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Mutation Elation.

They gave superheroes a new reason to be super.

X-MEN is the sometimes brooding, sometimes kick-ass, mostly campy filmic incarnation of a Marvel Comics series that added a new dimension to “super” heroes. It doesn’t quite outline the first generation of Professor Xavier’s “X-Men” but it comes close enough to raise the hairs on our bushy berserker sideburns.

In Bryan Singer‘s X-MEN, the internecine struggle between mutants of two differing ideologies reaches a zenith when Magneto (who hates humans) tries to turn the populace of New York into mutants via a big special effects machine, and the X-Men (who protect and pity humans) are there to stop him in their tight black leather.

Poffesor X

Unlike regular superheroes who were from off-planet (Krypton, Thanagar, Asgard) or whose powers came from outside forces (an intergalactic lantern, a radioactive spider, gamma rays), or who were just righteous bros in fancy panties (Batman, The Punisher, Iron Man), the Uncanny X-Men’s powers came from WITHIN; “cursed” with mutant genes, they each exhibited various powers that placed them beyond the pale of homo sapiens. Creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (1963) had hit upon an umbrella reason behind “super powers” that could be applied to any powers at all – no more need for contrived “origin tales”! He can grow more arms if they’re lopped off — uh, how? He’s a MUTANT – that is all ye know and all ye need to know. And this rationalization became so popular that it embedded itself in comicdom’s consciousness. It needs no explanation in mainstream media. My bushy sideburns leap for joy.

Within this new rubric, an irony – being mutants, these heroes were reviled by “normal” humans, even as they protected those humans from threats, the main threats coming from other mutants. An undercurrent of bigotry infuses every X-Men episode, inadvertently mirroring societal ignorance.

And director/co-writer Bryan Singer has reverently brought all these facets to life in X-MEN. It helps to have an almost perfect cast.

Sir Patrick Stewart, eternal Shakespearean, born leader, calm as stones, is telepathic Professor Xavier (aka Professor X); his brains are his brawn; from his school for mutants, some rise to become X-Men, defenders of justice, humanity, and low gas prices for the JP-7 fuel in their guzzling X-Jet. From his snazzy wheelchair, he Makes It So.

 

Famke Janssen, square-jawed Euro supermodel, is Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl in the original 1960’s comics); another telepath, in this movie still honing her abilities, which include hotness in tight spandex and not being able to wipe Toad’s jism off her face.

Halle Berry, salubrious milk chocolate, is weathergirl Storm; sunny with a chance of bad dialogue.

James Marsden, Teen Model mannequin, is laser-eyed Cyclops; in the comics, the tactician leader of the X-team, here, a vanilla love interest for Jean, and occasional eye-juice ejaculator. Oh, he does get to give some orders, but only after Wolverine says it’s okay.

Shawn Ashmore is Bobby Drake (aka Iceman, here an Ice BOY), trying to woo his chick Rogue without actually touching her. As if mutated virgins don’t have it hard enough…

Young Anna Paquin is baby-faced Rogue (what the–?! I know, I know, fanboys: Rogue doesn’t officially enter X-Man canon until 20 years after their inception, but here she is the brunt of the plot). Her mutant power sucks… the life force out of others. She cannot touch anyone without incapacitating them as their powers flow into her. Which gives the term “unsafe sex” actual meaning for the first time in its revenue-coined history. Rogue is immediately drawn to Wolverine’s musk, and uses her life-leaching-touch thingy as an excuse not to tongue Bobby Drake.

“Not so fast, Bub. You didn’t read the “claws” about pissing me off!”

And then there is Wolverine. Australian beefcake Hugh Jackman is the mysterious Logan (sporting “Wolverine” dog tags) with adamantium skeleton and triple-claw swagger. The X-MEN movie is about Wolverine. Really. No matter the movie title and the fact that this jampacked movie brings so many comicbook heroes to life, a conscious dramatic decision was made to make this feral scrapper with the shrouded Special Forces history the focus of this X-MEN movie.

Consider: Wolverine/Logan is given all the nuances of character that only lead roles boast, while all the other heroes are merely shallow tropes. It is his throughline that is resolved (trying to discover his past); it is his power struggle with the purported “leader” Cyclops (for primacy and the girl); it is his heroic action that saves the day; he is the only character with a redemption arc. It is Wolverine whose eyes we are seeing through as he wakes in a strange environment (the X mansion), it is he who speaks for the skeptic in all of us when Xavier introduces the X-Men with their code names “Storm” and “Cyclops” (Logan: “What do they call you? Wheels”?); he and Magneto are the only characters with “introduction scenes”; and let’s face it – though surrounded by models, he’s the best lookin’ mutant for miles.

