Dark Phoenix Saga -- Huh?

[Archetype]

Read the comic, ignore the movie...

Well, you won't get a better understanding of the character from the new X-Men III movie, that's for sure...

The Dark Phoenix Saga is one of my better comic-book-reading-days memories. Maybe it was just the time period (Early 80's), before many risks were being taken with firmly established characters in comics. But the story arc of corrupting, then losing a "main character" was unheard of at the time. And quite a good read.

Of course, it was filled with a lot of silly comic-book trappings that bogged down the plausablility of the story (setting the final confrontation on the moon, Dark Phoenix consuming a whole star system to satiate her lust, etc), so I was hoping the movie would pare this mythic story down to it's essentials. And it does this to some extent. The idea of Jean Grey being a super-powerful "Class Five" mutant from the moment her powers manifested, but Professor X clamping them down with "psychic circuit breakers" to supress that power was a clever device (adapted differently from a later comic plotline). It threw out the need for Claremont's whole "universal Dark/Light Phoenix Lifeforce avatar " gobbledigook.

If the movie had actually followed thru on the new premise that "Phoenix" was the name of the split personality which Jean Grey created to handle and personify the untamable power she possesed, it would have been an excellent movie device. Instead they blew all their creative "efforts" on making sure that Dark Phoenix had a scary FX-heavy appearance to try and illustrate her "corruption." Bleh. Doesn't anyone in Hollywood know how to *write* a script anymore... Why didn't Phoenix have any real dialogue about her transformation? Ok, Claremont's "I am Life, I am Fire, I am Phoenix!" overwriting would not have worked as movie-quality lines, but we should have had *something* spoken from the "Dark Phoenix" perspective that indicated she was a separate, barely-contained emotional tigress, drunk with the limitless scope of her power.

Instead, we got Famke Jannsen standing around the set, seeming uncomfortable in her red dominatrix-inspired costume, placed well for the blue-screen effects but looking lost, as if she is trying to find the teleprompter for her lines. What a waste.

 

[Psion]

I read it at the time and it was a complete classic.

Then they did that stupid thing about bringing Jean back in the cocoon which devalued everything that had gone before it.

Y'know, Phoenix was my favorite character at the time... but I agree.

I really expected to hate the movie interpretation. But in the end, I think it made more sense.

 

[sniffles]

I agree with Psion, the movie explanation made more sense.

Hey, did anyone who's seen the movie notice that Chris Claremont had a cameo? His appearance was right before Stan Lee's.

 

[LostSoul]

Instead, we got Famke Jannsen standing around ... in her red dominatrix-inspired costume

Sounds hot.

 

[sniffles]

WTF?!
I just went over to read the Dark Phoenix writeup on wikipedia, and discovered that the whole "she's not really dead" plotline was created by one of my favorite comic writers, Kurt Busiek!

Kurt, seriously, I'm going to have to find out where you live. Either that or corner you at Excalibur. No more resurrecting dead characters for you!

 

[fanboy2000]

My hat of cc know no limit

As much of a comic book fan as I am/was (have a collection of around 5,000 books, published between mostly the mid 80s to the mid 90s), I must admit that I never read or knew the story of the Dark Phoenix saga. I knew of Dark Phoenix, but only peripherally.

In many ways I was in the same boat as you, read comics-from the mid-80s to the mid-90s and knew little of it. I did read it later, but it only confirmed my hatred of Chris Claremont's writing. You know how some people hate Rifts or d20? Multiply that by 6.02 x 10^23 and you know how much I hate Claremont's writing. Which is to bad, because I've read interviews with him and he seems like a decent guy. I really wish he made his living in some lesser occupation like being a State Assemblyman or Vice President. Then I could ignore him and anything he writes.

 

[bodhi]

While I can’t comment on this story in particular, before my time, I read Watchmen 15-20 years after it’s original release and was not particularly impressed.

Go read The Annotated Watchmen along with the graphic novel, and tell me you're still not impressed.

So the impressions you get may be completely accurate, and the reason it’s so beloved is due to what it meant at that time.

Although I do admit you have a very good general point here. Some things are very much a product of their time. See VH1's "I love the 70s/80s/90s" shows.

 

[Spatula]

While the original story was very cool at the time (I started reading X-Men with the Hellfire Club / Dark Pheonix issues), it was also very silly and really only made sense in an established comic-book universe like Marvel - where something like "the Pheonix Force" could just be introduced with little explination and readily accepted, and mutants battling space aliens isn't really all that strange. That why I always wonder why fans are disappointed when things like this get changed for the big screen (or for television) - the original MAKES NO SENSE in a stand-alone movie or cartoon franchise.

This applies to the Spider-Man black costume / Venom thing as well. "Well, a hero that fights street crime gets transported to an alien planet where he gets a magic new costume from a machine that really turns out to be a symbiote being that feeds on his adrenline, and when he gets rid of it, it bonds with a photographer whose reputation was ruined by the hero's civilian identiy to form the deadliest villian of all!" This was all very fun to read at the time, but it would never work in a movie, where audiences don't expect things like aliens in their Spider-Man stories.

 

[Umbran]

This was all very fun to read at the time, but it would never work in a movie, where audiences don't expect things like aliens in their Spider-Man stories.

Well, the expectation can be managed. But the time required to properly tell the story is prohibitive. The whole symbiote-to-venom thing went across a couple years of comics, and it is difficult to gloss over that history and not leave the whole thing seeming... empty.

 

[Welverin]

Blasphemy! You're not actually a Russkie in disguise are you?

No I'm not.

Go read The Annotated Watchmen along with the graphic novel, and tell me you're still not impressed.

It'll be a while before that happens, if it ever does.

I do plan on reading it again to see what I think. Though based on a conversation with someone in one of the games I'm in, I suspect part of it is the fact that some of what made Watchmen so special is how pioneering it was for it's time, something that didn't work on me since I had already experienced the comics it influenced.