X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) - Movie Review

In the history of the Fox-helmed X-Men films, this particular entry is an important one. Mostly because, now that Disney owns the entertainment sector of Fox, this is the last film this franchise will produce until Feig and company integrate the mutants into the MCU proper. Even though Logan basically served as the thematic conclusion for this series, this is where it officially ends (save for New Mutants, but that project has been held back for so long now, it’s anyone’s guess if we’ll ever actually see it).

But there’s also something else that gives this film importance, namely writer and first-time director Simon Kinberg’s reason for making it. He tried before to bring the story of the all-powerful Phoenix to the big screen through his work on The Last Stand, but since most audiences didn’t care much for it, he wanted to try again and get it right this time. As I got into at the start of this year, I have a fondness for cinematic redemption stories like that, ones where creatives look at past mistakes and seek to rectify them; doubly so since it’s a filmmaker correcting their own mistake in this instance. However, no matter which way you slice it, the background importance placed on this just doesn’t translate into the finished product. Like… at all.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) - Movie Review

With the Marvel Cinematic Universe as ubiquitous as it is, it can be easy to forget just how important the X-Men films have been for the common conception of comic book movies. At the start of the millennium, the genre was in a pretty bad state: Vanguards of the art form Superman and Batman had both fallen on legendarily bad times, the kitschy ways of the 80’s were sticking around for god knows what reason like with Captain America and the unreleased Fantastic Four film, and to make matters worse, we weren’t even getting that many of them that were worth noting. Blade was pretty much the one and only comic book superhero film that was watchable. And then noted filmmaker Bryan Singer teamed up with Solid Snake (seriously, the OG voice actor for Solid Snake wrote it) and up-and-coming actor Hugh Jackman to make history for the format. Pushing the surface badassery of Blade into mainstream-recognised maturity, it changed the landscape from then on; it set the groundwork that the MCU went on to flesh out. No question, even in the wake of negative reviews, I was looking forward to the next instalment in this legendary series, especially given how amazingly well Days Of Future Past turned out. This is X-Men: Apocalypse.