YMMV / Dark Phoenix

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• Ass Pull: When Vuk first describes the Phoenix Force to Jean Grey, she explains that Jean is the only person in the universe to be able to utilize its power without dying. There's no indication that she was lying, so her sudden ability to siphon the power from Jean, and use it against her in the finale, comes out of nowhere.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Most people were wary of film's premise given that the last time the Dark Phoenix plot line was adapted on screen was in the largely-disliked X-Men: The Last Stand — a film which also had the same writer, now also helming as the director.
• Awesome Music:
  • Hans Zimmer composed a suitably epic, haunting and emotional score for the Grand Finale of the X-Men films.
  • The first trailer makes excellent use of Think Up Anger and The Filthy Souls' cover of "The End" from The Doors, hammering home that this movie represents the End of an Age for the franchise. In a sizzle reel that leaked out beforehand, it was the original song, edited in a way that was even more haunting in its presentation.
• Complete Monster: Vuk is the leader of the D'Bari Empire and author of an insidious plot to control the Phoenix Force and rule the Earth after using the Phoenix Force to wipe out all life on Earth. Tracking the Phoenix Force to Earth, Vuk murders a woman and takes her appearance before killing the woman's husband by stopping his heart. Vuk subsequently finds and murders Jean Grey's father John after interrogating him about Jean's whereabouts, noting that it's harder to understand someone while they're screaming. After managing to find Jean, Vuk persuades her to try embracing her powers and to not bother with ideas of morality. When the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants confront Jean, Jean is overcome with remorse, and Vuk "volunteers" to take the Phoenix Force away from her, knowing full well that Jean will be killed. After the mutants are captured and she is prevented from completely absorbing the Phoenix Force, Vuk and her forces attack the train transporting them to take the Phoenix Force from Jean, killing dozens of soldiers. Utterly without empathy even towards her own people, Vuk was unlike any threat the X-Men had faced before.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Dazzler's surprise cameo at the party managed to dazzle a number of fans.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Reshoots and delays for Dark Phoenix occurred shortly after Disney announced its plans to acquire Fox's assets. This led some fans to believe that the re-shoots and delays were a result of this impending buyout, possibly to tie the film in with the Marvel Cinematic Universe in some way. This was not helped at all by an April Fools' Day story reported by JoBlo that this would be the case, which went over more than a few heads. In all likelihood, Fox's earlier apprehension toward working with Marvel Studios with regards to the Fantastic Four property would likely indicate that no such plan is in place, and that Fox's iteration of the X-Men franchise already has enough continuity issues to integrate it into the MCU. Not to mention Kevin Feige's refusal to integrate anything Marvel not produced by him (such as Venom) into his movie canon, or perhaps more realistically, the re-shoots could have been done to retool the film into a Grand Finale for the series due to the buyout. Some of the people involved also stated the movie had to be made more distinct from Civil War, as its initial version took heavy inspiration from it.
  • With Jessica Chastain's role being kept a secret, many have proposed that she could be Lilandra or a Skrull, among many choices. Recently theories are that she's, in fact, a far younger Cassandra Nova. Then she turns out to just be a member of the D'bari, a minor alien race.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Many casual movie viewers are under the mistaken belief that Jean had the Phoenix Force in X-Men: Apocalypse and claim that this film ignores it. However, this is completely overlooking the fact that Jean had the same fiery aura since X2: X-Men United, which was explained in X-Men: The Last Stand to be telekinetic energy from her mutation. Zak Penn, who co-wrote both movies, said that the Phoenix was not a cosmic force when discussing his scripts in a 2008 interview.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With the MCU. It's gone so far that after the buyout of Fox by Disney, fans of the MCU wanted to see Marvel Studios shelve it permanently... even though it wouldn't have been financially feasible in any way for Disney to do so (as, even in the event of a flop, Fox and Disney by extension would get some money back). After the movie bombed, a theory came from Fox fans, hypothesizing that the movie was sabotaged by Disney to serve Captain Marvel, though the director said that the ending was changed at the request of test audiences, and Disney did not have authority over Fox at the time that the movie was wrapping up post-production. ^note The merger was completed less than three months before the release of the film; Disney's only actions on the project were apparently to give the movie a last-minute marketing push. It was also in Disney's best interests to have the movie do as well as possible, even if there was no intent to do a follow-up since the Fox purchase was so expensive.
