Dark Phoenix (2019)

The X-Men franchise had a long and uneven run at 20th Century Fox, stretching from Bryan Singer's original 2000 film through prequels, sequels, and timeline resets across nearly two decades. Dark Phoenix, released in May 2019, was intended as the closing chapter for the prequel-era cast that had been assembled since X-Men: First Class (2011), and it draws on one of the most celebrated storylines in Marvel Comics history: the Phoenix Saga, which first ran in Uncanny X-Men in the late 1970s and has long been considered a high watermark for the medium. The broad premise follows Jean Grey, an X-Man whose encounter with a mysterious cosmic force during a space rescue mission amplifies her powers far beyond anyone's ability to control, setting her on a collision course with her own team, her own past, and an alien faction looking to exploit what she has become. It is, on paper, rich material. Whether the film does justice to it is another matter entirely.

Behind the camera is Simon Kinberg, a longtime producer and writer on the Fox X-Men films (he co-wrote X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse, among others) making his feature directorial debut here. The production was not without turbulence: reshoots pushed the original release date back by nearly a year, and reports at the time suggested significant structural changes were made in post-production. The film was produced under the Genre Films and Hutch Parker Entertainment banners for 20th Century Fox, coming at a moment when Disney's acquisition of Fox was already in motion, which lent the whole enterprise a rather awkward, end-of-an-era feeling before a single frame had screened. For science fiction fans who enjoy picking apart franchise mechanics, it sits in an interesting if uncomfortable place alongside other big-canvas genre films, not unlike the tonal and structural challenges discussed in my review of Transformers or the more propulsive energy on display in Mad Max: Fury Road.

The principal cast carries considerable weight on their shoulders. Sophie Turner, best known at the time for her long-running role in Game of Thrones, steps into the centre of the film as Jean Grey, a polished but unremarkable piece of casting on paper that the film needed to justify with strong material and direction. James McAvoy returns as a younger Professor Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender reprises Magneto, and Nicholas Hoult and Tye Sheridan fill out the core ensemble alongside Jennifer Lawrence, who had by this point made little secret of her waning enthusiasm for the franchise. The action sequences were handled with a certain visual competence, and the 114-minute runtime keeps things moving, but reviews on release were largely damaging, and the film underperformed at the box office, effectively confirming that the Fox era of mutant storytelling had run its course.

Dark Phoenix (2019) is a hot mess of epic proportions, a film that had one of the most powerful storylines in X-Men history and somehow turned it into a bland, confused, undercooked finale to one of the most 'meh' franchise reboots in history. The Dark Phoenix saga should be huge: Jean Grey consumed by cosmic power, losing control, becoming a threat to everything she loves. It’s tragic, operatic, emotional. But it’s reduced to moody lighting, vague CGI explosions, and a villain (Vuk, played by Jessica Chastain doing her best alien bureaucrat) who feels like she wandered in from a different, much worse movie. Sophie Turner clearly cares about the role and brings sincerity to Jean, but she’s not given the material or direction to carry a film of this scale. Her emotional arc (trauma, power, isolation) is rushed, underdeveloped, and robbed of weight. The rest of the cast, including James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence, are left spinning their wheels with characters who’ve regressed rather than evolved since Days of Future Past. And the action, while slickly shot, lacks impact, Jean flinging ships through space should feel terrifying, not like a screensaver. It’s not even bad in an entertaining way. It’s just… empty. The tone is flat, the stakes never feel real, and the whole thing wraps up with less drama than a sitcom finale. For a series that once tackled prejudice, identity, and war, this is a whimper, not a bang. A disappointing end to two decades of mutant storytelling. The fans deserved better.

For me, that emptiness at the centre is the real disappointment, because the raw ingredients were genuinely there. Jean Grey's arc, the tension between Xavier's paternalism and Magneto's pragmatism, the idea of a team undone by one of their own: these are themes with real dramatic weight, and they have gone mostly to waste. I found myself thinking about how action films can misfire not through a lack of ambition but through a failure to commit to what they are supposed to be, something I have touched on in my look at The Raid 2, a film that very much commits. Dark Phoenix just never does. It is the kind of film you finish and feel oddly nothing about, which is perhaps the worst thing you can say about a story that was supposed to break your heart.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-09-25

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Dark Phoenix (2019) on YouTube

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