"X-Men" is arguably heavy on mutants they have a way of coming onstage, doing their tricks and disappearing. No matter Xavier, who can read minds, leads his good mutants in a battle to foil Magneto, and that's the plot, or most of it. (The world leaders are conveniently meeting on an island near Ellis Island, so the Statue of Liberty can be a prop.) How a machine could create a desired mutation within a generation is not much explored by the movie, which also eludes the question of why you would want to invest your enemies with your powers. Magneto wants to counter by using a device which can convert world leaders to mutants. Bruce Davison plays the McCarthy-like senator who waves a list of "known mutants" during a congressional hearing and wants them all registered-no doubt for dire purposes. Xavier, who runs a school for mutants in Westchester County, where it doubtless seems no stranger than the other private schools, hopes these new powers can be used for good. Magneto, having seen the Holocaust, has a deep pessimism about human nature.
They aren't enemies so much as ideological opposites. Magneto's opponent in "X-Men" is Xavier ( Patrick Stewart), another mutant of the same generation. Some of the X-Men develop paranormal powers which cannot be accounted for by the strictly physical mutations which form the basis of Darwinian theory I get restless when real science is evoked in the name of pseudoscience, but, hey, that's just me. The narrator informs us that "evolution takes thousands and thousands of years," which is putting it mildly, and that we live in an age of great evolutionary leaps forward. One could argue that the Holocaust is not appropriate subject matter for an action movie based on a comic book, but having talked to some "X-Men" fans I believe that in their minds the medium is as deep and portentous as, say, " Sophie's Choice." The Holocaust scene introduces Magneto ( Ian McKellen) as a child his mental powers twist iron gates out of shape. Graphic novels (as they sometimes deserve to be called) take themselves as seriously as the ones without pictures, and you can tell that here when the opening scene shows Jews being forced into death camps in Poland in 1944.
It's restrained and introspective for a superhero epic, and fans of the comic books may like that. "X-Men" is at least not a manic editing frenzy for atrophied attention spans. The events that end the movie are sort of anticlimactic, and the special effects, while energetic, are not as persuasive as they might be (at one point an airplane clearly looks like a model, bouncing as it lands on water). Since the Marvel Comics empire hopes "X-Men" is the first entry in a franchise, it's understandable that the setups would play an important role in the first film.
0 kommentar(er)
