Phoenix Descending

In the 1990s, Marvel Entertainment was in trouble financially. While they’d done well with animated TV adaptations of their characters, live action was another matter. So they sold the rights to their two best-loved series, X-Men to Fox, and Spider-Man to Columbia. It must have been galling to watch the success of the characters. Fox struck first in 2000, with X-Men becoming one of the most successful movies of the year, taking in almost $300 million worldwide. Then Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was an even greater success, breaking $800 million at the box office. Along with the Dark Knight trilogy, it was clear the time had come for superheroes. Marvel began making movies themselves with their second-tier characters: Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the others. They, of course, struck gold, platinum, oil, and diamonds with a series of 22 films grossing over $21 billion dollars – an average of $930 million a movie!

While Marvel’s fortunes went stratospheric, Fox and Columbia stumbled badly. The first two movies in the series did well, but for films, too often the third time is the nadir. You had the disco Spider-Man, so hated by fans that it was lampooned in the opening of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. X-Men fared no better, with Brett Ratner taking over from Bryan Singer for the third entry in the series. (Both men are now blackballed from Hollywood, paying for their past behavior with the advent of #MeToo.) Ratner took the most celebrated arc of the X-Men, the Phoenix saga, and turned it into a painful mishmash. Both studios tried to reboot their franchises themselves. The Andrew Garfield Spider-Man had an okay first film but crashed and burned with the second. Fox did better, going back in time with a new cast for X-Men: First Class and then blending the new and old casts with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which blessedly changed the timeline so the third movie essentially never happened. But again, they couldn’t make a good third film, and X-Men: Apocalypse tanked. Strangely enough, Fox’s attempts to spinoff Wolverine into his own series reversed the third film problem; the first two films were horrible – they made Deadpool a mute! – but the third film, Logan, was perfection.

Marvel has now reclaimed their characters, thanks to their alignment with powerhouse Disney, and Spider-Man: Homecoming shows what good news that is for fans. The X-Men will also be redone, but Fox had one last stab at the series with the newly released Dark Phoenix – the first X-Men movie without the tag before the title. Long-time series producer and writer Simon Kinberg took over the director’s chair as well for this film.

Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey first appeared in X-Men: Apocalypse, using her mental power to defeat Apocalypse. An earlier scene showed her instability; she shakes the foundations of Professor X’s school because of a nightmare. Dark Phoenix starts before that. A very young Jean is on a trip with her parents when an argument over tuning the radio leads to a horrific crash. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) comes to the hospital where Jean’s been checked over, though she’s emerged from the crash unharmed. Xavier tells her that she’s orphaned but offers her a new home at his school. Jean’s reluctant, afraid she’ll “break things,” but Xavier says they can fix them if it happens, calming Jean’s fears.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when a mysterious force has disabled a space shuttle. Xavier volunteers to save the crew by sending a team of X-Men into space in a customized X Jet, even though Beast (Nicholas Hoult) isn’t sure it can make the trip. Jean is worried, but Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) reassures her. They make it to the shuttle, where Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) manage to rescue most of the crew as a shimmering cloud – the Phoenix Power – approaches the shuttle. But a final trip for the last astronaut, with Jean accompanying Nightcrawler to mentally hold the shuttle together, leads to Jean being in the ship when the cloud hits. The shuttle’s destroyed, but instead of killing Jean the cloud bonds with her, allowing her to survive. Back on earth, Jean exhibits no bad effects from her experience at first, but when her mental instability comes out, it shows the cloud has magnified her considerable powers.

The massive cast also includes Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, living on a private island with his crew of mutants until Jean’s actions cause him to seek revenge. New to the series is Jessica Chastain as Vuk, an alien of the D’Bari system whose home planet was destroyed by the Phoenix Power. But the excellent cast of actors is hamstrung by a pedestrian script that became mushy with extensive re-writes. The whole third act of the film was rewritten and reshot, with a promised Outer Space finale removed. The trailers feature several shots not in the final product, evidence of the changes. This pushed the budget into the $200 million range, about the same cost as the more ambitious Days of Future Past, though that film ran twenty minutes longer. (Different from most superhero flicks now, Dark Phoenix doesn’t make it to two hours for its run-time.) The aesthetics, too, are not up to the earlier films. The makeup for Mystique is pedestrian, while the costumes for the X-Men look like baggy, double-knit jumpsuits.

