3+1 Ranty Paragraphs: Dark Phoenix

2019, Simon Kinberg (screenwriter for last few X-Men movies) -- download

**warning: spoilers, cuz I don't have the energy to hide stuff for this one**

WTF. Seriously, WTF. How do you adapt a beloved X-Men comics story (Uncanny X-Men #129-138) into something so... bland. Hell, even if X-Men: Days of Future Past wasn't great, at least I seemed to have enjoyed it. But this did... nothing for me. Again, it was not terrible in execution or craft, but.. oh, I don't know, its just so frustrating, I find myself wishing I had just disliked it, because then I would not just hate it for being so utterly workaday.

Following in the path of the other First Class movies, we are still in the the X-Men's past, pre-Wolverine, under the tutelage of a still young, pre-Jean-Luc Picard, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and 10 years after the last movie (X-Men:Apocalypse) and we have the X-Men as the darlings of the US Govt. I guess having saved the world from a mutant wannabe god made them acceptable & likable enough to have an X-Phone (yep, direct line to POTUS) and being beckoned to save some astronauts. While in space, Jean Grey is dosed with The Phoenix Force, which I just saw as a colourful version of Galactus from the original Fantastic Four movies or maybe even Parallax from Green Lantern?? She survives.

Back on Earth, before you can finish a Dazzler bonfire party, Phoenix goes boom. Everyone is afraid! Everyone is worried! Jean is angry! Charles lied! Aliens arrive, and eat someone's dog and become an uncharacteristically alien looking Jessica Chastain -- seriously, she isn't alien looking because she's an alien, but because they made her look like an Emma Frost knock-off. Oh whatever, after confronting a not-dead Dad (Charles lied!), Jean runs to Magneto to help her, bats around some US Army (POTUS has decided the revoke the Bat.. er X-Phone because she made some holes in crappy houses and schmushed some cars) helicopters and then runs off again. Eventually everyone catches up with everyone, some zip bang slash crash pew pew pew, and the soldiers capture everyone but Alien Jessica Chastain.

About the only interesting segment of the entire movie is the train ride from Deadpool 2. The aliens attack and everyone gets to let loose because, you know aliens. Its a fun battle. But they didn't even do the sacrificial attack that climaxed the comics, they just had her pop like a fireworks display. There is a sub-plot about Charles being not-nice, so at the end of the movie he leaves the school in the hands of Beast and goes to Paris to play chess with Magneto. So, technically it all looked good and had some exciting bits (and Dazzler !!) but *yawn* oh-mi-gawd, it had no idea what it wanted to do with the franchise, just milk some rewards from another known X-Men comic story (if you are over 30) and ... move on? Oh, and Jennifer Lawrence definitely moved on, getting killed early in the movie, so I guess we now have to Google "how can Mystique be dead" to find out how the early version of the franchise even starts.