X3

[jack]

I saw X-men 3 again. It's still well done (though still silly in all the ways people said it was before).

* It definitely benefits from a big screen
* Magneto and the tattoo, magneto and the bridge, Hank "There comes a time when any man... oh, you get the idea", are all my favourite moments.
* It's still stupid to build a magneto-proof prison out of metal. What's next, out of money or high explosives?
* I notice Magneto, despite being willing to kill all humans in the world last film, still attacks on foot rather than, eg. dropping a nickel-iron asteroid on alcatrz island
* Alternatively, I notice Storm, Magneto, Wolverine, Charles, Pyro, etc could nearly run the economy of a small country. What would it be worth to never have any storms devastate any coast for ever, or free space travel, or free heat, or free meat? Oil barons get legal breaks, how about mutants? :)

ETA: Did Magneto's powers start coming back for any particular reason? Is he just that cool? Do class 4 mutants have greater powers in other ways? Or did they just not have enough long term testing for the cure and it's going to wear off for *everyone*. That would have been handy to know before.

ETA: The academy is going to be fun with Jimmy in some classes, it'll keep some people on their toes.

Comments

[simont]

To be fair, this time building the prison out of plastic wouldn't have helped anyway: Magneto wasn't confined in it, he was free on the outside, and hence would have been conveniently able to pull together large quantities of metal to throw at it. The way in which they Magneto-proofed it was the only way they could: by arranging that he couldn't find it. Which would have worked fine if it hadn't been for Callisto, so really the prison failed to be Callisto-proof.

Small country: yeah, but the problem is the same as the problem with any other group of people who might stop causing you grief if you let them have a country of their own and left them to it. There aren't any spare countries!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's true. I think I was too absorbed in the plastic thing to take notice of their actual plan, which was reasonable. Being plastic would have been a bit better, it would have needed more finesse to knock out the convoy without killing the people inside.

I can't decide if there was any reasonable solution. Zelazny said something like this in Lord of Light, that when everyone has these great, specific, mysterious powers, almost any single defence can be beaten by *someone*, you need a lot of different things to check everyone at once.

For that matter, while using the cure non-voluntarily is obviously morally wrong, so is keeping someone chained up completely stationary for the rest of their life with no toilet facilities. Come to think of it, I got the impression that was supposed to be a mobile prison, but was it just transport? Not that wherever it was going might not be better or worse for the same reasons.

[simont]

Zelazny said something like this in Lord of Light, that when everyone has these great, specific, mysterious powers, almost any single defence can be beaten by *someone*, you need a lot of different things to check everyone at once.

The real problem with mutants, I think, is not just that they all have different and inconvenient powers, but that you don't even know what everyone's powers are. Their prison seemed secure against everyone they knew about, but if they'd known about Callisto, they'd have designed it differently again. (Not that I have any idea how, right at this moment; it's possible that the only solution to Callisto for these purposes might have been a sniper rifle. But anyway.)

I think it was explicitly stated to be a mobile prison at some point, although I haven't seen it recently enough myself to be absolutely sure.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

that you don't even know what everyone's powers are

Oh yes, totally. Xavier or Magneto or Mystique or Kitty or Nightcrawler could obviate all sorts of things you might have thought were secure. It's like designing a very redundant system, it has to keep working, even if the worst possible things go wrong in several places.

Small country

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I didn't mean so much that they should all go off and live by themselves -- that would make the other countries even more paranoid. But that if the government started seeing them as useful, maybe they could reach some accommodation.

Of course, the government might immediately decide to start enslaving them, rather than being bribed by them, it's hard to tell.

And they do have a legitimate fear, I don't know what is a sane strategy if you have mutant terrorists running around. Magneto you might be able to deal with, but some are just going to be insane/evil and cause much havoc, and you have to rely on the x-men to enforce the law.

[simont]

And they do have a legitimate fear, I don't know what is a sane strategy if you have mutant terrorists running around. Magneto you might be able to deal with, but some are just going to be insane/evil and cause much havoc, and you have to rely on the x-men to enforce the law.

I think I'd have to say, in that situation, that your strategy should be one of conciliation and cooperation. If you don't treat mutants like shit, then relatively few of them will turn terrorist in the first place; and if you can foster an atmosphere in which most of them are well disposed towards normals, then the X-men will have plenty of recruits and allies when it comes to hunting down the few remaining renegades.

It's tactically right and it's morally right. The only thing that stops people doing it is the stubbornness that comes from a perceived threat: you don't want to be nice to people who have you at their mercy, even if they deserve it anyway, because then it feels as if they wrested that niceness from you at gunpoint even if they really didn't, and you worry that it'll encourage other people to arrange to have you at their mercy for less good reasons later on. (This is particularly bad if you're considering starting to be nice to people in response to hostile acts which have already taken place, rather than merely countering the possibility of future hostilities.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

you don't treat mutants like shit, then relatively few of them will turn terrorist in the first place

Oh yes, totally. There's so many reasons not to act like bigoted totalitarian assholes it's hard to enumerate them all :)

Though as you say, once you start down that road, it's hard to change. In fact, they may have started when a powerful minority was suggesting registering mutants, which is a reasonable idea in itself, but magneto correctly saw it was going somewhere bad fast.

