The first official trailer for what could very well be the last X-Men film in its current iteration is finally here, as Twentieth Century Fox has released a look at 2019’s Dark Phoenix. The movie features the returning cast from the previous three X-Men films with a starring role for Game of Thrones‘ star Sophie Turner as the titular Phoenix. Watch the trailer first, and then we’ll unpack everything we saw.
Much like the much maligned X-Men: The Last Stand, this new film looks like it will give us lots of flashbacks to Jean Grey’s childhood and the development of her powers. And much like the comics, it seems Jean’s powers kick in when she was a young girl and experienced a car accident, although the one in the trailer looks worse than the one in the comics. We also see Jean arriving at the X-Mansion.
With Dark Phoenix set in the ’90s, that means that James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are now thirty years from where we met them in X-Men: First Class, but they have barely aged. And according to the X-Men movie timeline, in about ten years they’ll look like sixty-somethings Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. Mutant aging?
The trailer also shows some shots of the X-Men performing a mission in outer space, although the movie doesn’t appear to be going full cosmic like the original Dark Phoenix Saga comic book storyline. Sorry folks, but it looks like no Shi’ar Empire in this Dark Phoenix adaptation either. Gone are the ’80s and ’90s style costumes that appeared at the end of X-Men: Apocalypse; instead we have something akin to what the team was wearing in the comics in the early 2000s.
We also see the X-Men attending a funeral; our guess for the mutant being buried is Quicksilver. Jessica Chastain’s character is also seen briefly, whom many speculate to be a shape-shifting Skrull. If that’s the case, it means we may have two different versions of the alien race on movie screens at roughly the same time since Captain Marvel arrives a month later from Marvel Studios.
Finally, the choice of music is very telling. The use of a cover of “The End” by The Doors could be Fox selling this film as the last entry in the X-Men movie saga that has been going on for nineteen years and ten films (twelve if you count the two Deadpool movies!) The use of “The End” can’t be a coincidence folks.
Dark Phoenix arrives in theaters on February 14, 2019.
What are you hoping for in this second adaptation of the X-Men classic? Be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Images: Twentieth Century Fox
