X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Oh noes, space weather affected the Space Shuttle, so they need to rescue the space astronauts. Jean Grey sucks the space goo into her space body, but it seems she absorbed it all, just got a little bit weary for a while. No space cooties, OR IS IT?
They get back down, and go for a PR stunt, with people holding signs with their names, then there’s a close up with a literal child holding a sign saying “Marry Me”, “I want to have your babies”, and similar. Jesus fucking Christ, Bryan Singer, you were cancelled for a reason.
Jean’s midichlorian levels are off the charts now. She is now all feisty, flustered, and with extremely tight underwear. That can’t be comfortable. This is still PG-13, so there’s no protruding nipples (see Batman Forever) or anything, it’s all very chaste. Chaste voluptuousness.
With the space cooties, she’s not only more emotional, she overpowers Charles and remembers her father. He’s the one that appeared on the prelude. Charles implies he is abusive, but he wasn’t.
The X-people try to bring her home, but she fights them and Mystique is impaled in some sticks. An anti-climatic end to such a core character. Everybody is pissed at Charles, he’s like Bill Cosby now, out of the blue.
Is it aliens, it’s fucking aliens. Goddamn it. Aliens want the space cooties. They fetch Magneto to fill the quota, then go do the climax, in NYC for tax purposes.
What follows is one of those massive snorefests only comparable to Wonder Woman, but with nice choreography. It’s just too much literal hand waving, colourful goo, and enemies who were friends a couple scenes ago.
To cap it all up, the pull a Fast and Furious and it’a really all about FAMILY, noooo. Another franchise ruined by abstractions.
The status quo trigger is pulled and Jean Gray (who was catatonic in the previous scene) turns every new bad guy to dust. The mutants left for dead are actually alive for the next film, except the ones where the actor cannot be bothered, those are left ambiguous.
Apparently this Jean Gray actress is a singer? She is in some Jonas Brothers film? Weird.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.