On Monday, I went to the press screening of Dark Phoenix; and then I came home and watched three hours of Bojack Horseman. I’m a latecomer to the Bojack zeitgeist — I’m just now making my way through the third season — and there’s something about its bleakness that I find profoundly reassuring. The whole show is a study in the grinding mundanity of disappointment, which made it an ideal chaser to Dark Phoenix.

After 19 years of Fox’s X-Men, I’ve gotten very good at managing my own expectations — but I so desperately wanted this movie to be good. It’s the last one. Even in a line full of retcons and reboots, second chances as literal as this one — the same source material as a previous movie in the same series, revisited by the same writer — are virtually unheard of. Nobody gets to do that.

I want this to be a story about second chances. I want to tell you how, at the end of its convoluted life, the lumbering half-rotted behemoth that is the X-Men cinematic franchise caught a spark and rose blazing into the night sky; and all of what I had thought was dead weight fueled something bright and brilliant and new.

This is not that story.

[Ed. note: This piece will contain major spoilers for X-Men: Dark Phoenix.]

At its heart, The Dark Phoenix Saga — the legendary comics arc on which Dark Phoenix is based — is a story about Jean Grey. It’s also about the X-Men, about friendship and family, about power and corruption. But Jean — or what was later retconned to be the Phoenix wearing Jean’s face and memories — is the story’s core.

In the X-Men comics, Jean Grey is a complex and frustrating character, one whose Silver-Age origin under the pen of Stan Lee mean she spent her formative years defined almost entirely by her relationships to the men with whom she shared the page. She was Xavier’s protegee, Cyclops’s girlfriend, by turns nursemaid and muse to the rest of the team. The fraught relationship to her powers that would define so much of Jean’s cinematic representation was introduced only later, in retcons that began after Jean’s apparent death in X-Men #137.

And as much as Chris Claremont fleshed Jean out in her own right, as much as she’s the center of the Phoenix story, those stories are largely about Jean being acted upon by outside forces.

When the events that lead into the Phoenix Saga begin, Jean has long since left the X-Men’s active roster. She’s living in Manhattan, working and considering a return to college; it’s only by an accident of fate and timing that she ends up in space with the rest of the X-Men. Her corruption and transformation into Dark Phoenix is largely a consequence of manipulation by the nefarious Mastermind and his allies at the sinister Hellfire Club.

Fate may propel the plot of the Dark Phoenix Saga; but Jean’s choices are its pivot points. She may not have chosen to be in space, but the decision to pilot the shuttle back to Earth during a solar storm — sacrificing her life in the process — is hers alone. She doesn’t choose to destroy the D’Bari homeworld, but her subsequent cavalier murder of a Shi’ar crew is what alerts the empire to her actions. When she finally confronts the consequences of what she’s become — and done — she makes sure that both the final fight and the death she chooses take place on her terms.

2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, borrowed a portion of its plot from The Dark Phoenix Saga, keeping the manipulation but leaving Jean herself passive, a force to be controlled and ultimately killed by the men around her. They are the film’s real protagonists; Jean herself, especially as Phoenix, is little more than a prop.

Dark Phoenix returns both focus and agency to Jean Grey — arguably even more so than the original comics. In the previous series entry, X-Men: Apocalypse, we met a Jean Grey who, for all her sweetness, was also prickly and walled off, perpetually ill at ease with both her powers and her peers. Sophie Turner, best known for her phenomenal decade as Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones, brought similar nuance to Jean Grey, whose eeriness cracks through her wistful, lopsided smile.

Dark Phoenix returns both focus and agency to Jean Grey

And at least initially, Dark Phoenix does an excellent job adapting key moments from the comics, retaining their impact while redefining them within its own narrative. Jean may not be the one who chooses to stay with the shuttle when the solar flare — actually the arriving Phoenix force — hits, but she diverts it to herself and away from her teammates’ vessel. Her nightmarish return to her childhood home packs the same emotional gut-punch as the parallel scene in the comics. And while Scott Summers — Cyclops — plays a far less central role in this version of the story, the relationship that plays out in the background of Dark Phoenix is by far the best version of the Scott-and-Jean romance I’ve seen in any on-screen adaptation. Tye Sheridan’s Cyclops is more reserved and less certain than the cocky new kid we saw in Apocalypse — and he and Turner’s Jean connect less with explosive chemistry than quiet and certain depth.

