“It’s alright” – the answer we’ve all heard before when asking a friend about their opinion on a movie. The words like “dreadful” are easier understood. In that case, you can avoid the movie, or watch it out of morbid curiosity about how bad it really is. Nobody ever seems to know what to do with “alright”. Between John Wick 3 taking us all by storm and Hellboy bombing at the box office, it’s easy to see how movies such as X-Men: Dark Phoenix are being left suspended between the two extremes of opinion.
“Well, that was alright…” was the one thing my friends said about Dark Phoenix. They didn’t have anything more to say about it. And really, that feels quite a shame to me. Dark Phoenix may not have done anything groundbreaking with the X-Men world and its characters. It’s no Endgame by any means. If there’s one thing that this movie makes clear – whether it be through how the characters deal with loss, or the way the end of the third act is written to bring the focus back to Jean (Sophie Turner) – it’s that it was never trying to be Endgame.
The mentality that every movie needs to be either utterly bad or a total masterpiece to be worth notable recognition is problematic. No matter where you stand on Dark Phoenix as a movie, it proves audiences are too dismissive of the alright. Outside of the fanbase, who are still vigorously arguing where it fits against the rest of the franchise, talk of it has just…vanished. Is this what cinema will boil down to? Everything in between of best and worst left to gather dust?
I hope not, because that would be a sad loss for all of us. When we think of these movies as just “alright”, we don’t spend any time talking about how any part of them made us feel or what sort of moral we may have taken away from it. Having only two outcomes – fantastic or awful – forces us to have higher expectations for movies who set out to entertain. There’s nothing wrong with a packed three-hour epic with a multitude of famous names. But would it still be epic if everyone did the same thing?
Dark Phoenix is not exempt from criticism. A lot of the founding setup for the plot is quickly and haphazardly done and there were some clunky bits of dialogue (that surprise f-bomb being notably painful). But it was more than “alright”. The score wonderfully keeps the tension building in the action scenes, the fights are well choreographed, and the confrontational moments between Jean and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) are a great showcase of the acting talent. The story may not have been mind-blowing, but it was entertaining, capable on a technical level and worked as a not-too-final end cap for the X-Men franchise.
We need to stop dreading the alright movies and start discussing them. Talk about the pros and cons. Even if it’s a low-key film about a bunch of friends running around a city getting into mischief with a small cast, there’ll be something in there to have a conversation about. Let the filmmakers see that audiences are not passive. Show the budding film students in the crowd that there’s nothing wrong with making something alright – because even alright has its praises to be sung. And give yourself a break from this year’s equals of Birdemic and settle for a Lost In Munich. It may not join your digital collection, but it’ll certainly level your expectations.
It’s important to keep the conversation going. It might seem a little silly at first but try it. If it doesn’t work for you then, well, that’s quite alright.
