X-Men: Dark Phoenix - 40 WTF Moments
The X-Men are back and they're dumber than ever!
If they'd told you some years ago - when the new take on the iconic Dark Phoenix Saga was seeded in the newer X-Men timeline - that the end result of the extended, problematic production journey would have been the best X-Men movie ever, you wouldn't have believed them. There's a good reason for that, as well, because the film is actually not very good at all.
Mired in the fog of its controversial production, which has to include the decision to spoil a MAJOR story element in the trailers for no reason, Simon Kinberg's sequel was on a hiding to nowhere anywhere, given the Disney deal, but it could have made a better account of itself. Hell, if it had just tried to be a bit more fun, it could have scored better points.
As it is, the film is weirdly dull, oddly wrong-headed and terribly executed and it has one of the strangest scripts ever seen in an X-Men movie. And while nobody is expecting documentary realism here, there's fantastical and there's just plain... well, dumb. At least it generates a vast amount of moments that will provoke a good old WTF out of you, though.
It's a hell of a thing...
40. The Best Line Is Cut
All that time waiting and we didn't even get to see Charles Xavier deliver his weird "I don't know what to do!!!" line from the trailers. A thing of beauty lost forever.
39. "Werewolves Of London"
If you're going to set a film in a certain time period, you really ought to be pretty savvy with your historical accuracy. And since Dark Phoenix chooses to be set in 1975 - partly in order to celebrate the start of Chris Claremont's revival of the comics - you'd expect any incidental details to be correct to that time period.
So that makes it extremely weird that the car crash sequence sees Jean Grey changing the car radio to a station playing "Werewolves Of London" by Warren Zevon, which was recorded in 1977 and released in 1978. Yet more time travelling in X-Men movies, then.