With nearly the whole of the MCU available to watch on Disney Plus, the Mouse House’s streaming platform is gradually adding other non-Marvel Studios Marvel movies — technically, we’re supposed to call them Marvel Legacy films now, but no one ever does — to its library, too. The latest to join the rest is, unfortunately, one of the weakest around. Namely, 2019’s Dark Phoenix, the final entry in Fox’s X-Men saga.
Dark Phoenix went up on D+ in the United States this Friday, September 3rd. So now is the perfect time to rewatch the movie if you haven’t seen it since it first premiered in theaters two summers ago. Though fans hoped that the last mainstream X-Men movie would be a fitting conclusion to the franchise, it wasn’t to be, as this second cinematic adaptation of the Dark Phoenix saga somehow managed to be just as bad as X-Men: The Last Stand, just in different ways.
The movie sees the action again hop forward another decade without the cast looking any older, this time taking place in the early 1990s. When the film opens, the X-Men are the world’s beloved heroes, being sent on a mission into space by the President himself. However, contact with a mysterious alien entity awakens a sleeping second personality within Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), which leads to the tragic death of one long-running character and the team splitting in two as they disagree on how to handle Jean, who is now a threat to the whole planet.
First-time director Simon Kinberg elected to go with a stripped-down vibe and somber tone for this one, which failed to capture the colorful cosmic melodrama that made the classic Marvel comics storyline such a hit. Not to mention those extensive reshoots that removed any vague similarity to Disney’s Captain Marvel, along with much of the excitement.
But, hey, if approached from the right frame of mind, a certain amount of entertainment value can be gleaned from Dark Phoenix. It’s available to watch now on Disney Plus.
