Actress Famke Janssen - who portrayed Phoenix, aka Jean Grey, in the original X-Men movies - believes that the upcoming Dark Phoenix can fix the mistakes of the storytelling that happened with her character in X-Men: The Last Stand. Janssen, like many fans, feels that the Dark Phoenix plot was not given enough time in The Last Stand.
X-Men: The Last Stand began with the other X-Men believing that Jean Grey had died in the previous film. Scott, her former lover, drives to her resting location, but she appears to him and kills him. When the others arrive, they only find Jean there unconscious, along with some floating rocks and Scott's glasses. Eventually, the film explained that when Jean died, it released the "Dark Phoenix," an alternate personality with godlike destructive powers. Then, Jean loses complete control of the Phoenix and Wolverine stabs her to stop her from destroying everything in her path. Although it sounds like a lot happened, these scenes were only a small part of The Last Stand, a subplot surrounded by many other plots, leaving comic book fans familiar with the Dark Phoenix scratching their heads as to why the film didn't give it the time and attention it deserved.
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Janssen, who portrayed that version of Jean Grey, agrees with fans. In an interview with Inverse, she talked about the upcoming film Dark Phoenix, starring Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, and how she hopes it can fix the mistakes filmmakers made with that particular storyline in The Last Stand.
“I’m glad that the Dark Phoenix saga is finally getting its due. When we tackled it in The Last Stand, it wasn’t given enough time. I remember hearing from fans after we finished the film that they were disappointed that an enormous moment in the comics was given so little screen time. I’m happy for them to give Phoenix the due that she deserves.”
Turner initially stepped into the role of Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse, but she will get a solo movie of sorts with Dark Phoenix in 2019, which will go into more detail about this particular storyline made famous in the 1970s Uncanny X-Men comic books, as written by Chris Claremont. The film focuses entirely on how Jean becomes Dark Phoenix, though the other members of the X-Men are also key to the storyline. The production is a serious one, too: the cast and crew researched mental health issues so they could accurately depict what happens to the character on the screen after she goes through events that unleash her full potential and power, which causes her to rename herself Dark Phoenix.
As Janssen said, fans deserve a better retelling of the Dark Phoenix story than they got in The Last Stand. And that better version should, hopefully, arrive with Dark Phoenix when it lands in theaters next year.
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Source: Inverse