We meet Wolverine doin’ what he does best: scrappin.’ We don’t so much meet him as drink him in: shirtless, boozing, chomping a cigar as he takes down a contender in a filthy pub cage match. And the most amazing part: his hair! How did they smoosh it into that pointy-v we know and love from his brutal graphic novel adventures? When he snikt’s his adamantium claws out, it is in the best gunslinger tradition, holding off two men on either side of him. Then he saunters out of the bar with his v-shaped mullet all sassy. Except for his over-6-foot frame, Hugh Jackman is EXACTLY how we envision Wolverine. Not since Christopher Reeve as SUPERMAN has there been casting so awe-inspiring, so pitch perfect, so like-a-glove. An adamantium-clawed glove.

Film actually goes against canon in making Logan so touching. When Rogue is trying to run away, he consoles her: “Give these geeks one more shot. The Professor understands people like us.” Which only makes her untouchables ache for him even more.

There is no Angel and no Beast (two of the original X-Men), but there is — Magneto.

 

Sir Ian McKellen, also Shakespearean giant, also Japanese garden calm, is iron monger Magneto/Erik Lensherr. Now we know the comicbook Magneto is a muscly maroon mantoy, but even the visual miscasting of doddering Sir Ian cannot impede him taking the metal-bending role to the delicious limits of Dr. Zachary Smith and making it his very own, at one point tut-tutting Wolverine, lamenting, “Oh, dear boy…”

Loquacious, regal, crafty, the only mutant to use his abilities to their fullest tactical extent, Magneto is the morally ambiguous “bad guy” who mistrusts humans, especially Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) who wages congressional war on mutants. Magneto’s plan is not so much evil as vengeful: to mutate every human in New York to make them realize there is nothing to fear from mutation. Through him, we feel the analogies to Nazi Germany and modern-day Amerikan Republicans: “Women and children, whole families destroyed simply because they were born different from those in power.”

Magneto may be old, but he’s an Old Dog; what can we make of his right-hand man being a right-hand svelte blue nude chick? Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, wet dream, working blue, is shapeshifter Mystique. What better use for your right hand?

Rounding out the evil cabal are the appropriately named Tyler Mane as liony Sabretooth and Seth Green look-alike Ray Park as the tongue-twisting Toad (he was Darth Maul in PHANTOM MENACE)

The opening scenes of X-MEN are powerful, almost sinister, deadly serious and set a tone for the movie that the movie itself cannot match. A YouTube comment says it all: “If the whole movie was like this, the movie would have been epic.”

In these opening scenes, we see a young Erik Lensherr in a concentration camp discovering his latent powers over metal. And we meet shirtless Wolverine like Eastwood with claws. Then it gets progressively campy. Magneto turns Senator Kelly into a water puddle (an aqua-man, if you will – or if DC Comics will let us); the X-Men mill aimlessly through Act Two, where we discover most of them can’t act too. There is a magnificent display of Dr. Smith’s telekinetic powers over police cars and bullets, and the final ill-contrived climactic scenes illustrate how limited the writers’ imaginations are, as all these beings with various super powers stand around and get their butts kicked.

The final “showdown” is laughable, as the X-Men debate how to get fifty feet up the Statue of Liberty’s arm to rescue Rogue: “Storm, can you fly me up there?” “I don’t have that kind of control!” “Don’t take the shot – you might hit her!” “Jean, can you steady him?!” “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Eventually Cyclops takes charge and gives orders on how to do it. And Wolverine agrees, so they do.

END

Who watches the Watchmen?… and who watches the Watch-GIRL?
That should really tell you something about yourself…

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

And the fanboys whine like bitches. The “unfilmable” graphic novel, WATCHMEN – has been filmed! Cry the beloved comicbook and let slip the dogs of nihilism.

WATCHMEN is epic and sexy and bloody; sensual and visceral and brutal; more than a comicbook, more than a messianic cry of madness; flamboyant costumed heroes, a plot that shakes the world, and Dr. Manhattan in full frontal ectoplasm.

