X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

 “She’s not your little girl any more.” 

It's always instructive where a movie that has a lot seemingly going for it, like this one,turns out to be mildly disappointing. Not that it's terrible, but there's no denying that it fails to translate the excellent of Christ Claremont and John Byrne's source material, nor that the promising first half hour with lots of interesting character development and subtext yields to a load of dull fighting against a bland alien threat. Beyond the fact that we can by now be sure, I think, that Simon Kinberg isn't the person who should have been in charge of these films. But what went wrong?

There's a lot of good stuff in the early part of the film. All the characters feel real and well-rounded, even relatively minor ones like Quicksilver and Nightcrawler. There's some interesting questioning of Charles' habit of manipulating people's minds for their "own good". There's also a nice point made of Charles pushing the X-Men, at great danger, to be superheroes and to be popular, as the alternative is to be hated and feared: it's effective to see how quickly Jean's antics have the X-Men change overnight from popular celebrities to feared outcasts. It's unexpected, and effective, to have Raven die at the hands of Jean.

And yet, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender aside, the main cast are all a bit bland, despite a splendidly charismatic performance by Evan Peters as Quicksilver, for the last time in this continuity. And then there's the vague nature of where the Phoenix force comes from and the equally vague aliens looking for it. There's a lot of good ideas here, but no real way of resenting them once the plot gets moving. A sad ending for the Fox X-Men movies. Let's hope we see them again under happier circumstances.