  • With the MonsterVerse, due to being released one week after Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and being perceived by Godzilla fans as an incoming threat to their movie's already disappointing box office performance. The fact that Dark Phoenix got even worse reviews and made even less during its opening weekend than King of the Monsters is cited as a "victory" for the MonsterVerse, although no one really won (at the very least, Godzilla was viewed much more favorably by its fans, while Dark Phoenix wasn't that well-received even by most X-Men fans).
• Fanfic Fuel: Word of God confirmed that the movie's ending would still lead up to the good future seen at the end of Days of Future Past, but given that there's 31 years between this movie's ending and that scene, fans are completely free to speculate on what happened between those two points in time.
• Fanon Discontinuity: For some fans, Logan is the true finale of the original X-Men series rather than this movie. Alternately, Logan is a Bad Future story (since it is officially set in an Alternate Continuity) and X-Men: Days of Future Past is the proper finale.
• The Firefly Effect: A case that doesn't involve Executive Meddling so much as bad timing on Fox's end. While the film was originally planned to be the start of a potential trilogy, the news that Disney would move to buy Fox in 2017 put those plans into doubt — and Fox eventually confirmed that the movie would be the end of the road for the series in April 2019. As a result, Dark Phoenix becoming an unintentional conclusion was a factor that dampened interest in the movie with the knowledge that a reboot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be coming eventually, and the knowledge that these iterations of the characters would not be used going forward contributed to a sense of apathy toward the project.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • All the way back in the first X-Men film, Wolverine questioned the X-Men wearing black leather, with Cyclops responding that it was either that or "yellow spandex". Now, the final Fox-produced X-Men movie in the main series has the X-Men wear yellow spandex uniforms!
  • The Phoenix Force, a powerful cosmic force, resembles a sentient cloud. Where have we seen that before in Fox's Marvel films? The Galactus comparisons get funnier when you consider that Galactus quite infamously destroyed the Skrull home-world in the past of the Marvel Universe, and that the D'Bari in this movie are Skrull stand-ins.
  • Daniel Cudmore was supposed to reprise his role as Colossus but was cut in the final film. With the appearance of the Mutant Containment Unit (MCU), it appears that with Cudmore being cast in Helstrom means that Colossus got captured by the MCU after all.
• Ho Yay: Not as much as previous films, but the movie does end on Erik meeting Charles in Paris and offering to house him in Genosha. Most fans treat this as the pairing being endgame.
• Informed Wrongness: Charles Xavier is portrayed as being in the wrong for hiding an Awful Truth from Jean Grey regarding her past, which everyone calls him out on. But it's clearly shown that her father didn't want anything to do with her after she accidentally killed her mother, even deeming her a "lost cause" with no hope, and willingly gave her to Charles with no hesitation. Furthermore, he even disposed of her old photos in order to erase all memory of her from his life. Meanwhile, Charles only wanted to protect her from being hurt by this tragic past, giving her a new and loving home. The movie also calls him out for trying to use the X-Men as a means to generate good PR for the entire Mutant species, but considering that they were being vivisected by the government merely 19 years prior, trying to make heroes out of his now-adult and willing students is a logical course of action in a world where many of them are still hated and feared for their unique abilities.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some people went to see the film just to hear Hans Zimmer tackle the score to another superhero movie.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • With the way that Days of Future Past shows Jean Grey at the X-Mansion, few in the audience actually expected Jean Grey to stay dead by the end of the movie. Her survival is confirmed in the final shot, where a flaming Phoenix appears above Paris.
  • A non-death variant also occurs. Some also called that Jean wouldn't actually turn evil since the ending also showed her with the X-Men and the same of the theme of the movie was that you can evolve to change yourself and change your fate.
• Mis-blamed: Disney was hit with accusations of forcing director Simon Kinberg to change the ending film when word got out that the original climax of the movie (which had Jean Grey going into space and fighting off an invading fleet of D'Bari ships) had similarities to Captain Marvel. In actuality, the decision to change things up was a call made by Kinberg and Fox after initial test screenings for Dark Phoenix, which happened before Captain Marvel was even finished filming. (The climax was reportedly criticized by test audiences for lacking the majority of the characters, and changes had to be made after the massive set for the original scene was demolished and was deemed too expensive to rebuild by the studio.) Furthermore, Disney was not in control of Fox until March 2019, after the release of Captain Marvel and after the reshoots for Dark Phoenix had been completed.
