Dark Phoenix (2019)

Director: Simon Kinberg

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Sophie Turner

Have I Seen it Before: This is usually the part in these reviews where I make a joke about how a film is entirely too much like what came before it for me to label it a truly new experience. It will be incredibly difficult to not make a remark like that here.

Did I Like It: As much as I tried to avoid that above refrain, try as I might, I can’t say I’m 100 percent on board with this.

There should be a moratorium on adapting year-long epic comic book arcs into movies that can not (by studio mandate) run over 180 minutes of screen time. Superman movies have failed over a couple of formats to harness whatever was interesting about the death and rebirth of the Last Son of Krypton. Batman even managed to stumble a little bit trying to mash together Knightfall, No Man’s Land, and The Dark Knight Returns in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). And now the X-Men series have failed twice to capture the Dark Phoenix saga after two tries in less than fifteen years. These stories need longer to breath, which is why, ironically enough the most effective adaptation of the Phoenix saga actually occurs in the sixth season of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer.”

I’m not sure if Dark Phoenix fails as aggressively as X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), but it certainly trips up in new ways. The story is listless, being somewhat about an alien invasion story, and somewhat about the same set of characters we met in X-Men: First Class (2006). Matters are not helped by Hans Zimmer appearing to phone in his score, where 20th Century Fox (and now, presumably, Disney) fully owns the rousing John Ottman scores from the better films in this series.

There are some things to enjoy, here. McAvoy and Fassbender still prove equal to the task of filling the shoes of Stewart and McKellan. To be fair, that’s probably more praise for the team behind the sprightly X-Men: First Class (2011) than the work performed here. Some have indicated that Fassbender looks bored in the role, but I would counter that he’s doing the best he can with a script that doesn’t seem that interested in him anymore. How they got Fassbender (and for that matter, Lawrence) to extend their contracts into this movie is beyond me. Maybe the proceedings looked different before the film became engulfed in the flames of the dread reshoot entity.

Also, the opening moments are kind of sweet, with the X-Men being national heroes for the first time in their own film series. Gone are the days when they hide in the shadow. In fact, the President has a direct line to Xavier’s study. It put me—in the early goings—of thinking of how far this film series has come in nineteen years, now that it’s ending. Gone are the days where this series was trying to be a character drama that needed someone like Bryan Singer to make it at all comprehensible to film audiences, and now we’re fine flying into space and doing combat with cosmic forces. What a long, strange trip it has been.

If only it all came together a bit better. Ah, well. We’ll still have Logan (2017)*. Wait, is this the first X-Men movie to not feature Hugh Jackman at all? Weird. That may have been part of the problem.

*Which, by the way, this movie sort of absent-mindedly pisses all over the admittedly byzantine continuity set by the previous films. Logan can’t be the future of the original timeline established in the first three films in the series. That much is clear. As of the end of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), it would seem like Logan belongs in that new timeline, extended into X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and concluded here. But this film has Xavier retiring to play Chess with Magneto in France (for reasons, I guess) so I’m not sure how Xavier re-joins the school he built before the deterioration of his mind. And, I’m almost relieved to say, we will never have the opportunity to reconcile these multiple discontinuities. So, the lesson becomes that even when I try to dwell on the brighter moments of this series, this film only suffers all the more.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Parts 1 (2014) and 2 (2015)

…Too Many Colons: The Rise of the Colon Army

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Julianne Moore, and a disturbing drought of Stanley Tucci

Have I Seen it Before: No. Honestly, I’m not sure why, after I genuinely liked The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), but in the current flood of media, it just never came up on the radar.

Did I Like It: I mean… I think I still have some problems with all of the proceedings, but sure.

I’m going to review both of the final movies of this series in one entry, because—and this isn’t exactly a hot take—that’s the way this story should have been presented. 

Since filmmakers split up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2010 and 2011), we’ve been having to endure the unnecessary elongation of an epic’s final act. Scenes go on forever, fan service is turned up to eleven, and an artificial cliffhanger is injected into a story that never needed or wanted one. 

Now, if I’m being completely honest, patient zero for this phenomenon was actually Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Part III (1990), although those are two films that—when someone derides them—I get irrationally irritated. The splitting—or culling, to borrow a term from this franchise—makes business sense, I suppose. If you have a hot property, why not get two big opening weekends out of your last hurrah, when you can get two for the same price? Good for the shareholders; have yet to hear an argument for why it might be good for the story.

