She’s a phoenix. She’s dark.
BQB here with a review of the latest X-Man movie.
The reviews have been calling this the crappiest X-Men movie to date, but here’s my take, 3.5 readers. If you view the movie as a stand alone, it’s pretty good. Lots of good action, special effects and what have you.
If you view it as part of a long, drawn out, lengthy timeline saga that the studio has asked you to consider, then it all falls apart.
You’ve got the early 2000s movies with Jackman, Patrick Stewart and so on. You’ve got the newer, younger yet older timeline based movies with the quote unquote “new class.” To date, nerds have been happy to see the timelines work but it falls apart here.
I could go on and on with the timeline errors. At this late point in the timeline (I believe this takes place in the 1990s though there aren’t any guideposts to show it), Magneto and Professor X should be played by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, rather than their younger counterparts, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. There are other little nagging things that don’t make sense to a nerd who is paying attention and ultimately, the “older” version of Jean Gray from the 2006 “The Last Stand” film (Famke Janssen) already became the Dark Phoenix so if the X-Men in that film were surprised she went dark then it doesn’t make sense if she already did it in the past, which is this film, which OK, now my head is starting to spin and I realize I need a life.
At any rate, in the early 2000s, older people were more accepted in lead roles in movies. By the 2010s, every hero had to be barely out of puberty. The conundrum FOX had is that according to the X-Men source material, Professor X and Magneto were two old men who had recruited their bands of mutants to fight one another and well, we couldn’t have old farts on screen for any length of time anymore so to make sense, the studio came up with historical flicks where Prof. X and Magneto were young.
To everyone involved’s credit, the idea went off largely without a hitch and there was an effort to keep the timeline in order but caution on the timeline was thrown to the wind with this one.
It’s unfortunate because again, on a surface level watch, it’s not a bad movie. It just falls apart if you consider it in connection with the rest of the franchise. Unfortunate, because I believe this is the last X-Men flick, at least in this go-around and any future ones, I assume, will be part of a reboot.
Sophie Turner and friends do their best and Jessica Chastain is great as a villain/alien who wants the dark phoenix power for herself. There’s an unnecessarily placed F-bomb, which, if it works, I’m not against but it seemed like it was just placed here for shock value and one wonders why since, by and large, these movies are for children.
I don’t know. Sometimes I think these movies are great. Sometimes I wonder why I spent so much time watching a bunch of blue assholes (Mystique, Nightcrawler, Beast, etc) run around like idiots for two hours.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy, but you do have to watch it as a normal person and not as a nerd who with an in-depth memory of the timeline. Going forward, I think given Hollywood’s base hatred of anyone over 40 (or really, 35), they’re probably just going to have to deviate from the source material and have Prof. X and Magneto be a couple of 20 somethings leading other 20 somethings and everyone over 30 can go F themselves. So in other words, the new flicks will mirror today’s world.
Bookshelf Battle 