https://www.empireonline.com/movies...nix-trailer-breakdown-director-simon-kinberg/
When
X-Men: The Last Stand attempted to pull off the classic Dark Phoenix storyline in 2006, it didn’t go as well as many would have hoped – including its co-writer, Simon Kinberg. He’s remained with the mutant saga through
First Class and beyond – and now he’s set out as writer-director to give Jean Grey’s struggle with a greater power the big-screen treatment it deserves. The first trailer for
X-Men: Dark Phoenix has just arrived, teasing a cosmic new direction for the comic book series, a mysterious figure in Jessica Chastain’s still-unknown character, and – at last – the classic X-Men get-up.
Empire spoke to Kinberg to get the lowdown on the teaser – and he elaborated on plenty of intriguing tidbits.
Jean Grey: The Early Years
While
X-Men: Apocalypse introduced a grown-up Jean to the
First Class timeline, it turns out that Charles Xavier has a longer-standing relationship with her.
“There are not a lot of flashbacks in the movie, but that foundational relationship between Young Jean and a younger Charles is one of the core themes of the film,” Kinberg explains.
“The question of Jean’s relationship to her own powers becomes a big conflict for her throughout the film once she’s transformed by something that happens up in space, that has nothing to do with her childhood. It opens with a mission that takes them up into space that has consequences for Jean that ripple throughout the movie.”
The Professor’s Problem
In previous tellings of the Dark Phoenix story, Professor X has limited Jean’s capabilities after seeing the full potential of her power – and the
Dark Phoenix trailer teases at a similar strand here.
“Charles has been hiding secrets about Jean’s past from her that get revealed over the span of the movie, and only make her more unstable,” say Kinberg.
“It’s the most inopportune time for this character to become unstable emotionally, because she’s becoming unstable in a much different way after this cosmic thing that happened to her in space. In this way, Dark Phoenix is the most intimate, emotional and personal movie we’ve made, and yet also has the biggest breadth in terms of spanning beyond our planet, even beyond our galaxy. There’s a sense that the things that are happening emotionally for Jean and what’s happening cosmically inside her is making her incredibly unstable, dangerous, destructive.”
Present Day
Cut back to the main timeline, and a reasonable amount of time has elapsed since we last saw Prof X and co.
“It’s 1992, nine years after Apocalypse,” confirms Kinberg.
“The X-Men have become the X-Men that many of us know from the comics – they are heroes. They’re still viewed as different by society, but they’ve been more embraced than ever before. And when the movie starts in 1992, they are a known superhero team.”
Suburban Outfitters
In a move sure to please many long-term fans, the X-uniform in
Dark Phoenix finally brings in a classic yellow-and-blue design similar to the comic and cartoon incarnations.
“I’ve been waiting to do that from the first time I ever got a call from Avi Arad,” Kinberg enthuses.
“Avi and Kevin Feige were the chief two people that called me about an X-Men movie 15 years ago. We talked about the costumes, and what Bryan Singer had done I understood and liked, but they were very different to what I had grown up seeing in the comics. So I was excited finally as the director to have more of a say and clothe them in their classic costumes.”
The new look pinches elements from various designs seen on page and screen over the years.
“I had a board full of my favourite images from the comics, and then I worked with our costume designer, who also worked on Logan, to create something that was incredibly loyal to the comics and then also had a little bit of its own feel. There’s little nuances from the cartoons, the comics, from whatever it is that if you were a fan you grew up reading or watching.”
