Civil Disobedience- When siding with the 'bad' guys seems the right thing to do

Rating: 8/10 (28 May 2006)

20th Century Fox and director Brett Ratner had the chance to end this film with a glorious special effects sequence that would have earned it the title of classic -- Phoenix (Dutch actress Famke Janssen) could have blown Wolverine away and been reborn. Ratner and Fox had the potential to do truly anything imaginable with the screen, an opportunity for the most spectacular special effects shot in screen history. Yet they blew it by letting the good guys - the president, the jerk who invented the mutant cure, the U.S. army, and the literate, patriotic mutants led by a domesticated wolverine - win.
In 'Fahrenheit 451', which Ray Bradbury wrote in the 1950s symbol of the Phoenix is used as a metaphor to describe the nuclear holocaust which ends the world but leaves the good guys alive. The good guys ended up being those the world Bradbury depicted were considered subversive mutants - those who still deeply cared about reading and literature.
In the Harry Potter series the Phoenix has played a role as a devoted pet, like Harry's Owl Hedwig, rescuing him in the nick of time in 'The Chamber of Secrets' and going through a very commonplace, non-earth shattering rebirth through flames.
In "Can Poetry Matter?" in 1991, Dana Gioia wrote "Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes."
The image of the Phoenix is sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes utterly commonplace; and because it invokes apocalypse, X-Men asks us to read its characters and plot as allegory. X-Men is trapped by its inability to break out of the conservative ending, which denies us the pleasure to witness the awesome on-screen spectacle of Phoneix being reborn.
The scene at the end in which Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) "saves" Phoenix and saves "civilization" -- may well be one of the most talked about disappointments in film history, and worth seeing the movie because of how deeply it disappoints. It shows us through it's beautiful denied potential that a film company with more imagination (and less Right-leaning corporate tendencies) than FOX could have changed motion pictures in a minute with one of the most talked about endings in film history. Instead, the X-Men put on their hometeam uniforms and save America. And I'll bet not too many people will see the film twice.
Slow though it seems at times with it's long Shakespearean opening sequences with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), there is a lot to say about this movie. The film is ripe with potential for subversive readings. Set in the "not too distant future" X-Men has as much to say about 2006 as it does about the world it imagines and the time during which it was originally published as a comic boox series.
Superman is headed our way soon as well. The great white hero is back to rescue society. Lex Luthor definitely should not win, he's just too much of a fascist. But when Magneto spares civilian bystanders on the Golden Gate Bridge while preparing to attack Alcatraz, the audience realizes that his cause is just. That's the most subversivie moment in the movie, because then we're really on his side and want the army with it's plan to force the amazingly evolved mutants to become mere humans again. And when the audience is ready to laugh at the president on screen it limits his real power in Washington as well.
In the film pir wondering about her true power and potential is what really sets us up for wanting to see Phoenix let her power take hold. We want to know just how amazing she'll be and if she can ignite and leave us good guys -- us liberal mutants and all the people protesting the government's fascist policies -- alive somehow.
Instead, we're denied that by the film. Maybe if Hollywood went ahead and kept the white hero from saving "us" from apocalypse we'd get to see cooler movies. Movies that imagine what the world has the potential to become rather than those which depict what the patriarchy is afraid of.