I finally watched this earlier this week, and I enjoyed it.
What a coincidence -- I just watched it today.
Since I haven’t read many of the characters’ comics, and not in quite a long time, I was able to go into this fairly fresh and judge it on its own terms. In that respect, it’s imperfect but moderately satisfying. I didn’t find its story actively stupid or insulting or incoherent. It wasn’t very deep or complex, and ultimately it was a rather simple story about mastering fears, but it was watchable.
I did find it borderline laughable how it went out of its way to give every one of the characters a murder-y backstory, but that actually made sense once it was revealed that this was an Essex Corp. program to recruit and train mutant killers, so
of course all the “patients” would be mutants whose powers had already proven lethal. Even though I was spoiled in advance, I thought it was fairly clever the way the movie set up the audience and the characters to think that Reyes’s “superior” was Charles Xavier, only to drop hints that something darker was going on and eventually to reveal the truth.
The characters were underwritten, but I thought Dani and Rahne’s romance was sweet, and I was impressed at how far they took the same-sex romance when I was expecting something far more tentative. Illyana was unpleasant at first with her meanness and gratuitous racism, but she got better, and let’s face it, Anya Taylor-Joy was really hot here, especially in her action scenes. And Lockheed (when he finally showed up for “real”) was adorable.
I liked the visual effects design. Reyes’s force fields were interesting, the flashes of Magik’s Limbo dimension were visually striking, and the Demon Bear was fairly effective. I assume its smoky body was an interpretation of Bill Sienkewicz’s art.
Reyes’s force fields were strange. If she generated them herself, how was there a permanent one around the hospital, even when she was asleep or drugged? Could she generate one and make it persist independently until she chose to bring it down? They could’ve stood to explain that.
Also, it annoyed me how they took the (putatively) Native American parable of the
Two Wolves and substituted bears in order to fit the story they were using. It felt like cheating.
Once they revealed Reyes worked for the Essex Corporation I was really hoping we'd finally get to see Sinister on screen, and was a little disappoint when we didn't. Do we see him in Dark Phoenix or is he going to end up being a set up that will probably never get a pay off?
Nope, nothing about him there. I suppose you could say the payoff is in
Logan, because Dani's flashes of the experiments on mutant teens are largely stock footage from that movie.