X-TRA – Jay and Miles Spoil the Hell out of Dark Phoenix

I have never heard of this retcon that Jean’s powers were tampered with by Charles until now. I wondered why there were two adaptations which did this when it has nothing to do with the Dark Phoenix Saga. It might be a potentially important note for these characters, but breaking or rebuilding trust between them was never the primary focus of the story. As Miles points out, “This hurts for so many characters.” It’s about everyone coming together for Jean, which we finally did get in this movie, but for the wrong reasons. Instead of coming together to support this member of their family when the weight of an alien empire is against her continued existence, it is instead about putting aside their differences over how to handle her so they can stop a new species from killing everyone on Earth and Jean can extinguish them first.

Jay: I’m going to say, based on “…Future Past” that Beast is the only reason that Charles Xavier hasn’t drowned in a pool of his own vomit by this point.

You don’t need to look to X-Men: Days of Future Past, it is already apparent in X-Men: First Class, in which Charles Xavier does more drinking than thinking and Beast is the one designing Havok and Banshee’s costumes. Beast puts in the work.

Here’s my take on Dazzler. Everyone at that party attended the school, including her. This is not an adult Dazzler who loves playing the Xavier School, this is Alison Blaire before she had developed distinct musical skill and vocoders and similar have been used in music since the 1960s.
https://www.soundopinions.org/show/236/
Dazzler’s music didn’t leave any impression on me, I don’t know if Auto-Tune was used or not, but “Believe” by Cher came out in 1998. Auto-Tune was around and used in pop music in the 90s, just the wrong end of them.

I haven’t seen the film – this is definitely one for which I’ll wait until I can see it on the small screen. Nor have I listened to our hosts on it yet — I’ll reserve that for when I have seen it. So apologies if this duplicates some of their discussion.

But I’m struck by the fact that this makes two tries for a film version of the Dark Phoenix story, and neither has worked. X3 has other problems, of course, and it seems that so does this.

But I wonder if TDPS is a poisoned chalice for film adaptation — something that is so iconic that everyone expects you to do it, especially because it is the Jean story, but whose success in its original comics form is tied to things that don’t translate well to a film.

Here are some possible aspects of that. (Possible, certainly not exhaustive, and all pretty much off the top of my head as they come to me.)

– TDPS was originally not really its own story, but the payoff to the Hellfire Club story. Making a film of TDPS is essentially making a film of the conclusion to a story, not a story. And as with a lot of conclusions, TDPS isn’t all that interesting in itself, but that doesn’t matter because it is a satisfying resolution to earlier parts of the story that grabbed the reader’s interest then (which was their job).

-Extension of that point: TDPS is a good example of the “soap opera” side of X-Men. It really depends on your investment in the characters over a long-running saga. The iconic moments in it: Jean destroying the planet; the different X-Men’s thoughts on the night before; Scott and Jean running out; Jean sacrificing herself — these all, especially the third two, are primarily about you caring about Jean and the others as people in a way that is hard, if not impossible, to duplicate in the more compressed format of a film. To put it another way, it’s maybe more suitable to be like Avengers: Endgame if it is going to be a film at all.

-With that in mind, TDPS depends also on previously established plot elements. Specifically, it’s a retread of the Shi’ar space opera that Claremont had done extensively earlier on. That’s important (maybe not critical, but important), because it gives the story something of the feel of a twist after the Hellfire Club stuff. Plus it helps give it a sense of cosmic and epic scale. The film does apparently incorporate aliens, but I don’t know that it’s aliens that matter: it’s star-spanning galactic empires. Judging by the trailers, the film doesn’t really go there.

– Which it can hardly be blamed for doing, because that’s not really something that would feel anything other than incongruous in the films. That’s just not the sort of thing that they’re about. It’s something of a virtue of the MCU that it’s accustomed viewers to the sort of crazy genre hybridity that superhero comics readers take in stride. But the X-films are more clearly cast as a specific type of science-fiction story that’s more restrained and grounded.

But this raises an awkward point: TDPS isn’t an “X-Men” story. Well, that’s silly. What I mean is that it’s not really about the whole “mutants as a metaphor for marginalized minorities” thing that we have come to see as the defining element of an X-story (certainly in the films). But that’s not something that was prominent in Claremont’s UXM from day 1, and TDPS is really the culmination of Claremont’s first phase as X-writer, in which the distinguishing features of the book are soap opera, soap opera, and also soap opera (plus an international cast and a fair amount of globetrotting).

Shortly after this, in Days of Future Past, Claremont makes his big turn towards reviving the political element and making it central to the X-Men. But it’s basically not at all what TDPS is about, and this renders the story quite unsuitable to feel thematically coherent with the films.

– I get why both films have included the “It’s all Charles Xavier’s fault” retcon (although my memory of X3. It’s not actually that far from the original story, because it’s the tampering with Jean’s mind by Mastermind that unleashes Dark Phoenix. Given that you’re eliminating the Hellfire Club — and you absolutely can’t lack an element like that for obvious reasons: nothing could be worse than removing one of the features of TDPS that mitigates the fact that it’s killing off a woman because she’s too powerful — adopting the Xavier retcon is the most elegant solution, because it makes things turn on a central figure.

But there is the obvious objection, that it tends to make this Xavier’s story, not Jean’s, in classic Aristotelian fashion — he’s the person who’s made the critical choice that’s driving the whole plot.

And it’s more than that. Arguably, the original TDPS works because it is the Hellfire Club’s fault. They’re offstage for the final act (TDPS), and the most responsible person, Mastermind, has paid the price for his actions. There is no-one left hanging around whom it is useful to blame. The X-Men are united in defense of Jean, and there’s no element of guilt to that. The Shi’ar are equally doing what’s right from an entirely understandable perspective. I think you might need all that to inform one’s emotional response to the death, both in order to be moved by it as a tragic necessity in an impossible dilemma, and to feel that Jean’s sacrifice is defensibly the right choice for her to make.

-Which brings us to the death. I don’t know if the new film kills Jean off. I would cautiously guess that it probably doesn’t. But even if it does, I don’t think one can underestimate the extent to which killing off a major character who had been around since the ‘60s, and writing the story so as to sell the reader that this was permanent was an enormous deal in a superhero comic book in 1980. It’s easily the main thing about the plot that makes the story so iconic, and it’s something that you can’t easily duplicate if you tell the story in a different context.