Where Have All the Women Gone?

A Dark Phoenix Review
By Lian Lansang

Spoiler Alerts AHEAD!

Dark Phoenix the most recent of what seems like will be a never-ending series of X-men movies, premiered this past weekend, and a question that I was left with after spending two hours mostly confused, is — where have all the women gone?

The film attempts to follow, or makes nods to The Dark Phoenix Saga where Jean Grey travels to space in order to fight robot sentinels, (which only appeared in “Days of Future Past”), then is noticed by the Phoenix Force, and as Jean is dying after solar radiation poisoning, the Phoenix Force, this cosmic entity, absorbs part of Jean’s consciousness and creates a duplicate body for her — memories, personality, and all the bells and whistles. The Phoenix Force really wanted Jean — more than Scott, Logan, and even Professor X (yep, that totally happened at one point in the comics).

The movie doesn’t mention that it’s the Phoenix Force that engulfs Jean, but rather an alien cosmic force that they initially think is a solar flare. Mention of the Phoenix Force actually isn’t stated at all throughout the rest of the film. But forget all the to be or not to be of what force it is, let’s focus on the question of where have all the women gone? For real, where the hell did they go? Oh — the grave!

Dark Phoenix at the beginning had the potential to be a strong female fronted movie with a plotline where a woman didn’t have to be saved by a man and came out the hero. However, the movie followed so many other feminist-baiting films where the women were sacrificed in order to further the plotline of the men in the movie.

The movie starts out with three of the strongest women in the X-men universe — Jean Grey, Mystique, and Storm; however, they seem to serve not much purpose. Storm barely talks throughout the movie, Mystique (SPOILER) dies really early on in a death that was so lackluster and was not the death a badass like Mystique deserved, and lastly, despite being called “Dark Phoenix” the movie is more focused on Professor X and his weird-ass obsession with Jean. He loves her for her mind…

Oh, yeah, (SPOILER AGAIN) Jean dies as well. Or, well, “dies.”

So, to answer the question, Where Have All the Women Gone? They’ve gone where most women in superhero films go — the back-burner.