20th Century Fox, for reasons incomprehensible, are allowing Bryan Singer to have another go at the Phoenix Saga in the upoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix . Despite exhibiting little more than contempt for comics and everything they represent, The Usual Suspects director has had a steadfast grip on one of their most lionized families for almost two decades now. In that time, the best entries in the franchise have incidentally been the ones that seem to have the least to do with him, (Logan, X-men: First Class ).
Singer is a relic in the world of comic book movies, a veritable fossile still standing after having made a name for himself in the days before nerd culture was the bread and butter of the box office and black leather spandex was the cogent solvent for costumes that were deemed too “silly” for the silver screens. Critics have been fairly kind to the X-Men film series, though frankly upon rewatch, I think you’ll find that none of them really hold up quite as well as you remember, yet Bryan Singer has established himself as one of the pioneers of the genre, alongside Sam Raimi and Richard Donner.
Look, I’m a big fan of the X-Men comics, but not so much as to crucify a guy for making cheesy 90’s style bastardizations of them over a decade ago. I get it — that was the edgy industry trend — I just don’t understand why Singer’s reign of mediocrity is permitted to continue.
Marvel, the former bankrupt comic book publisher, is now a licence-to-print-money movie behemoth that just released a successful sequel to Guardians of the fucking Galaxy . Ant-Man has a good movie counterpart. Deadpool, the inbred spawn of Singer’s fatuous franchise, has since gotten a redeeming reboot in the SAME franchise. And now, nine movies and one soft reboot in (not that it matters, as the only thing Singer seems to care less about than the X-Men themselves is his own established continuity), we are getting another attempt at the Dark Phoenix saga.
The Phoenix saga is an irrefutable masterpiece, an epic cosmic soap opera that’s chalked full of the histrionic plot threads the medium is famous for. I’d love nothing more than for a capable, imaginative filmmaker to bring Clearmont’s story to the big screens, but sadly Singer just ain’t that guy neither is his preferred partner in crime Simon Kinberg, who has been announced to take over directing duties while Singer oversees the project as producer. X-men 3 (penned by Kinberg) was an embarrassment in its own right, even without the weight of adapting the revered Phoenix run on its back. That film has been effectively eradicated from canon thanks to the events of X-men Days of Future Past, and a new younger cast was ushered in to take up the mantles previously held by the actors that literally aged out of the franchise.
First order of business? Have them take on Apocalypse, in a film as formulaic and visually uninspired as the era of comics that birthed him. We get another retread of the Quicksilver slomo sequence, a laughably unavailing Wolverine cameo and a tease to the Dark Phoenix in the form of a glance at the incendiary bird that doesn’t come until much later in the comics.
Oh goody another, female superhero is too weak to control her own powers story. Yeah let's bypass all the neat space stuff and focus on the least interesting aspect of the greatest X-men story of all time-god Singer’s obsession with telekinesis bores me.
Well meaning or not a proper realization of the Phoenix Saga simply cannot work with a Jean Grey the audience knows nothing about. A large part of the appeal of that story is the defiance of expectations for that character. It’s the classic good girl goes bad story but with a terrifying galactic entity subbing in for- I don’t know chain smoking or joining a rock band. Most of the characters that are integral to the Phoenix saga appear in name only in the Singer-verse, some of them have yet to appear at all. Hang it up Bryan, I’m not saying you have to pass it to Marvel, they’ve seemed to have found a new girlfriend in The Inhumans, I’m not saying you have to pass it to anybody, I’m just you need to stop making X-men movies. Please.