WATCHMEN is a triumph! …Unless you’re a fanboy.

the rorschach test:
one fan’s classic is another fan’s bubastis.

Who Watches the Cucumber?

And the writer of the graphic novel, Alan Moore (V FOR VENDETTA, 2005) has once again spat the dummy and insisted his name be removed from the WATCHMEN movie, leaving only mediocre artist, Dave Gibbons, credited as “co-creator.” There’s perfectionist – and there’s bitchboy. Alan Moore is the latter.

Directed by Zack Snyder like the graphic novel panels are emblazoned on the insides of his eyelids, WATCHMEN the movie – like VENDETTA – is ardently true to the spirit of the source material and reverently recreates the world of an alternate 1985, where Nixon has been in office continually since the Viet Nam victory (!), where costumed heroes are part of the crimefighting landscape, where colors scream and morals bend and we hit the ground running in thigh-high boots that are not removed for mile-high sex.

The opening montage, showing how the world assimilated these heroes into its culture, is crafted with such care and creativity (with source music from Dylan to Hendrix), I shed a tear at watching the pages of Watchmen come alive. And this was only the opening!

under the hood:
battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster…

WATCHMEN (written by mad prophet bitchboy Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, published in 1986 by DC Comics as a limited 12-issue series) is a “celebrated graphic novel” because the fantasy world it presents train-wrecks into our reality so closely it hurts our Gotham nerve.

BATMAN BEGINS (2005) portended this trend of superhero films being no longer the provenance of teens vicariously living out fantasies with towels tied around necks; THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) and HANCOCK (2008) continued this journey; now WATCHMEN takes it beyond the Bubastis, raising the bar into dark adulthood, where every sin is a necessity, every moral an ambiguity.

None of the heroes have supernatural powers; except for the atomic anomaly, Dr. Manhattan (victim of an “intrinsic field chamber” accident and able to manipulate molecules at will, and perceive future time streams), they are all versions of Batman and Captain America, well-trained and well-educated athletes with a penchant for vigilantism.

And vigilantism – as in this real world – is only tolerated so long. Nixon outlaws “masks” (as costumed heroes come to be called) – after they help him win Viet Nam, mind you! – and we are thrust into this roaring, breathing work of art during the second generation of masks after they are disbanded.

When one of the Watchmen, the abrasive, cynical Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, love-child of Robert Downey Jnr. and Javier Bardem) is killed mysteriously, the last Watchman on active duty, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), goes on a solitary manhunt to find the killer.

He warns fellow ex-Watchman, Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), “An attack on one is an attack on all of us!”

Rorschach is the nihilistic conscience of WATCHMEN, a sociopath with principles, wearing a mask that shifts its Rorschach ink-blot patterns continually. He considers this shifting palette his “true face” – mirroring the ineffable, morally relativistic face of the New York he holds no love for… “The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’… and I’ll whisper ‘No.'”

As each Watchman entered the equation, I recognized them immediately – the last such perfect casting being X-MEN (2000). There was, of course, Rorschach’s wondrous ever-changing mask; the worrisome dweeb with the weak Chevy Chase lips had to be Dan Dreiber aka Nite Owl II (the faux-Batman guy); the bumblebee hooker with the Pert hair and bad bangs must be Laurie aka Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman); the Bowie-thin Brit is Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and lemme take a guess that the shimmering blue, hung, naked buff is Jon Osterman aka Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).

And my own chiseled six-pack hardened with delight when I saw Ozymandias’s exotic, mutated lynx, Bubastis!

WATCHMEN is a wet dream waterfall.

The key to WATCHMEN, the grand concept that elevates it above the jungle of super-beings who bust bank-robbers and petty thieves (which are merely the outlying strands of a much larger sociological problem) is Ozymandias saying, “I fought only the symptoms, leaving the disease unchecked.”

Now, as Nixon and the Soviets edge toward nuclear war, Ozymandias, “the world’s smartest man” with unlimited resources, takes it upon himself to attack the disease. To save humankind from itself.

Hero? Villain? Spandex-wearing looney? When Spock said “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” he was regarded as noble because he was sacrificing himself. Ozymandias plots to destroy life as part of a bigger plot to save life. The Comedian’s death was a small cog in this world-shaking coup. And the moral dilemma falls to the other Watchmen to either stop him, or stop the truth being told.