• Narm: Here.
• Once Original, Now Common: The original story line was an absolute game-changer when it came out in the early '80s. An almost god-like female character carrying a story of her own about a power she can't control was unheard of back then, but has since become common in modern times. A few reviewers have pointed out that the story didn't translate well because general audiences who don't know much about comics history would assume that Dark Phoenix is the derivative one. The film version had the misfortune to be released with an entire slew of very similarly themed works, particularly another female-led superhero film that came out only three months earlier, Captain Marvel. This piece from Vox points out there were also two other popular pieces of media in the first half of 2019 that followed the same beats as the original Phoenix Saga story, Vanya Hargreeves's arc from The Umbrella Academy and Daenerys's arc from the final season of Game of Thrones.
• One-Scene Wonder: Dazzler is in the movie for about five seconds, but longtime fans of the comics really, really liked her cameo.
• The Scrappy: Vuk, the main antagonist of the film, is greatly disliked for being a dull, uninteresting, and ultimately forgettable villain who has little characterization beyond manipulating Jean Grey into trying to destroy the world. The fact that Jessica Chastain's talents were wasted on her only makes people dislike her more.
• Sequelitis: This movie received the lowest critical score out of all the main X-Men movies, with critics saying that it's a very disappointing send-off to a franchise that restarted the comic book movie genre. Most notably, it received worse review aggregate scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic than even X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Apocalypse, which are considered among the worst in the series, with some critics and fans actually preferring The Last Stand over this movie.
  Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus: Dark Phoenix ends an era of the X-Men franchise by taking a second stab at adapting a classic comics arc — with deeply disappointing results.
• Special Effects Failure: Storm's lightning effects in the final battle have been rather poorly received for looking like bland and unconvincing white streaks rather than actual bolts of electricity.
• Tainted by the Preview: The first trailer provoked highly mixed reactions, with a lot of fans turned off by how similar the movie looks to The Last Stand.
• Take That, Scrappy!: While the death of Mystique is played in a tragic light, detractors of this specific version of the character saw the scene as a relief.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many of the supporting Mutants — namely, Quicksilver, Storm, and Nightcrawler — aren't given much to do from a character development perspective, even if they're all involved in action sequences. Quicksilver gets the worst of it, considering that Apocalypse teased that he would eventually have to reveal to Magneto that he's his father, but the two never even share a single scene. He's injured and taken out of the film rather early and never gets to do his trademark "run really fast and do a bunch of stuff as a pop song plays" thing from the previous movies.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Even before the film was released, many detractors expressed frustration that, rather than take advantage of the clean slate offered by Days of Future Past and tell new stories with the cast introduced in Apocalypse, Fox opted for a do-over of a storyline that one of the series' least popular movies already did, and with even less build-up to it.
  • There were complaints that the costumes seen at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse, which were all personalized for the team, went unused in favor of the more uniform New X-Men-influenced outfits.
  • The climax of Apocalypse has Charles intentionally telling Jean to use her full power, heavily implying that she unleashed the Phoenix and that this film would explore the dire consequences of this decision. Instead, the film ignores this and reveals that Charles once again repressed Jean's power as he did in the original timeline, while the Phoenix is an outside force completely unrelated to what Jean did in Apocalypse.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
  • A huge part of the general negative consensus of the film stems from the sheer amount of darkness that makes the plot hard to care about, when the plot could have focused on new concepts such as Quiksilver's relation to Magneto (from the previous film) instead of having yet another film where one of the main antagonists is yet another mutant.
  • Points of contention tend to include Mystique's death when fans had gotten more attached to her (or at the very least gotten to know her more) in the previous films, Jean becoming uncontrollably possessed by the Phoenix and set on destroying everything (and everyone) in her path to drive the plot forward, Xavier being harshly blamed for Jean's actions and the mutant situation despite his lack of control over them, and the government being given an excuse once again to use lethal force against mutants after this was alleviated several times in previous films.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Dazzler makes a surprise cameo during a party sequence, where she's been hired as the evening's entertainment for Xavier's students.
