X-Men: Dark Phoenix

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is the farewell bid to a 19-year legacy of 20th Century Fox-produced Marvel films. It is the true precedent to Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe that started in 2008. it is unfortunate that Dark Phoenix isn't the masterpiece everyone was hoping to see, but it definitely has its share of bright and dark.

On the subject of technical aspects, the movie is brilliant. No one needs to tell you that Hans Zimmer's score is a pure resonating experience! Sharp sound design and amazing visuals elevated the overall picture quality! Computer graphics are undoubtedly great too.

Most importantly, if you've always wondered how a X-Men team-up battle would look like, refer to the Third Act here! That train action sequence alone demands everyone's attention! Magneto (Michael Fassbender) chain-tying the henchmen, Cyclops (Tye Sheridan) beam-blasting through the aliens, Magneto assembling an entire weapon arsenal to shoot Vuk (Jessica Chastain), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) porting enemies to face the train at track and Magneto squashing a train carriage with the palm of his hand are simply amazing ideas that translate so well onscreen! Not to forget, the tug of war between Erik and Charles' (James McAvoy) army to reach Jean (Sophie Turner) is a wonderful episode, with Magneto pulling a subway train from the ground plus Nightcrawler stuck in between Xavier and Selene's (Kota Eberhardt) grip being the highlights. Even the astronaut rescue mission in the beginning is intense.

The problem of course lies within the writing bone itself, which is brittle as it gets. When the story kicked off with young Jean (Summer Fontana) accidentally killing her mother in a car crash, you could see the premise's promise. There's an effort to establish the unique relationship between Jean and Professor X, which kicked-off with a beautiful pen analogy. The alien clan introduced as antagonists have so much potential! Them taking shape after an actual person is terrifying to watch! There's even a solid stake established regarding the perception towards the mutant race through the eyes of the general public. But not sure if it was due to the writing quality or the countless rewrites and/or reshoots since 20th Century Fox was acquired by Disney, the plot and characters were chronically underdeveloped.

When you have a protagonist like Jean Grey who is clueless on what actions should she take throughout the majority course of the runtime (on top of being easily manipulated by various individuals she meets), your film as a function of that, becomes aimless and made-up, thus leading to the audience saying: "It's boring.". After the cosmic flare enhances her telekinesis ability, she is unable to control the overflow of her own power. This is a physical problem and it's understandable. But the script certainly did not do a good job explaining how this affects her mental stability. The connection is faulty, weak and almost nonexistent! Her whole reason of going rogue against Charles even after being clearly presented with the fact that her own father didn't want her, definitely appears to show that the real issue here is she's being delusional! Trying to blame this on anything else especially the power doesn't make any sense. Plus, she willingly performs evil acts like destroying the military troop's choppers and forcing Charles to walk out of his wheelchair (an awesome scene by the way!) without any concrete push towards pursuing this option! And in the end, her choice to do good arrived abruptly as well. All of these actions would have been justifiable with strong development, which is again, absent!

Supporting characters such as Hank (Nicholas Hoult) wanting to kill Jean and Professor X pandering towards fame and perception are completely out-of-character actions! We didn't even know prior to this that Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) and Hank are in a relationship, and we sure as hell do not know the aliens' backstory! Mystique's death leaves no impact due to no character development. That chess epilogue between Erik and Charles does trigger a smile nevertheless. And before ending the review, we would like to thank Disney for ruining yet another great franchise and shoving their political agenda down our throats via the 'X-Women' monologue. Bravo!