Peace at last

Rating: 8/10 (21 October 2008)

The third act of this tragedy or drama is this time bringing the fight within the mutant community. The President of the USA, with his Secretary to Mutant Affairs who is not even informed, let alone associated, to the President's decisions on such a matter, has paid for the invention or devising of a special genetic vaccine to "cure" the mutants of their mutant-ness. This gives the opportunity to the bad mutants to gather some groups and even crowds and to start some terrorist action against this cure in the name that mutant-ness is not a disease. The final battle in order to destroy the research center that devised the "cure" and the scientist who is behind the discovery is spectacular with a bridge rotated in order to tie up San Francisco to Alcatraz by way of the Golden Gate Bridge. This time the battle will bring the bad mutants down once and for all. The leader of them, a certain Magneto, will be injected four doses of the "cure", the winged son of the President of the USA will save the scientist, and Wolverine, the man with metal bones and claws on his hands will get rid of the too famous Jean who had gone wild and evil after her resurrection from the water catastrophe in the previous film. Then peace and safety are finally assured and men and mutants can live happily together thereafter and have many children. Such films are definitely naive as for the meaning but they are saved by the special effects and are entertaining after all. We could of course compare this trilogy with the Aliens first three films, or with the Terminator trilogy, or the two Star Wars trilogies. We would always find somewhere the belief that the future is not so grim as it may look and that good will always get over evil. Then the differences are in the surviving or winning models. From the Genesis or Ragnarok model of Terminator, to the bi-partisan peace of this X-Men trilogy, to the never ending resurrection of the Aliens in the Aliens series, to the democratic victory of the two Star Wars trilogies, we can write volumes on the persistence and return of such ideological, supposedly religious or philosophical models, but the best novel ever written on that subject remains Stephen King's The Stand.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines