Well, it’s here. What may very well be the final instalment in Fox’s X-Men franchise, before the mutants are somehow shoehorned into the MCU, is finally on the horizon. Disney’s takeover of all things cool and nostalgic is almost complete. That said, it’s a pretty slick looking teaser. The newest outing for favourite mutants will bring to the big screen for the first time (no, I’ve never heard of any X-Men: Last Stand, please get away from me) the iconic Dark Phoenix arc.

See the trailer below, and read on for a bit of This Guy’s amateurish fanboy analysis.

 

So, of course all the usual suspects are back. James McAvoy’s Professor X, is delivering another apologetic speech, alongside Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, ever calling him out on it. We also obviously have the return of Sophie Turner and her questionable accent. Though her few lines in the teaser already show a decent improvement in that department. The most exciting addition to the cast is surely Jessica Chastain, as a yet unnamed character. But she seems to be manipulating Jean/Phoenix for her own ends, which could spell out arch-villain in all likelihood.

What’s very promising here, is that it seems this incarnation of the ‘Dark Phoenix Saga’ should be much more faithful to the original comic story arc. We do see the team’s Blackbird soaring into space, so extraterrestrial involvement is certainly possible. Now, whether this will involve only the Shi’ar, or maybe even reach so far as the Kree and Skrull (perhaps acting as an early pull into the MCU) is yet to be seen.

But what we do know, is the action shown does seem a bit more restrained from the previous instalment, Apocalypse, which dialed everything up to 11 and broke the knob. If Dark Phoenix is handled well, it could be the best X-Men tale since X2.

Dark Phoenix is set for release on February 14th, 2019.