Jean in fact carries more of Dark Phoenix than she did of the Dark Phoenix Saga. While reviewers tend to cast Jessica Chastain’s alien commander Vuk as the stand-in for Mastermind’s corrupting influence, the role is played far more closely — albeit retrospectively — by Charles Xavier. Like his comics counterpart, this Xavier’s mentorship of Jean Grey has been continually and insidiously manipulative. Since Jean’s early childhood, he has suppressed her powers and rewritten her memories for what is ostensibly her own good and more honestly his own expedience; and the Charles Xavier of Dark Phoenix faces accountability for those actions more directly than his comics counterpart ever quite has.

“There’s always a speech, but nobody cares.”

In fact, a good deal of Dark Phoenix is about Charles Xavier being confronted with his own hubris. The most satisfying confrontation by far is with the eternally patient Hank McCoy, who by this point has spent thirty years as Xavier’s loyal lieutenant, alternately following him into battle and dragging him out of pools of his own vomit.

That the movie puts a pin directly in the franchise’s rehashing ad nauseum of the Xavier’s endless existential crises and his tendency to inflict them on everyone around him doesn’t stop it from becoming mired in more of the same. “You’re always sorry, and there’s always a speech,” Magneto tells Charles Xavier during one scene, “but nobody cares.”

And yet, the speech goes on.

And on.

And on.

For all that Dark Phoenix tries to be a story that challenges and ultimately moves beyond Charles Xavier, its focus always manages to slip away from the more compelling second generation of X-Men and return to him. The film’s ending is essentially the coda to 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, with Xavier and Magneto in the Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle roles. That last bit is especially bitterly ironic if you know that the film’s climax was sacrificed to avoid echoing another superhero movie — Captain Marvel, which, unlike Dark Phoenix, keeps its focus firmly on a woman rising to claim and own both her own trauma and immeasurable cosmic power.

This is where I should probably stop and talk about Simon Kinberg.

As Jean Grey is to the Dark Phoenix Saga — the axis around which all its moving pieces orbit and ultimately converge — so is Simon Kinberg to the cinematic artifact of Dark Phoenix.

Kinberg entered the X-Men franchise as cowriter of The Last Stand, and despite that ignominious start, has gone on to write and/or produce every subsequent installment in the main series, as well as a several of its spinoffs on both large and small screen. (In Kinberg’s defense, The Last Stand would have been a mess with or without his involvement). With Dark Phoenix, he steps into the role of auteur, writing, directing, and producing.

Kinberg’s enthusiasm for the X-Men is charming and intensely relatable: He’s an unabashed fan, and whether or not you agree with his interpretations of Marvel’s mutants or the comics he’s drawing from, his reverence for both comes through in both interviews and the films themselves. But the same thing that makes the X-Men so precious to fans makes the property treacherous territory for creators. Get too attached, and it’s easy to start to believe that the story is all about you.

And just as Dark Phoenix’s focus slips again and again from Jean Grey to Charles Xavier, it’s hard not to see the film’s closure and catharsis as belonging to Kinberg more than to audience or even characters. This, after all, is his Phoenix saga: a chance to rise conclusively from the ashes of Last Stand just in time to end Fox’s X-Men cinematic universe. It’s got it all: death, rebirth, second chances. Like Phoenix in the comics, Kinberg entered this chapter having already rebuilt a universe, and his personal arc has the grand scope that the film’s notably lacks.