Though Dr. Manhattan is acclaimed as, “God exists – and he’s American,” Ozymandias’s plan to kill millions to save billions is nothing short of godlike. (“…lest ye become a monster.”) Superman saving kittens just wouldn’t get it.

Thus the graphic novel’s slogan: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who is going to guard the guards themselves?), or simply, Who watches the Watchmen?

gazing into the abyss:
one man’s artist is another man’s autist.

As with any great movie loaded with cerebral thematic grist, it is impossible to convey the innumerable hooks and references, analogies and cultural touchstones contained within its hurricane walls.

Snyder and screenwriters, David Hayter and Alex Tse, have retained a layered complexity, yet removed superfluous characters and events (such as Captain Metropolis, and a non sequitur pirate story within the Watchmen story, and even (gulp!) changed the ending – okay, stop that puling, dorknozzles!) and recreated every imperative scene as meticulously as possible.

“Look on my – ahem – works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Like his ultra-violent battle hymn, 300, Snyder’s framing is breathtaking: Rorschach atop a roof as lightning silhouettes him, Dr. Manhattan’s clockwork bachelor pad on Mars, a cityscape with the Twin Towers in the distance… even the grimy understreets, the balletic breaking of bones, the mobs and the mayhem, all gloriously swank. Never has the ugliness of mankind looked so alluring – Snyder has a knack for conveying emotional darkness as visual beauty.

This movie has envisioned Watchmen better than the graphic novel and I’ll tell you wh– (Oh. Here comes Alan Moore and his gang of bitchboys to break my little cucumber legs. Marnoo! Bar the doors and windows, would you please. Onward…) –and I’ll tell you why:

Two elements go into making a graphic novel (as if real comics fans don’t know). Story. And artwork.

I give Moore all the credit he doesn’t want to deserve (hell, I’d be happy if someone would just buy my stories, let alone pay such rapturous tribute, man!) – but though his story is epic on toast, Dave Gibbons’s artwork is like watching paint dry – literally.

Gibbons is a great anatomist (he even depicts Dr. Manhattan as Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man in issue #4), but lacks superhero flair. His neatly-blocked nine-panel pages in the Watchmen comics make for some creative transitions and interesting gimmicks (such as the “Fearful Symmetry” issue #5, where the whole book is almost a mirror image of itself), but are flat, static and would go far to inspire accountants. In this medium, Artwork is King. They’re GRAPHIC novels fer chrissakes!

Bad artwork ruins a good story. Gibbons has no action lines.

Moore would pen the Batman benchmark, The Killing Joke in 1988, with Brian Bolland on poison inks. Now that was Art. So too, the driveway-gravel grit of Frank Miller, the sexual fluidity of Jim Aparo’s 1970’s Batman, the slamdown of Marvelites, John and Sal Buscema; pull up any number of X-MEN artists – you’ll be inspired to tie a towel around your neck quicksmart. Not with Gibbons. The WATCHMEN movie endows The Watchmen with skills, training and verve, whereas Gibbons’s drab panels don’t display any reason for them to be wearing such tight trousers.

kindle a light:
the darkness of mere being.

Each WATCHMEN character is more of an emotional pizza than is usual with costumed types because this series was written as a limited run – they did not have to sustain arena love for decades. Each of them is us.

If we had the impunity to be unchained, unholy, what would we do with that power?

The Comedian “saw society’s true face – chose to be a parody of it, a joke…”

Rorschach, breaking people’s fingers all over the place, says of himself, “This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.” No kidding, with a long trail of fingers to prove it… (The filmmakers admirably got Rorschach’s ‘hurm’ sound down – like the X-MEN filmmakers prided themselves on getting Wolverine’s ‘snikt!’ sound.)

Playing Blind Man’s Buff with Rorschach is harder than you think…

I admit on the fanboyjury stand that Dr. Manhattan’s non-personality was ruined by the movie writers. This amoral, unfeeling wraith would slip further psychologically from humanity with each blue day, but in this movie he went from the cutting, “Existence of life is highly overrated” to a sudden Chick Flick epiphany, “Life itself is the miracle.” Someone call Julia Roberts.

Nite Owl II, a technophile who resembles Batman in more ways than one, only comes alive through his alter-ego. He can only get it on with Silk Spectre (in his Owl Ship floating in the clouds, no less) after they’ve had a costumed adventure together. Just like a woman, first thing Silk Spectre does when she moves in with Nite Owl is start messing with his vehicles.

