Dark Phoenix: Better than average

Dark Phoenix (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for considerable sci-fi violence, disturbing images and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Comic book writers are notorious for adjusting, revising, reworking or even completely undoing the mythic back-stories and details of long-established characters. 

The spooky, otherworldly Vuk (Jessica Chastain, right) insists that she can help the
confused and increasingly overwhelmed Jean (Sophie Turner) control cosmic powers
that are literally off the chart. Naturally, Vuk's motivations are far less than pure...

Nothing is sacrosanct: not even death. If so-and-so perished nobly while saving the universe, s/he can be resurrected five years later via some previously undisclosed loophole. (If all else fails, rely on time travel.)

Putting up with this is difficult enough with comic books, but at least such contrived and manipulative nonsense can be “justified” during multiple issues over the course of many months.

It’s a lot more disconcerting when the newest X-Men entry — Dark Phoenix — makes absolute hash of the continuity established in previous films … or so it seems. Apoplectic fans sputtering “But … but … but!” are advised to pay closer attention to what went down in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Which is how writer/direct Simon Kinberg gets away with the jaw-dropper that hits during this new film’s second act.

It also kinda/sorta justifies — albeit with an eyebrow lift — this film’s more-or-less replication of events already covered in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. Both are based on the iconic Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum/John Byrne “Dark Phoenix Saga,” which played out in comic book form from 1976 to ’80 (back when only one X-Men comic book hit the stands each month, and boy, those were simpler times).

At its core, this is a common superhero plot device: What happens when a good hero turns bad?

Having proven themselves heroic after events in 2016’s (thoroughly unsatisfying) X-Men: Apocalypse, Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his mutant students happily bask in the unaccustomed glow of public acclaim. Charles has a direct line to the U.S. president; children eagerly purchase dolls and other ephemera related to their favorite X-Man … or X-Woman, as the shape-shifting Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) tartly suggests should be the team’s actual designation, given how frequently the gals save the day.

That’s no mere idle comment. Female characters are front and center in this film, and it’s darn well about time.

X-Men: Apocalypse — Thud and blunder

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and quite generously, for gratuitously fleeting profanity and distasteful, soul-crushing violence
By Derrick Bang

Enough, already.

Things were bad enough last summer, when Avengers: Age of Ultron gave us characters capable of re-shaping reality, along with a celestial scheme to return Earth to its Ice Age. Hollywood’s apparent need for superhero movies that forever increase the sense of scale — like a junkie craving ever-stronger fixes — was plain outta control.

When Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, center) is alerted to the presence of an ultra-
powerful mutant, he and his comrades — from left, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), Moira
Mactaggert (Rose Byrne), Alex Summers (Lucas Till) and Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) —
try to determine how best to find this entity.

This newest X-Men entry is even worse, with a villain who literally can re-shape the planet according to whim: a level of power so off the chart that the very notion of this guy being stopped by anybody, let alone young and largely untested mutant heroes, is simply ludicrous.

What, I wonder, could be next? A baddie who’ll pull the Moon out of its orbit? Destroy Saturn and her rings? Extinguish our sun? Annihilate entire galaxies?

It’s impossible to care about any of this film’s sturm und drang, because its screenplay — credited to Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris and director Bryan Singer — doesn’t spend enough time with character development. Worse yet, the little we do get is needlessly grim and mean-spirited: the same problem of tone that infected Batman V Superman a few months back.

The early X-Men films were entertaining by virtue of the wary ensemble dynamic that united such radically different characters into a team, and for the way that everybody’s strange and weird powers were blended into a cohesive fighting unit. That camaraderie is all but lost in this smash-fest, which instead revels in an arrogantly callous level of civilization-snuffing carnage that I’ve not seen since the distasteful 2012, which depicted mass death with all the gravitas of a pinball machine.

Singer’s tone is about the same here, with John Ottman’s bombastic score adding even more portentous fury. And just to seal that atmospheric deal, Ottman’s original themes are augmented, at (ahem) apocalyptic moments, by the equally dour second movement (“Allegretto”) of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

Not much fun to be had, all told, in this 143-minute endurance test.