  • After much speculation as to who Jessica Chastain could be playing, from Lilandra to Cassandra Nova to Skrull Queen Veranke, it turns out she's playing... Vuk, a one-off antagonist from Avengers #4 (a 1963 story which had zero to do with the X-Men). Chastain eventually revealed that she didn't even know what her character name was until the movie came out, indicating that it was a late change into the film's development.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Charles Xavier. He is blamed for Jean losing control and it's implied that the audience is supposed to agree that he was being selfish; caring more about his ego than the students. However, many viewers agree with him. Xavier has created a trusted bond between mutants and humans, a vast improvement over them being vivisected and/or mutants using their powers for crime. Despite Mystique's claims, Charles isn't forcing kids into dangerous situations as a publicity stunt; he's sending willing adults to use their abilities to help people. Also, creating mental blocks in Jean's mind arguably wasn't done to control her, but to protect her and others; Jean's powers become wildly unstable when she's emotionally distressed. What could be more distressing than being a little girl who accidentally killed her mother and is disowned by her father? Charles clearly cares about Jean (when Jean goes inside his mind to telepathically confront him, it's shown that he still views her as the little girl he took in and he says he only wanted to "keep the pain away"). While he could've handled the situation better, his intentions appear sympathetic. However, it can be argued that we are supposed to sympathize with Xavier as Jean forgives him and agrees that his actions were done out of love. Adding to his point, when confronted by Mystique about his intentions for the missions, she accuses it of being for his personal fame. He reminds Raven of their previous treatment as criminals and they're always "one bad day away" from being set back to it; their missions and PR prevent that. When Jean loses control (and Erik and Hank go on Roaring Rampage of Revenge), the government doesn't hesitate to cut all ties with the X-Men, begin cracking down on mutant freedom all over again and the public deems all mutants a threat. This, in which, proves Charles was right.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Mystique is seen as this by many viewers when she calls out Xavier, even though it's meant to be an empowering scene. She mocks Xavier by saying that she can’t remember a moment where Xavier actually "risked something" like the rest of the X-Men did, despite the fact that Xavier had sacrificed just as much as they had (including the use of his legs, something she was there for) in the previous movies. She also chastises Xavier for sending them on dangerous missions (despite willingly doing so before as an X-Men member) and lectures him for trying to make heroes out of the X-Men, claiming they're "just kids". This sentiment comes off as contradictory to the rousing speech she made in Apocalypse (where she declared they're "not students anymore", but official X-Men). Also, her observation that they're "just kids" is downright nonsensical due to the team now being in their mid-to-late 20s and have been doing such work for nearly a decade, making Mystique come off as both overprotective and hypocritical. She also claims that the female team members are "always saving the men" and that Charles should change the team name to "X-Women" to suit their alleged work and effort. As fans pointed out, the male team members (primarily Quicksilver and Nightcrawler) have saved the team, Mystique included, from death at least a few times in the movies; including this film. Hence, they find this statement untrue and, once again, hypocritical.
  • After Mystique's death, Hank decided to team up with Erik to hunt Jean down, even agreeing to Erik's decision to outright kill her out of vengeance for accidentally killing Mystique. While Hank has a right to be furious that Jean killed Mystique, he knows that she did not do it on purpose, and is simply scared and confused as she doesn't know what's happening to her. Despite knowing this, he allows his emotions to cloud his judgment and decides to team up with his worst enemy to kill his former student without hesitation. The fact he blames everything on Charles and makes him out to be a cruel villain who selfishly "messed with the mind of an eight-year-old girl" and declares that they should have "been protecting the students from Charles all along" (despite what he himself is doing in trying to outright murder Jean) really doesn't help his case either.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Regardless of the movie's writing, you can't deny that the CGI is amazing for the most part. Special mention would have to go to Cerebro, where entering one person's mind creates a swirly, ink-like environment around the user. It's meant to simulate the work of synapses in a person's brain, and it's beautiful to watch.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • While there are some who are happy to see the X-Men wear yellow outfits based on the New X-Men run, others have mocked this, believing that the Jim Lee-inspired costumes seen at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse were better.
  • Jean's dark red trench coat has been derided for being similar to the red dress that she wore in X-Men: The Last Stand, for bringing back bad memories regarding that film.
  • Mystique's look in the film has a noticeable decrease in terms of makeup quality compared to prior instalments. Jennifer Lawrence previously made it clear that she isn't a fan of the makeup process that it takes to bring the character to life, likely leading to lighter applications of it in her appearance in this film and her character's death early on.

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