Ozymandias, whose inspiration is Alexander the Great, wants “conquest not of men, but of the evils that beset them.” When you slide this slippery slope, the question becomes Dirty Harry’s in MAGNUM FORCE, “When police start becoming their own executioners, where’s it gonna end?… Pretty soon you start executing people for jaywalking, executing people for traffic violations, then you execute your neighbor because his dog pisses on your lawn.”

Let’s face it, Vigilantism is as malformed and unjust as The Law that it thumbs its nose at. Two sides of the same confused coin – how to embrace your freedom without being stultified or harmed by other idiots enjoying theirs. We all have built in radar for “right” and “wrong” – and we are all prone to what I’ve always called “circumstantial morality” so a cloudy mix of vigilantism and written laws should prevail.

But who decides what I think is right is wrong? “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25.)

Who watches the Watchmen?

from crimebusters to watchmen:
The times they are a-changing.

Interestingly, Watchmen is not the group’s official name. In the graphic novel, they’re called by the unofficial cheesy name of The Crimebusters. Watchmen is never mentioned. In the movie, they contemplate banding together as “Watchmen” but are ridiculed immediately and never get around to registering the dba. (Or whatever superhero groups like The Avengers and The Justice League did to protect their precious band names. Although, who’d be dumb enough to don underpants-outside-spandex and plagiarize a name that could get them hung by their nipples from the Golden Gate bridge with the ineffectual police powerless against the person who hung them there?) So there’s no such thing as a Watchman, Victoria…

Maybe that’s why the fanboys are bamboozled… they need the obvious frame-to-frame intrinsic field metamorphosis… anything less… is simply blood from the shoulder of Pallas…

What’s that incessant banging on my door? Ah yes, I’ve got some fanbitches to deal with. Marnoo! Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding; let me just slip my Rorschach mask on…. and I’ll meet you on the far side of crazy…

END

Hot women in faux-leather with bottled ‘do’s, piloting aircraft – funding problems just disappear.

X-traordinary.

In X2: X-MEN UNITED, the two factions of warring mutants we met in X-MEN (2000) unite against a common enemy: homo sapiens. And all genetic babbling breaks loose…

Pofferine

The “good” mutants (the ones tagged with the X-Men epithet) are Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine, Iceman and Rogue (joined by additional cast, Nightcrawler and Colossus); the “bad” mutants (actually, “misunderstood” mutants) are Magneto (Ian McKellen), Mystique, Pyro and Lady Deathstrike.

The opening scene with the teleporting Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) infiltrating the White House is filled with badass promise (his “bamf” teleporting sound effect is especially bamfy!), and X2 delivers in action and production values, and almost-perfect casting, but is ultimately felled by its PG-13 rating and desperate need to have as many mutants as possible suck all the oxygen out of the screentime.

(Unfortunate that X1 and X2 are now associated with these mutant movies, instead of their original references: Bell’s X1 aircraft, piloted by Chuck Yeager, the first documented to break the sound barrier in 1947. Never forget that, young-uns! Successive X-numbers denoted successive prototypes.)

Brian Cox is William Stryker, a military madman who gets the president’s okay to wipe out mutants in society. There is a subplot regarding his role in “creating” Wolverine, which is never resolved – unless you count Wolverine neck-chaining him to a helicopter while a tsunami bears down on him “resolved.”

Though much of the casting fits our preconceptions absolutely, we weep at what they’ve done to Cyclops (James Marsden), whose role is disconcertingly minimal, as it was in X-MEN. Comicbook Cyclops/Scott Summers was always the undisputed Leader of the group, exuding a patriarchal air amongst the very first x-youngsters to the present. Movie Cyclops exudes all the presence of a day-player, or some guy in a bar in Miami in an episode of GIRLS GONE WILD.

Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is also abused somewhat. Firstly – that hair – not working, honey! Gone are comicbook Jean’s cascading, volcanic-red, lava-locks (too 80s for this modern film? – but no worse than the Animé cartoon hairstyle she now sports); will it have to come down to an episode of VH1’s 50 AWESOMELY BADDER HAIRDOS to acknowledge this soccer mom abomination? And before we know it, Jean is gone. In a dramatic high-point, sexily holding back a wall of water while simultaneously powering up the X-Jet, she is sacrificed; a device which had to occur for Jean’s overwhelming Phoenix force to achieve illimitable psionic freedom. (Somebody stop me sliding into geekery!…) In essence, in just two movies her character traverses an arc which took decades of comics to develop.

