For the vast majority of the X-Men, I think it works.  Most of them are kids/adolescents and they'd already have to deal with coming back several years younger than the rest of their classmates.  Now they have the ability to freeze or burn stuff on top of that.

For Charles and Erik, maybe you have them be powerless friends who get a second chance after the snap.  Charles was an inner city schoolteacher who came from money but never really used his family fortune to help anyone because he was too depressed about the accident that cost him his legs.  Erik was a former Black Panther who finally gets the power he needs to even the score.  Their powers are new, but their baggage isn't.

It wouldn't work for everyone.  Wolverine is a big problem unless you make huge alterations to the character.  Same with longtime mutants like Apocalypse.

But I think you could fix all that by saying that there were a very small number of mutants before the snap.  Charles, Erik, Logan, and a select few of the X-Men, but the snap made it where they were impossible to hide anymore.  Maybe you rationalize it by saying that Hulk was researching mutants in between Endgame and they were in the far reaches of his subconscious when he did the snap.

I’m looking forward to what Disney does with X-men now, but I don’t think they’ll revisit Phoenix, Days of Future Past, etc any time soon (if ever).  Watching the comics right now and knowing Feige is  in no hurry for X-men, I’m wondering if they’ll follow the road map Jonathan Hickman is laying out.

The House of X storyline presents many interesting ideas, but the core is the mutant story as they embrace that they stand apart from humanity and walk this gray line between heroes and villains.  After Disney uses a movie to introduce the characters and give us the alternate timelines leading up to House of X, the story could then explain a lot - mainly why we haven’t seen mutants in the MCU before now (because they were hiding on Krakoa until they were ready).  It could also easily set up the Avengers vs X-men movie rumored to be a goal for the MCU.

This is also one of the times I’m 100% behind a race swap on characters like Xavier and Magneto (rumor that they want Denzel Washington for Magnus).  In my mind, those were already black characters wearing white skin - the veiled allegory to the 60’s Civil Rights movement had defined those characters in many ways (Martin Luther King vs Malcolm X).

In any case, we’ll see.  There’s a lot of potential with X-men left; Disney doesn’t even have to touch the ground Fox already covered.

But like so many things (the Seer included), asking for a two-part X-Men movie at this point was a little crazy.  They might've been able to pull it off after First Class or even Days of Future Past, but coming off the clunker that was Apocalypse and coming up on the sale of Fox to Disney, it was crazy to think they could get a two-part movie greenlit. 

With all that being said, with Fox's waning interest and Kinberg having to edit a two-part movie into a one-part movie, I think the fact that the movie is as coherent as it is impresses me.

I agree with the idea that they should've kept all these movies in the 60s and 70s.  I don't know why they jumped a decade for each movie but didn't make any attempt to age anyone.  Charles and Erik should be in their 60s, and they (obviously) don't look anywhere near that age.  And while I think that they did need more from the team to show that they're a team, I would've probably seen another movie from these guys, whether it was the original two-parter or some sort of follow up.

But yeah the movie covers way too much ground for one movie.  Genosha, which should be a big deal, is glossed over.  The X-Men as celebrities is sorta too.

It wasn't as good as First Class or Logan or X2.  But it was far from the worst X-Men movie.

Legion is a really fun show to watch, even when I don't know what's going on or remember any of the characters' names

Really enjoyed it, wound up watching Seasons 2 and 3 together in a big binge.

As a result, there's too much going on. Simon Kinberg writes every scene with tenderness. He directs every moment with care and detail. The action sequences are a return to the original 2000 aesthetic: confined spaces, brutal intimacy, the X-Men trying to contain the conflict, each shot of mutant powers in use infused with emotion and meaning. But with two movies packed into one film, the emotion and meaning have no context.

There is no sense of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Nightcrawler and Beast having any kind of rapport between them, no characterization for Jean, so Jean becoming dangerous is meaningless. Cyclops insists Jean can be saved; Storm declares she can't -- there is no rationale for why either one takes either position. Beast teams up with Magneto to kill Jean, then Beast tries to save Jean later into the movie -- there is no explanation for what changed.

All the actors perform these scenes well, but without additional scenes (or a movie) to establish the relationships and why each character might choose each opinion and then change their minds, it feels random. I have no doubt that Simon Kinberg knows why Beast when from wanting Jean Grey dead to wanting to keep her alive -- but he has been denied the space to show what happened.

