The leader, Vuk, shape-shifts into Jessica Chastain with white-blonde (it looks irradiated) hair and an instant mastery of the vocabulary of feminist resentment. That floating whatsit arrives with a bunch of ET’s in pursuit, survivors of a dead world who are looking for a new one. When Charles dispatches a team to save a space shuttle beleaguered by said cosmic space whatsit, Raven tells him, “If anything goes wrong, I’ll turn us around in a heartbeat.” When did she become such a stick-in-the-mud? Much as I adore J.Law, I miss the other timeline with Rebecca Romijn’s gleeful Mystique. president, but Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) thinks celebrity has gone to his head. In this new timeline, the X-Men have been welcomed into the world of ordinary mortals, to the point where Xavier has a special phone to reach the U.S. The note most often hit is “Bad Xavier!” - a scolding that would be more satisfying if the crisply patriarchal Patrick Stewart sill played the role instead of the mild and relatively boyish McAvoy. Also, it’s cool to see our earthbound X-Men fight space invaders.

This is a real Zeitgeist superhero picture, with a nod toward militant female empowerment and the concomitant notion that fathers don’t know best - and therefore have no right to make decisions on behalf of women. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Jean is induced to repress her trauma instead of working through it, which becomes a big problem when she’s zapped by a cosmic space whatsit that melts the partitions in her brain. Xavier’s aims are pure it’s his methods that prove cataclysmic.

In the opening flashback, Jean’s telepathic powers cause the death of her parents (no first shot of a kid in a car with Mom and Dad ends well), but the man who adopts her - Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) - assures the little girl that those powers can be used for good. (“How do you respond … Lord Baelish?”) The transformation was potent in Game of Thrones because you could discern the girl shoved into adulthood too violently and it’s almost as effective in Dark Phoenix, which turns on an irreconcilable split - demonic rage versus human need - in Jean’s psyche. Under stress her features harden, her eyes become slits, and an ancient Greek war mask seems to settle over her face, from which comes a voice that both chills and cuts. Jean Grey) in the latest X-Men movie, Dark Phoenix, might be our most expressively inexpressive young actress. Sophie Turner, who played Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones and has the title role of Phoenix (a.k.a.

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