Review Roundup: What Did Critics Think of DARK PHOENIX?

Dark Phoenix is the story of one of the X-Men's most beloved characters, Jean Grey, as she evolves into the iconic titular character. During a life-threatening rescue mission in space, Jean is hit by a cosmic force that transforms her into one of the most powerful mutants of all. Wrestling with this increasingly unstable power as well as her own personal demons, Jean spirals out of control, tearing the X-Men family apart and threatening to destroy the very fabric of our planet. The film is the most intense and emotional X-Men movie ever made. It is the culmination of 20 years of X-Men movies, as the family of mutants that we've come to know and love must face their most devastating enemy yet -- one of their own.

Find out what the critics thought of Dark Phoenix below!

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Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

Jean drifts through the film in a convulsive trance of intensity that's a whisper away from traumatized. Trauma looks good on superheroes (it's part of the lifeblood of the comics), and Sophie Turner, from "Game of Thrones," with her green eyes and cosmopolitan hauteur, gives Jean a glinting sensual fire, a Fusion of triumph and dismay and sheer violence - it's like watching Vivien Leigh play a vengefully irradiated badass. Jean has good reason to seek vengeance, yet she's reckless; at a certain point, she kills off one of the most admirable of our heroes. Turner's damaged conviction holds "Dark Phoenix" together, giving it a treacherous life force.

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter:

Compared to the conclusions of other major franchises - the most recent being Avengers: Endgame - this one seems distinctly minor-league. The men who have anchored most of the X-Men outings are just spinning their wheels here, and while Jean's central dilemma is certainly dramatic enough, and is most closely entwined with the actions of two other women, what should have registered as genuinely powerful instead plays out in a pretty low-key way. In no way does this feel like a fulsome, satisfying destination to a journey that started two decades ago and logged about 30 hours in the telling.

Matt Singer, Screencrush:

It's very hard to tell this story in a satisfying way in this little amount of time. Multiple characters undergo life-altering changes of perspective - flipping from good to evil, sympathetic to monstrous - in a matter of seconds. The whole movie hinges on Jean Grey, a character we hardly know (the Sophie Turner version was introduced in a minor role in X-Men: Apocalypse) and her relationships to a team of heroes we've hardly seen. The film is like an adaptation of the original Dark Phoenix comics, and also of the Anchorman 'Well, that escalated quickly' meme. Everything happens too fast, until the whole structure goes down in flames.

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly:

"It's true that X-Men have never exactly been the party clowns of the Marvel Universe; their hero status has always been conditional to fearful humans, and the chosen family of mutants they've landed in is less choice than necessity. Why should they have to banter for us, too? Still, for what is being called a final installment, it all tends to feel both anticlimactic and a little grim in the end. Not that anything Marvel is ever really over; fans only have to hold their breath for horror spin-off The New Mutants, due next April."

Brian Truitt, USA Today:

"Dark Phoenix" is one of the more emotionally intense of the X-Men flicks, thanks to Turner running the gamut from fear to self-loathing to rage. Even if the film on the whole is lackluster, she delivers as a young woman whose feelings and life barrel out of control, as well as a superhero (or supervillain?) you believe holds the world's fate at her whims.

William Bibbiani, The Wrap:

"The most impressive thing about Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix, the 12th movie in 20th Century Fox's wildly inconsistent X-Men superhero franchise, is that it's not the worst one. It's rather embarrassingly scripted and acted out by a cast who, pretty much across the board, look like they'd rather be anywhere else, but at least it's not quite as awful as X-Men Apocalypse, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, or X-Men: The Last Stand.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire:

Dark Phoenix isn't the first event-free event movie of the mega-franchise era, but this one is different - it's a perfect storm of pointlessness. Not only does the movie fumble the baton pass between generations and fail to advance the series' overarching story in any meaningful way, it also hardly seems to try. Not only does it botch the source material's signature narrative arc, it also does everything in its power to flatten it out. Not only does it waste an excellent cast on a script that reduces all of its characters to basic constructs, it also puts them at the mercy of a first-time director who doesn't even know how to make them look cool.

Phil de Semlyen, Time Out:

A fairly pointless retread of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's 'The Dark Phoenix Saga', which we've already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner's 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand. It bolts on a pallid alien invasion storyline that's more X-Files' than X-Men and is laden with lumpen dialogue about destiny and 'controlling your inner power' that could have been lifted wholesale from a tai chi manual.

Matt Goldberg, Collider:

If the Phoenix is a metaphor for Jean's childhood trauma, you run into a whole host of other messy problems because it's not just Jean's story by also Xavier's. Xavier put barriers into Jean's mind to protect her from her trauma and when the Phoenix comes along, it destroys those barriers, causing her trauma to reemerge. Again, if this had been built up over multiple movies and showing us how Xavier, in his misguided arrogance and love for Jean tried to protect her from her emotions rather than teaching her how to deal with them, that would be a good story about parents and children. But that backstory doesn't exist outside of a 10-minute prologue where it seems like more effort is put into showing how Jean's mom died horribly in the car crash. And if dealing with emotions is the core of the story, that leads into some really ugly territory.

Angie Han, Mashable

Dark Phoenix's lack of imagination is all the more disappointing because it glimmers of promise early on. Its first act promises two interlocking character journeys with rich thematic potential: one of a woman realizing her rage at what has been done to her, and one of a man facing up to the mistakes he made with the best of intentions.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone:

Dark Phoenix doesn't just suck big time. It's the worst movie ever in the X-Men series. That's 12 films since the first X-Men in 2000. Even series low points - that's you X-Men Apocalypse -offered compensations. Dark Phoenix just lies there like a dying fish, futilely flapping about on land while it waits for the inevitable dying of the light. The degree of awfulness is surprising since the man falling into the abyss with this Phoenix is debuting director Simon Kinberg, who has served long and well as the series producer and sometimes screenwriter. Shouldn't he know these characters best? You'd think.

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