The scenes of the Phoenix power and the mutants battling are tense and troubled and directed with a perfect sense of choreography, of geography, of presenting each mutant as a character and their power as a manifestation of their inner mindsets -- except the movie is too rushed for us to know who these characters are.

The movie looks beautiful. The small scale of the film is a wonderful contrast to the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. At one point, Xavier exclaims that the mutants cannot fight or they'll be "freaks battling on the streets of New York," a hilarious rebuke of the first AVENGERS movie. Later in the film, all the mutants are imprisoned and thrown aboard a train, taken away by the Mutant Containment Unit -- the MCU. This is Kinberg's first film as a director and there is a remarkable clarity and immediacy to his work, an intensity of emotion in all his visuals -- except that the story just isn't there.

It's a bizarre paradox: every scene has meaningful, stirring dialogue, but the surrounding context is absent. The X-Men are declared to be celebrities now, but there isn't enough screentime devoted to really sell it. The lead X-Men are declared to be friends and teammates, but there aren't enough scenes to make them feel like anything other than neighbours living in the same apartment complex. FOX was insane to compress DARK PHOENIX into one film.

DARK PHOENIX feels like the end of year three part finale to a 22 episode season of an X-MEN TV show except they filmed the finale first and never got around to producing episodes 1 - 19. And FOX's mishandling of this project really shows how they have no business making superhero movies and Disney was right to shut them down and start over.

Aesthetically, X-MEN (2000) came out in the post-BATMAN AND ROBIN era when, fairly or unfairly, live action superheroes were thought to be silly. BATMAN AND ROBIN looked like a MAD TV spoof of an actual film. X-MEN and SMALLVILLE (2001) were part of the era of 'superhero-realism' (much like magical-realism), presenting a realistic environment with superhumans existing in isolation and in opposition to the mundane world around them.

Productions didn't have the technology to make skintight clothes look like anything but Halloween costumes, so this was the "No flights, no tights" period of superhero media that was ashamed of superheroes. Eight years later, IRON MAN (2008) came out and showed that technology had advanced to allow multi-coloured superheroes to look convincing in live action. Both IRON MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA demonstrated how movie and TV costumes could add texture and weight to bring a 2D design into live action while retaining the lines, colours and recognizability of the comic characters.

SMALLVILLE joined IRON MAN in 2008 and its eighth to tenth seasons embraced superheroes as an exaggerated, hyperstylized reality. HEROES (2010) was the last gasp of superhero-realism and then AVENGERS made it clear that superheroes could indeed wear their costumes and be successful. At this point, it looks like superhero-realism is no longer dominant, but the low budgeted Netflix shows still use it.

The legacy of the X-MEN films is that FOX tethered their X-MEN ship to a talented but crazy, violent, unreliable, unprofessional filmmaker. When they fired him, he dragged the franchise down with him on his way out; when they re-hired him, he righted the ship but then crashed it again on the rocks of APOCALYPSE. 

According to two performers who worked on APOCALYPSE and spoke with me off the record, the director was having daily temper tantrums at cast and crew as the press reported his victims accusing him of rape and pedophilia. Eventually, he stopped showing up to set, leaving second unit and producers to try to wrap up the movie – which explains why APOCALYPSE was so thematically incoherent and unfinished. Xavier's message of protecting the weak never comes together; the teen mutants had all their scenes cut; they never use their powers in tandem to defeat Apocalypse -- in hindsight, it looks like the director jumped ship without finishing his own movie.

But, to be fair, every movie franchise finds a sword to fall on. 

(I haven't seen DARK PHOENIX and I'm sure it's fine; Kinberg is nothing if not competent, but I think we can all agree that the continuity is nothing if not hard to follow.)

And, honestly, that makes more sense from a story perspective.  If you end the series with Days of Future Past, the future sequence with Wolverine could've been the end.  Everything worked out and sorta tied together.  Instead, they tried to do more with the younger versions even though they'd already established that they'd saved the future.  It's hard to fear for Scott and Jean and Charles and Hank in Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix when we saw them okay in the future.

On the Weekly Planet podcast, one of the hosts likes to talk about how the X-Men films' continuity is as simple as "do you remember the last movie?  That's good enough" - if you ever try and remember passed the previous movie, the continuity sorta falls apart.