Moving on from the artificial elongation, what we have here is your Typical Part III™, feeding off the momentum of the predecessor, and marching toward and end you can see coming a mile away. It couldn’t possibly be a spoiler to tell you that the Capitol as run by Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) is brought to its knees and Katniss Everdeen, the titular Mockingjay (Jennifer Lawrence) is at the center of the social upheaval. 

The film delivers on these intrinsic promises, and then succeeds and fails where it tries to play with these expectations. It soars when Katniss sees the sliding standards between Snow and his self-appointed successor Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and diverts her arrow. It’s less great when she and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) are all of a sudden on board with a new batch of Hunger Games that would instell cull rich Capitol kids. And it’s even more of a thin attempt to make us feel something out of the blue when it is revealed that Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) retreat back to a life in the Victor’s Village, raising their kids, and Katniss appearing  as if she’s become completely numb to the world she helped save.

It could be worse: the werewolf kid could have decided he was madly in love with his jilted lover’s infant daughter. That’s a ridiculous plot line. I’m not sure where I heard that one…

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and all your cartoon pals.

Have I Seen it Before: Yes, again, strangely I’m not sure under what circumstances.

Did I Like It: Yes, and that much was pretty surprising. Honestly, halfway through the series, I’m not sure why I’m so skeptical about the proceedings on spec.

Not much to say about the film itself, aside from the fact that it suitably raises the stakes (if not the believability, but more on that later) on the character’s plight in slightly predictable ways, and ends with a cliffhanger that propels the action forward in ways I actually found surprising on first blush. General critical consensus would indicate that the film is more self-assured than the first, but I don’t know if I buy this as a particular evolution among the filmmakers, or more of a general byproduct of sequels freeing themselves from large swaths of exposition.

But I have a few more thoughts on my Big Questions(™) regarding the mythology behind these stories.

So, if the world of Panem our future, or some fantasy land about which we’re not supposed to think of the origins? This has led me to some moderate Wikipedia surfing to find that the general consensus is that Panem is, indeed, future America, with the heroic District 12 located in the coal country of West and Regular Virginia, and the Capitol apparently being built over what was once Salt Lake City, Utah. 

This only serves to aggravate my skepticism about the proceedings. Why has anyone thought the actual Hunger Games—except for maybe the exception of Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci)—were a good idea? I mean, fear, sure. That always helps the bad guys, but the rules were always going to break the whole damn thing down. Does anyone think ahead anymore? Also, and again a question renewed from my Hunger Games review: how does Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) accomplish living this long? He’s a baker and constantly in danger. I’m getting the sinking feeling that there is a possibility the story might illuminate my first question, but have little hope that there’s ever going to be an explanation for Peeta’s longevity.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Director: Gary Ross

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, A Hemsworth, Woody Boyd, and a well-paid Stanley Tucci and Elizabeth Banks

Have I Seen it Before: Yes? Did I see it in the theater? I can’t honestly remember.

Did I Like It: I guess, but… Well, we’ll get to that later.

The cinematic adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ first novel in The Hunger Games series is stylishly directed, and the cast is better than one might expect for the material and genre, benefiting from casting a still-unknown Jennifer Lawrence before she became a bona fide movie star, and other performers like Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and even Stanley Tucci who might otherwise seem like they were slumming it a bit, appearing in such a YA yarn, but are actually amiable screen presences and professional performers, that you never get the sense that this was anything other than the roles they were meant to play.

And yet…

Here’s my problem, and it actually stems from the books, I suppose, so it’s entirely possible that the filmmakers should get a pass. It is a matter of believability. 

I mean, I think I get that the story is supposed to be a parable tying in elements of the gladiators of ancient Rome, the antebellum south, and thorough reading of the Cliff’s Notes of 1984, but like nobody is happy about the Hunger Games taking place. It puts the powers of the Capitol in doubt, and it’s not like anyone who lives in a District lower than 2 is thrilled with the idea of having to go and fight these things. Why did they agree to all of this? Is there some kind of better explanation for this as the films/novels go on? Maybe I’m in for the whole ride now to find out. Maybe, in that respect, it is less of a flaw than a virtue. I imagine I’ll have thoughts on this issue as things progress.

Also—with a similar level of dubiousness—how did Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) live that long. He should have been out in the initial rush for supplies.