Movies unfortunately do not have the luxury of comicbook shelf-life; plots that were developed over thousands of inter-connected comics must necessarily be composited into a few films, before the franchise goes to pot with new directors, unfamiliar and unlikeable cast and widened demographic mundanity. i.e. it always ends up G-rated, with scenes of soldiers crawling out of exploded military vehicles to prove that they are still alive.

The film unflinchingly supplies each major character with an interesting arc; an almost insurmountable undertaking, considering the plethora of varied roles and interlocking story lines. Director/co-writer Bryan Singer and writers (Zak Penn, David Hayter, Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris) have done an incredible job, full tilt boogie – even day-player Cyclops gets his moment to kick butt and take names – but is ultimately taken down by a chick – girly-man style! And unfortunately, we only get one brief moment to see Colossus go full steel.

Before I go on, I must clarify: this is an excellent movie, well-filmed, well-written, well-acted – and hey! Wolverine! (Hugh Jackman) – ’nuff said! But it is not without its illogicities.

An example: Rogue (Anna Paquin) is sucked out of the disabled X-Jet and Nightcrawler bamfs out and retrieves her, bringing her back onboard safely – excellently illustrating his power’s utility – BUT – well, he’s back in the out-of-control X-Jet! Why not bamf to the ground instead, Isaac Newton? Matter of fact, why not individually bamf everyone down to the ground? This is the quandary that writers of superhero films must face: all these beings put together make up a formidable force and if they logically reasoned through any predicament, nothing could ultimately harm them.

When Wolverine barks, “Don’t we have any weapons in this heap?”, the full portent of his question hits us when Storm’s (Halle Berry) eyes go white, readying to bring the thunder – they’re ALL Lethal Weapons. Yet here is another mis-use of power from that same scene: Couldn’t Storm (who has just conjured more twisters than there were in the movie TWISTER) conjure a mighty updraft to float the X-Jet safely to earth?; couldn’t Jean (who has just utilized her telekinesis to explode a missile) also float the jet down safely?; couldn’t Iceman (still Ice-BOY here, Shawn Ashmore) create a slide of ice?; the potential list of ‘saves’ goes on – yet, it’s Airport ’75 up in that converted Blackbird and Our Man Charlton ain’t nowhere in sight. Instances like these really make you wonder whether you ARE on the Right Side, rooting for these insensate clowns, when the ostensible Bad Guy – grandiloquent Magneto – is the only one with any brains, balls or mutant clout to actually save the jet.

The DVD commentaries infuriate with their naivete: cast and crew misuse and completely misunderstand the word “evolution,” continually saying “evolve” where they should say simply “develop,” illustrating an utter ignorance of this world-shaping concept. Evolution is a process by which mutated genes, if they enable an organism to better adapt to its environment, are “selected” and passed on. Less-adaptable organisms are leached out of the pathway of Life vis a vis “natural selection.” Not being an essay on Evolution per se, this skeletal description will have to suffice to illustrate the ingenuousness of terms like “character evolution.”

The DVD also bludgeons viewers with the unsubtle message of tolerance. As if the raison d’etre of this movie is to promote tolerance and not to make sinful amounts of exploitative cash. By exploiting a minority existing in fantasy, they audaciously attach this analogy to world problems, and then pretend they care. The fact that this movie issues from one of the most insular, in-tolerant places on earth – Hollywood – makes that “message” all the more hypocritical and straight-up shameless prevarication.

The X-Men’s tolerance theme has nothing to do with why this film was made – the current rash of superhero movies is not being voraciously consumed faster than they can be made because audiences wish to imbue themselves with spiritual elevation; no, superhero-mania is the latest fad in a long line of film fads – remember all those war movies after WWII?; all the westerns of the forties through sixties; the cop films of the seventies; slasher films of the eighties; the genres of “baseball,” “family,” “romantic comedies,” et al. Superhero films now join the carousel of bankable corporate products – because the generation who grew up enamored with comics is now at an age where they are making the major business decisions in the world. So please – spare us the faux-philanthropy and get on with entertaining us for our cash.

More Wolverine and Colossus please!

END