It's just crazy that the X-Men films were fine, broke their continuity with prequels, and then had a movie to fix the continuity....before trashing it all over again.

I don't know what the legacy of the X-Men films is.  The three movies I like the most (X2, First Class, and Logan) don't feel like they exist in the same universe despite the fact that they all have a lot of the same characters, mostly played by the same people (Wolverine is in all three).  It's a series that technically has two finales (Logan and Days of Future Past) but doesn't end either place.

Still, DARK PHOENIX is shaping up to be an interesting failure, a $100 million loss for FOX and the franchise leading up to DARK PHOENIX has been bizarre. X-MEN and X-MEN II were terrific, depicting a realistic world with mutants as a hidden subculture only beginning to receive global awareness. The world of these movies was a plausible, grounded reality with any advanced technology or superhuman phenomenon linked specifically to mutants.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, however, changed this. The world became extremely exaggerated and the new directors didn't have a strong sense of physical reality; there was no sense of terror from civillians when Pyro and Iceman started shooting off fire and ice; only muted reactions to Magneto moving bridges. Everyone in the ORIGINS film was a superpowered assassin or soldier. It's a bit like Bryan Fuller's criticism of Season 2 of HEROES: the powers no longer represented internal conflict and characterization.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS attempted a reboot with easter egg references to the previous films via Hugh Jackman's cameo as Wolverine and refilming the original X-MEN's opening scenes. FIRST CLASS was plainly a reboot set in the 60s, blatantly contradicting the original films with Xavier and Magneto meeting as adults rather than teenagers. FIRST CLASS was to kick off a new series of X-MEN films with the 60s cast. Meanwhile, there was another WOLVERINE film that continued the grounded aesthetic.

But then FOX made some strange decisions; they rehired the original director of the first two films to do the sequel, and rather than continue the 60s cast's adventures, the DAYS OF FUTURE PAST sequel killed the majority of the FIRST CLASS characters off camera and featured the 2000s-era Xavier and Magneto. It served as a finale story for the franchise. Director Matthew Vaughn would later express dismay that his sequel to his reboot became a conclusion to the original films.

With DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, the X-MEN franchise had come to a logical end and yet sought to make more films after having wrapped up their series. LOGAN offered what can only be an out of continuity finale for the Wolverine character that doesn't sync with DAYS OF FUTURE PAST's conclusion. I didn't see it, but I did read the script and the movie was, it seems, so well-made that viewers didn't care about the continuity. And then we came to APOCALYPSE which was simply peculiar.

DAYS OF FUTURE PAST declared that FIRST CLASS and the original films are set in the same timeline. The original films featured Cyclops and Jean Grey in their 30s in 2000. APOCALYPSE introduces the teen versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Angel, Storm and Nightcrawler in the 80s. Cyclops, Jean and Storm should have been around 10, Angel shouldn't have even been born yet.

Worse, APOCALYPSE largely cut down the scenes with these incoming characters, focusing entirely on the FIRST CLASS versions of Xavier and Magneto re-enacting their tired conflict for yet another round when DAYS OF FUTURE had situationally and thematically laid it to rest. APOCALYPSE featured lavish action sequences that were completely divorced from reality and were reminiscent of the video game aesthetic that marred X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE.

And now we come to DARK PHOENIX. The Dark Phoenix storyline depends on an audience invested in Jean Grey and Scott Summers -- who were barely present in APOCALYPSE. The Dark Phoenix storyline depends on having fully established the X-Men team and seen them in numerous adventures together before they find themselves having to fight Jean, the compassionate center of this group. We've barely seen these characters together.

I just don't think this series is capable of telling this story in this format with these versions of the characters who have been underserved, underwritten and underfeatured. APOCALYPSE was a painfully mediocre, uninteresting film with nothing meaningful or important to say and I don't see how DARK PHOENIX can offer a climax to a series about Scott Summers and Jean Grey that never really started. If the X-MEN films formed any kind of a series, that series ended in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. APOCALYPSE made me feel like the X-MEN movies had ended one film previous.

Which is probably why I stayed home and watched ONCE UPON A TIME in the gym instead.

I use this when the credits start no matter what movie I'm watching.  They have a spoiler warning so you can easily see if a film has mid or end credits sequences without spoiling what they are.