What a pity this gets such poor press because I really liked this movie. I just caught the late showing and taken as its own, this movie is kinda what I want comic movies to be more about: smaller scale, intimate, and with a good story with empathetic characters. This had that and most of it was okay. Mind you, there's faults and it retreads a lot of what already's been done before (and better and more maturely) but I thought this was pretty good throughout.
The single largest complaint I keep hearing about this is that this doesn't make sense with the rest of the other movies. That's true, but the timeline of these X-men prequels are so fudged up anyway, I think the best and only option to take is to say "screw it" and let's just go out and do something interesting the best we can, and I think Dark Phoenix does that. So what if it doesn't exactly follow Apocalypse or tie into the Singer movies, or even follow the original comic storyline...So what? Logan did it and it was mostly good, despite having nothing to do with Old Man Logan (which is terrible); and why would anyone want to follow X-Men: Apocalypse? It was genuinely trash. Haven't we enough of these outlandish, gay and merry, empty, mediocre, CG spectacles where every set piece is just an explode-y cartoon with photo-real textures? This movie tried to do something more mature without being vulgar or obscene, with a lot working against it, and while it's all stuff we've seen done better before, I think what it manages to do is still good. Dark Phoenix, on its own merits, I think, is good. As far as recent comic movies go, this felt like it was at least trying to be a real movie.
While it isn't doing anything new or inventive, this was competently made for the most part and for what looked to be on a smaller budget. As far as I'm concerned, Dark Phoenix is the X2 of these X-Men prequels, and in more than just the obvious parallels. DoFP was the third proper X-Men entry of the original Singer movies, in my mind, and we can just cut out Apocalypse (everyone wants to). This entry is more or less a direct sequel to First Class than anything else, I thought, and in terms of wrapping this particular series up, it was serviceable. These entries into the X-Men films weren't ever all that great to begin with but they certainly weren't terrible (mostly) and while it goes out kind of small, I felt it fitting in a way. No one blows out a near-burnt out candle by throwing gasoline on it.