The Darkest Timeline: An X-Men Dark Phoenix Review

Where do we go from here?

The first thing I think needs to be said about Dark Phoenix is that it isn’t a bad X-Men movie; we’ve had several of those, so we know what that feels like. It isn’t a great X-Men movie, either.

To me, the pinnacle of this franchise was Days of Future Past; in retrospect, that felt like the Endgame of the X-Men franchise (and several years before we got Endgame, too). So any movie following it was doomed to be a lesser story (Mathew Vaughn, who directed First Class, said recently that he wanted to do Apocalypse before Days of Future Past, and even left the franchise when the studio pushed for Days to be the second film). That’s very apparent in Apocalypse, which, to me, is my least favorite of all the X-Men movies that aren’t titled X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

But Dark Phoenix feels… different. It feels extra. Like an add on. Maybe because the original X-Men only got three movies (not counting their appearances in Days or Wolverine spin-offs) and this is the fourth, but it just feels separate somehow from the franchise. I can’t even really put my finger on why it feels that way to me, but it does.