So many models and yet some freshness

Rating: 9/10 (24 September 2008)

The special effects are good. The characters are simple and varied enough to make us like that universe of monstrous mutants that look just like us but can turn into whatever they want. Welcome to Carrie, Christine, Firestarter, the Tommyknockers and many other Stephen King paranormal beings and situations. Of course, this film adds to that berserk universe a good old American wrapping but with a twist. The statue of liberty standing on its nice little island as the symbol of what it is called after and yet looking like a stiletto stabbing the sky and jutting out of a flat no man's seascape. The twist is in the fact that it is this very statue that is going to be the epicenter of the destruction of all the heads of states assembled at the United Nations for the general assembly of this world's forum. This American wrapping is the standard bigot position of a senator against mutants, against people who are different, who rejects them and kills them as fast as possible. And the twist is that this senator is kidnapped by the bad mutants, transmuted himself by them and then discarded to die in any odd place away from them. And before dying he is saved by the good mutants and he even comes to like them. Finally the main twist is that there are good mutants and in this film, temporarily, they win and save humanity from a cataclysm that would have destroyed both humanity and mutant-dom. Then the rest is not even sentimental episodes. It is pure action and mission and some fights, and a lot of visual special effects. That makes a nice entertaining film though on no matrix whatsoever except maybe the very very distant faraway relation to a certain Quasimodo in Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo: the ugly monster is the savior of the beautiful gypsy girl all the normal Parisians want to victimize and kill.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines