00:00With X-Men Dark Phoenix, Simon Kinberg signs his first directorial.
00:04He's originally a screenwriter who wrote XXX Next Level, Jumper, the reboot of Fantastic Four, and X-Men 3: The Last Stand.
00:13So basically, not only are we handing the story of the black phoenix back to the person who ruined it the first time,
00:19and what's more, he's being asked to direct something he's never directed before.
00:23From there, only a miracle can save the film.
00:25But if only that were all, because it's simple, the film will be unlucky until the end.
00:30It went into production in June 2017, for release in June 2019.
00:35Except that in the meantime, Fox was bought by Disney.
00:37The transaction is unique in the history of cinema.
00:39The studio will be sold for more than $50 billion.
00:42And the works in production at that time will be greatly handicapped by this sudden change of direction.
00:48There's a new sheriff in town, and therefore a new vision.
00:51X-Men Dark Phoenix, although it was off to a bad start before the buyout, clearly won't be helped.
00:55For Fox, before the Disney era, this film is not the last in the franchise.
00:59They have to produce more so as not to lose the rights to Disney.
01:03But when the big-eared company buys it, the idea is of course to integrate the X-Men into the MCU from scratch.
01:08Disney Studios has therefore declared that this X-Men will be the conclusion of a 20-year saga.
01:13And why not? All good things must come to an end, after all.
01:16But the problem is that this film is clearly not written as an ending.
01:18And the story doesn't seem to have been tweaked to make it look like that, as many of the characters' arcs are left hanging after the credits roll.
01:25To top it all off, the final sequence, which was originally supposed to take place in space, will be completely reshot to avoid resembling the Captain Marvel finale, which was released around the same time.
01:34So we end up with a completely messed up finale in a kind of wasteland, and we are therefore deprived of the long-awaited grandeur.
01:41Again.
01:41So let's be honest, if Apocalypse isn't the most successful, Dark Phoenix turns out to be a real failure.
01:47The scenario is already a nightmare.
01:48Nothing is going right, everything is rushed, rushed, as if no one really wanted to invest in this story.
01:54Simon Kinberg manages to ruin for the second time a story that is epic and pre-prepared by the comics.
02:00I mean, it's all there.
02:01It's like copying from your neighbor at school, but still managing to give the wrong answers.
02:05It doesn't make sense.
02:06Already, the whole arc with the aliens is completely botched.
02:09At no point are they credible.
02:11There is no context.
02:12They're just there in The Walking Dead mode, but they don't add anything interesting.
02:16Too bad because there was real potential with Jessica Chastain as a super villain.
02:19The development of some protagonists is not much more glorious.
02:22Apart from Charles and the controversies surrounding him, the others are neither done nor to be done.
02:26Scott is back to being the annoying guy from the first movies.
02:28Quicksilver no longer has any impact and his power, which could easily create sparks in terms of staging, is not exploited.
02:34Fove making inconsistent choices, Magneto playing the botanist, and Jean Grey of course.
02:39His transformation was very poorly managed and compared to a sort of teenage crisis.
02:43I mean, what's this cliché scene like, honestly?
02:46At no point does she show any empathy.
02:47At no time do you feel its power.
02:50This is the crux of the story and it doesn't work.
02:52And from there, the construction of the story can only collapse.
02:55The film has this ability to not release any emotion.
02:58Even Mystique's death is poorly handled.
03:00It's an old remake of Charles Xavier's death in X-Men 3.
03:03Jean in her old home confronts the X-Men and in her fury kills one of them.
03:07Great! But at least in X-Men 3 it has some panache.
03:10While it was the guy from Rush Hour who did it!
03:12The death of this character and the sacrifice of Jean could have easily ended the saga.
03:17But the staging of these two events proves that this film was indeed intended as a filler.
03:21Why is Mystique killed in this way?
03:23After its importance in the saga, the scene is far too rushed.
03:26Some people like to say that it was Jennifer Lawrence who couldn't linger on the set of this film.
03:31But still, it's a bit of an excuse.
03:34Even if we know that the actress did not necessarily help the character's consistency in the latest installments.
03:38Some say the actress's skin had allergic reactions to makeup products.
03:42Others that she simply hated spending hours in the makeup room.
03:45But whatever the case, we see her very often without makeup.
03:48And it makes no sense because at that moment, the character is totally in tune with her mutation, accepts it and is proud of it.
03:54And for an actress to be responsible for the lack of coherence of a character is not normal.
03:58Especially for makeup related issues.
04:01Let's talk about this makeup.
04:02The regression is total.
04:04We go from that to that.
04:06Again because Jennifer Lawrence has limited makeup time in her contract.
04:10Rebecca Romigne, the first interpreter of Mystique, will confide in this subject.
04:13And admit that spending several hours on makeup was a bit exhausting.
04:16But that it was a source of pride for her to wear it and that it remained true to the character.
04:20Thank you Rebecca.
04:21We can't really link this to a regression in makeup in the film since the beast, for example, is much more successful here than in First Class.
04:28Where it was a little scary, let's be honest.
04:30Visually, it's another 200 million wasted.
04:33No identity in terms of the decor.
04:35200 million to fight in a street corner in a studio?
04:37Seriously ?
04:38I mean, there's nothing there.
04:40It's incredibly poor considering the scale that the film is supposed to convey.
04:43He loses all his identity.
04:45It's bland.
04:46In addition to this, the saga no longer bothers with timeline consistency.
04:49It's even more incomprehensible than the rest of this side.
04:52The ending of Day of Future Past clearly shows us that everything ends well for everyone.
04:56And yet here we have two deaths that are not supposed to be.
04:59Charles who is retiring while...
05:01Well no.
05:01Anyway.
05:02It's a mess.
05:04So this is how this X-Men saga ends.
05:06An average film with a less than perfect ending.
05:09A not unpleasant film in short.
05:11But which clearly does not do justice to the mutants who will have undeniably marked modern cinema.
C’était le premier film X-Men que j’ai regardé, mais il c’est passé six ans avant que mon pote me dise « vas-y, il faut que tu regardes X-Men »
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