In Kinberg’s defense, it’s possible that adapting the Dark Phoenix Saga — at least into a single feature-length film — is an impossible task. On its own, the arc fills ten issues, one of them double-size; but its magnificent heft is supported by years of intricate narrative foundation. It’s the climax and sum of everything that came before it: not just the first six years of Chris Claremont’s run, but the decade that preceded them.

The Dark Phoenix Saga hits with the weight of 18 years of growing pains; of family found and built; of fighting the world and fighting for the world. For all that it’s a discrete story, it’s also and above all a grand finale. It’s all chips on the table, the part of the 4th-of-July fireworks where the whole sky lights up and the explosions blur into a single rising roar.

It’s all chips on the table

Scale is the central dilemma facing any adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga; of length and intricacy, but also of sheer scope. In the comics, the enormous stakes of the Dark Phoenix Saga have been long since established; because in the comics, the Dark Phoenix Saga comes after the Phoenix Saga. We’ve watched Jean Grey cross a galaxy with a thought and weld shut the cracks in reality itself. We know what it means when she snaps.

But after the timeline-shaking and near-apocalyptic stakes of the preceding two films, Days of Future Past and Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix doesn’t really have room to up the ante, and so it never really manages to sell its own stakes. The story works as long as it stays personal, but that’s not a story that lends itself to cool superhero fights; and the turns Dark Phoenix takes to justify cinema-worthy clashes are contrived and contradictory.

Michael Fassbender’s Magneto is still deliciously and unrepentantly extra, bringing operatic levels of drama to every fight he swoops into, but it’s not enough to prevent him from feeling shoehorned into the story. That he leads the call for Jean’s head after she accidentally kills Mystique is even more bizarre, given that Magneto himself not only spent Days of Future Past trying much more deliberately to kill Mystique, but went on to wipe out most of the population of a large urban center in X-Men: Apocalypse — both of those after making a wholehearted attempt to start a nuclear war in First Class — only to be welcomed with open arms by the X-Men and subsequently granted his own mutant kibbutz.

Mystique herself fares even worse. Jennifer Lawrence has been done with this role for a long time, and to say that she’s phoning it in here implies a level of energy she never achieves — her performance plays more like a dropped call. And the narrative accommodations that performance demands are doubly frustrating when you find out that Lawrence only agreed to appear in the film because Kinberg was directing. To give Mystique relevance — and her death weight — Kinberg assigns her several of the most critical emotional beats imported from the comics, simultaneously robbing other characters of the additional substance those scenes would have granted, and the moments themselves of their real impact.

In a world where mutants have started wars, rewritten history, and nearly wiped out half of life on earth, a little light manslaughter hardly feels like a moral event horizon. Enter Dark Phoenix’s D’Bari. Kinberg intended the D’Bari — alien shapeshifters who claim their planet was destroyed by the Phoenix and now seek to harness it to conquer the Earth — to encompass the roles played by the Hellfire Club and Shi’ar Empire in the Dark Phoenix Saga. Instead, they feel like they were imported wholesale from a really lackluster mythos episode of X-Files; imbuing Jean’s struggle to control the Phoenix cosmic stakes less with cosmic stakes than secondhand embarrassment.

Dark Phoenix should make me angry, I think. Under its surface, you can almost make out the bones of a much better movie. It’s impossible not to flesh them out with fantasy, to compare the reality to the Dark Phoenix that could or should have been.

If Kinberg had been able to step back —

If they’d kept the focus on Jean —

If they hadn’t given Scott and Jean’s most important moment to Mystique —

If Nightcrawler hadn’t gone on a killing spree (yeah, that happened) —

If Dark Phoenix had really been able to take flight —

But the spark wasn’t there.

The longer I look at Dark Phoenix, the sadder it makes me; but I can’t help but admit that there’s something fitting about it, too. It’s that Bojack Horseman letdown; almost soothing in its banal certainty.

After all: The X-Men’s first cinematic franchise was sprawing and uneven, more ambitious than cohesive, a tangle of knotted timelines and diverging creative visions.

Maybe it’s fitting — if not satisfying — that it’s ended the same way.