power over the course of many years. so hey, that's cool! the dark phoenix never needs to happen again!
except, whoops, the dark phoenix saga is one of the more iconic x-men storylines, so uhhhhh we gotta give it another shot.
so the folks behind X-Men: Dark Phoenix decide to throw all the stuff w/r/t the Phoenix being the dormant manifestation of Jean's incredibly powerful abilities established in the movie universe in the fuckin gahbage and instead re-establish it as the Phoenix Force, a cosmic death cloud that Jean takes into herself. now, the X-Men series has never been, like, particularly concerned with continuity (hey why do we have two different versions of emma frost back to back) but it does feel a might bit weird to take something that's established in, like, 2 or 3 films at this point and be like "nah let's just do it like it is in the comics, it's fine."
(also, fun fact, they wanted to do the phoenix saga all the way back in X2 but the studio didn't want to get into "cosmic" Marvel so early on, what with superhero movies still trying to get back on their feet after the absolute disaster that was the mid-90s. then when they did the Dark Phoenix saga they ended up cutting out the cosmic stuff anyway. this movie was made after the MCU had gotten into both cosmic and mystical stuff so they were probably feeling a bit more confident. not that it helped.)
alright i'm including both the original image and the fucked up attempt at brightening it i did because it's kind of hilarious
so these are the d'bari, aliens featured in the original Dark Phoenix saga and (in this film) shapeshifters, and the reason i botched this brightening job is because i can't recall a single moment in the whole film where their power ranger putty ass design is seen in anything other than bad-cg-obscuring darkness. they were supposed to be the Hellfire Club from First Class, including bringing back Emma Frost, but uhhhh idk i guess the studio changed their minds and wanted aliens, who knows
Their leader is Vuk, who takes the form of Jessica Chastain. I have nothing interesting to say about her or, really, any of them, other than that Jessica Chastain wasn't even aware of her own character's name until the movie actually came out, which i think is really funny.
i don't know a lot about dazzler but what i do know about her would suggest that she's worth more than being just a barely-focused-on cameo in essentially the background of a scene which, to compare to previous movies in the series, makes her this film's jubilee
Xavier in X2: "I can't use concentrate too hard when using Cerebro because if I do then I could kill whoever I'm concentrating on."
Xavier in Dark Phoenix: "Hey Beast crank that mf thing up to 11 I'm gonna go poking around in Jean Grey's Memory Goo™."
Y'know, perhaps the lesson to be learned from the events of X-Men: The Last Stand is that forcibly suppressing parts of a person's mind without their consent is a bad idea. Surely New Timeline Xavier, having seen the result of this upon reading Logan's memories, would know this.
New Timeline Xavier's stupid ass:
this right here is really funny because on one hand Beast is correct, Xavier decided that forcefully suppressing the memory of a traumatic event and hiding the truth from Jean was the best idea ever despite having seen a different timeline where that went breathtakingly poorly and even though i doubt a fucking stun gun was going to take Jean down, he opted instead to stop Beast from trying so Mystique could try to talk her down, resulting in Mystique's death.
on the OTHER hand, i'm pretty sure right after this Beast decides that the only course of action is to murder Jean Grey
i believe it's worth examining bad media for things that are worth discussing. somewhere, deep in the bowels of x-men: dark phoenix, is a thematic thread that ties back all the way to similar threads told in the first two movies when they were not-so-subtly metaphors for the gay community ("have you tried not being a mutant" etc etc). Xavier has been working hard to make mutantkind palatable to the rest of humanity, turning them into heroes, schmoozing with political figures, all that jazz. suddenly Jean starts losing control of her abilities and the rest of the world is alarmingly quick to just abandon all that goodwill. poor charles gets his presidential hotline privilege revoked. there is a poignant metaphor here, it's just that Movie Bad™.
that being said it's not a perfect metaphor because like. being gay doesn't mean you can tear a person apart at the atomic level. but if we start trying to demand our allegory be perfect and flawless we'll be here all day resurrecting steven universe discourse.
vuk just finished explaining the d'bari's whole backstory and while she did i did some research and found out that d'bari in the original source material can't actually shapeshift which gives their whole presence in this film the same sort of energy as watching an episode of supernatural where they say they're going to hunt a dragon only to then explain that, actually, dragons can also shapeshift into humans (the budget says so)
look, i'll admit, i love spectacle in superhero movies. big climactic battles, huge set pieces, big dumb CG monster fights, i love all of it. and usually the X-Men movies are pretty good at delivering. but the most interesting thing done in this scene is Magneto pulling a train up through the road. it's supposed to be a big fight closing out the second act but there's no particularly creative power use or anything i can hype up. fucking x-men apocalypse had a goddamn anime beam clash between cyclops and storm. no one is at their best in this scene and it's kind of embarrassing to watch.
okay bear with me for a second here
so a few years back, sometime in the mid-10s, Marvel started kind of aggressively undercutting some of the titles whose movie rights were owned by Fox. I think Fantastic 4 was straight up just done for a while, and X-Men was all over the place. Most notably, Marvel began to really push Inhumans over X-Men, making them a big presence in their ABC TV series at the time and introducing more of them to the comics, most prominently Kamala Khan. This was all mostly because Fox was refusing to play ball with Marvel in the way that Sony acquiesced to (which of course resulted in Spider-Man being added to the MCU).
This sort of back-and-forth between them resulted in a few notable things behind the scenes, such as James Gunn only being allowed to use Ego the Living Planet (who was owned as part of the F4 stable of characters) in exchange to Fox being able to alter Negasonic Teenage Warhead's canon powerset and also X-Men characters being entirely absent from Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite (also resulting in that infamous interview where the unfortunate PR guy has to lie to the camera about how no one knows who the X-Men even are anymore).
With all this in mind I have to wonder how intentional it was that these guys here who are about to get their shit wrecked are from what I can only guess is supposed to be the Mutant Containment Unit, which hilariously gets shortened to "MCU."
i think the worst part about the d'bari is that they're just boring. they shapeshift, their minds can't be read, they're super strong and agile, oh no our weapons don't affect them! they're like. too much of a threat.
okay so justice league, right. the main villain in justice league is steppywoof. in the theatrical version he's this smug uber-perfect killing machine who is only slightly delayed by the attacks from the people he's fighting. he's constantly taunting and smarmy and it's just. dull. it makes it feel like our heroes are constantly outclassed every time they fight him so what's the point of hoping they'll win? and then Superman just becomes a "press X to kill enemy" perfect weapon.
in the snyder cut, steppywoof is a FAR more interesting villain because he's NOT perfect. he struggles, he gets overwhelmed, and he triumphs through his own sheer grit. this actually makes the fights between him and the heroes more interesting because (despite knowing it's a four hour movie and the likelihood of them defeating the villain halfway through is incredibly low) the fights could then go either way. the heroes actually stand a chance.
so when i see these stoic shapshifty aliens casually shrugging off everything thrown at them it doesn't exactly make me excited to watch them fight the heroes. it's just dull.
aaaand movie's over! golly gee whiz that was awful. thank you for joining me on this livechost test drive. it will happen again.