Without that first X-Men movie in 2000, you could make the argument superhero movies would not have exploded as they did. So here we are nearly 20 years later with the last installment in this franchise, X-Men Dark Phoenix.
How to Stream or Download Dark Phoenix
You will be able to stream or to download this twelfth X-Men movie from iTunes once it becomes available and before that, it will be available as a pre-order. Meanwhile, you can read our reviews of the recent X-Men movies:
- X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014),
- Deadpool (2016),
- X-Men: Apocalypse (2016),
- Logan (2017),
- and Deadpool 2 (2018).
You should also know that the main role (Jean Grey) in Dark Phoenix is played by Sophie Turner who has become famous after her professional debut as Sansa Stark in the TV show Game of Thrones.
The Movie Review
While it is no MCU. The X-Men movie franchise has far more good movies than it does bad. Actually, I would say that the Last Stand is the only movie I flat out do not like. With such a long history behind it, X-Men Dark Phoenix feels nowhere near the end of a huge saga that it should be. It just kind of ends and that is that.
The movie features a great cast with people like Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, and Sophie Turner to name the “main” cast. However, it was the supporting cast that really did it for me in this movie. One thing that I did really like about X-Men Dark Phoenix was the way characters like Cyclops and especially Nightcrawler was used more.
I am not saying that they gave these two characters (along with with Storm and Quicksilver) more depth. However, they got more meaningful screen time in this movie than they did in Apocalypse. Nightcrawler especially is pretty badass in the movies main action scene. I also really liked what they did with Cyclops.
These two characters I really found myself rooting for in the movie. I actually think they really had something special with Tye Sheridan as Cyclops. I know that I would have been very interested in seeing him become the leader of the X-Men in a movie or two down the line had Disney not gotten the franchise.
Now the story of X-Men Dark Phoenix is the Dark Phoenix saga. It is not like it was in the Last Stand, it is not like it was in the animated series and it is not 100 percent like it was in the comics either. Jean Grey gets this new “power” after a mission in space goes wrong. She finds out what Charles told her as a child was not 100 percent true and she has a hard time dealing with this new rage and power.
The movie should have just been the X-Men going up against Phoenix and trying to bring her back. Instead, they put in these other “villains” that were lame. I do not want to spoil anything, but the inclusion of this other bad force for the X-Men to deal with felt very tacked on and I had a hard time caring at all about who they were, what the wanted and so on.
The whole movie just lacks any real heart. They try to go for a Tony Stark dying moment (although I think this movie was filmed first) but it just has nowhere near the impact that his death had. The story is very lackluster, but to be fair I would not say that it was boring and the movie did move at a brisk pace.
X-Men Dark Phoenix does have a couple of really well-done action scenes. There is one in New York which I thought was really cool. It actually teased a fight between Cyclops and Magneto and that is actually something I really wanted to see. The big end fight as well is also pretty spectacular and the major highlight of the movie for me.
I would not say that X-Men Dark Phoenix is a bad movie at all. It is just a rather “meh” kind of movie. It is a 7/10 kind of movie and one that you can have fun with, but when you consider that this is a 20-year long story. For it to end this way really does feel kind of disappointing to me.