Originally Dark Phoenix was scheduled for last fall, but the reshoots pushed it back to February. That would have interfered with another Fox offering, Alita: Battle Angel, and James Cameron prevailed on Fox to keep the field clear – not that it did Alita any good. It was moved once again to early June, far enough after Avengers: Endgame to give it a chance, and in a week when the competition was a sequel to a middling animated movie from Illumination Studios. But even The Secret Life of Pets 2 was too strong competition for Dark Phoenix, which came in second at the box office with the poorest showing of any film in the series.

The showing is justified, as the film feels listless. It’s not overtly awful like X-Men: The Last Stand, but it doesn’t connect emotionally. There’s no tag after the credits, which makes sense since it’s the end for this version of the series. But it would have been nice for it to go out on a high note.

Not So Fantastic

Most people who grew up on superhero comic books (back when they were comic books rather than graphic novels) have a particular series that was their favorite – SpiderMan, Batman, Thor, Green Lantern, etc. For me it was the Fantastic Four: Reed Richards, his girlfriend and later wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny, and test pilot and Reed’s oldest friend Ben Grimm, who get exposed to cosmic radiation on a space mission and become, respectively, Mr. Fantastic who can stretch, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing (indestructible with super strength). They were the first superhero series written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby, the start of the Marvel Universe.

The series also had Victor von Doom, a genius inventor as well as Romani sorcerer who was disfigured in an experiment and became the masked and hooded supervillain Doctor Doom. He blamed Reed for his disfigurement, thereby setting up the classic struggle of good and evil, and perhaps preparing the way in the 1960s for Obi-wan and Lord Vader in the 1970s. The series also introduced other facets of the Marvel Universe including the Silver Surfer and the Inhumans who are now being featured on “Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.”

While the rest of Marvel’s heroes have had movie success, that hasn’t happened with the Fantastic Four. There was an el cheapo version made in 1994 with a cast of unknowns; Stan Lee later said it was never meant to be released and was shot only to retain the movie rights for the series. The 2005 version with its 2007 sequel were light-weight when compared to the first two Sam Raimi Spiderman movies or the beginning of the Marvel movie renaissance, 2008’s Iron Man. I hoped that that would be corrected in the new Fantastic 4, released this weekend.

It had potential. The director Josh Trank made one of the best and most original superhero movies, 2012’s Chronicle, and he was once again working with actor Michael B. Jordan, who’d followed up Chronicle with a stunning performance in Fruitvale Station. Trank also wrote the script along with Simon Kinberg (2009’s Sherlock Holmes, X-Men: Days of Future Past) and newcomer Jeremy Slater. The early trailers featured a darker look to the story that was missing from the earlier movies.

The first part of the film is decent, even if it makes major changes to the backstory and progresses at a leisurely pace. The earliest sign of weakness, though, is in the casting. While Jamie Bell is an excellent actor, having him play Ben Grimm is like having Tom Cruise play 6’6” Jack Reacher. In the comic book Grimm is a football hero with strength to spare. In fact, the genius of the Fantastic Four was that the cosmic rays gave superpowers that highlighted the character archetypes: the scientist is flexible, his love interest becomes invisible, the young brother is a hothead, while the jock becomes raw strength. With Jamie Bell in the role and with the changes, Grimm is diminished from part of the team to a good luck charm for Richards.

Jordan and Kate Mara, who plays Sue Storm, are decent in their roles but are underutilized. Most of Mara’s time on screen is spent staring at a computer screen. The biggest weakness is with Miles Teller as Richards and Toby Kebbell as von Doom. Teller is an incredible, intense actor as he proved with Whiplash, but he can’t breathe excitement into the underwritten role, while Kebbell comes across as a 2^nd tier Euro-trash musician.

Once the trip to the other dimension is made, the rest of the film feels truncated, as if the main plot development got left on the cutting room floor. That may be true, since scenes featured in the trailer are not in the film. Trank tweeted that the version he made was recut by 20^th Century Fox executives. The film comes in at a brief 100 minutes. Ant-Man, in comparison, is almost twenty minutes longer. There’s also no cameo by Stan Lee, who showed up in Ant-Man and even made an appearance in Big Hero 6. Worse for fans of the interconnected Marvel Universe, there are no tags at the end.

With a 4.1/10 rating on IMDb and a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, people will stay away from this movie in droves, and that’s as it should be. It is a major disappointment. IMDb notes that a sequel has been announced, but that’s highly unlikely now. Maybe in 10 more years a filmmaker will finally give the Fantastic Four their due with a good movie that captures the feeling of the comic books. I’ll keep on hoping.