But most mutantations don't make that much difference. A generous policy at the outset would hopefully have worked.

[simont]

"Class 4 mutants": now you mention it, I think the sudden introduction of an absolute scale for gauging mutants' power was one thing I particularly disliked about X3. It's fine for the Psi Corps, because everyone in the Psi Corps has qualitatively the same special ability, so it's meaningful to judge whose talent is stronger than who else's. But when applied to people as different from each other as mutants, what the hell does it mean? Either it counts some measure of raw energy throughput, or it's an overall judgment of the tactical worth of the mutant's ability when set against other mutants or normals (as, for example, the concept of piece value in chess). In the former case case it's pretty much meaningless for any practical purpose, because one mutant might manage a tactically overwhelming effect by applying a few kW in exactly the right place while another blasts GW all over the shop uselessly; in the latter case, it's rather implausible that Callisto had the innate ability to sense it magically. So in both cases it seems like a pointless thing to bother paying attention to. Also it feels like a bolted-on afterthought due to never being mentioned in the previous two films, and furthermore those two annoyances combine badly (it wouldn't have been so bad if they'd bolted on an afterthought that was genuinely useful to the plot, but to have all the jarring of a bolt-on hack for no useful benefit is just stupid).

Cure wearing off: I think I assumed it was going to gradually wear off for everyone, and that either Magneto was simply the first to notice, or he was just the person who they decided to show us noticing because it was plot-relevant.

I hadn't thought of it before now, but there's a reasonably sensible rationale for it wearing off: if you extract blood from Jimmy, then it still contains his own cells, which one might postulate to be the source of the Leech effect. So you're filling the mutant with matter that temporarily suppresses their abilities. But, of course, those blood cells will gradually go out of circulation and be broken down by the body, and eventually the waste products will be excreted – so you naturally expect that at some point no trace of Leech will remain in the mutant's body, and then their powers return.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

> Class 4 mutants

Yes, exactly! What you said. I think I bitched about it the first time as well but not as thoroughly.

I think it's like hit dice or challenge rating in roleplaying systems (notably DnD). It's *both* a measure of innate grwoth and of tactical power in small-scale combat. It glosses over the assumption that those are in any way comparable whatsoever.

> to have the jarring of a bolt-on hack for no useful benefit is just stupid

Yes, aagh! I assume it's a reference to the comics in which it was equally stupid but more traditional. But it seems entirely gratuitous. Or were they paving the way for a computer game or something?

The military, or the brotherhood, might even do something like that. But it seems completely random dropped into casual conversation. Maybe it was to illustrate C's power, but she could equally well have said "much stronger" or even "twice as strong" and conveyed the same message with less jarring out of suspension of disbelief.

> Cure wearing off

That makes sense. But it kind of makes everything that happens in film a bit of a pointless tragedy. OK, so it's still a big deal, but eg. getting shot by a dart or taking the cure is less offensive if it only lasts a couple of months. People who paid for it might not be very happy either.

[simont]

It wasn't just Callisto who talked about class N mutants, of course. They also mentioned that Jean's Hyde personality was a class 5, in a reverent tone that suggested transcendence of some qualitative boundary. Perhaps that was the point of introducing it, although I still think it ought to have been possible to give the audience the required feeling of "unimaginably dangerous and scary" by other means...

Cure: although, of course, a temporary cure is better for people's general freedom of choice, because it makes it harder to keep somebody cured against their will but people who really want not to be mutants can easily keep voluntarily going back for repeat treatments. Nonconsensual use is a less terrible thing to do to somebody; so if a cure weapon in combat hits a bystanding innocent mutant, the damage is less, and one could use forcible administration of the cure to render a mutant criminal harmless for trial and/or imprisonment but then let it wear off when you freed them.

(Aha – in fact, there's your Magneto-proof prison! Keep him dosed on cure, and stick him in any old cell. Still have to guard against his allies trying to spring him, of course, but that'd be true whatever you did, and at least he won't be providing any help in the escape attempt like he did in X2.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that was the point of introducing it, although I still think it ought to have been possible to give the audience the required feeling of "unimaginably dangerous and scary" by other means...

Shredding people into dust, for instance :)

Yes, I don't know. To describe Jean could be the reason. Once they've introduced the term, they might as well use it.

Or maybe they just mistakenly thought that giving a measurement made it sound more scientific.

Cure

Yes, that's what I was thinking of. It might be a slippery slope, but assuming neither repeated applications nor wearing off do any harm (not certain, but possible) it solves a whole bunch of problems.

It still raises moral questions. But it also suggests that the entire film is either a tragedy or stupid because they were running round killing people when if they'd just held clinical trials first they might not have to bother, and I think the battles were supposed to look heroic rather than stupid and tragic :)

[simont]

Hmm. But Magneto has always been a hawk: his aim has always been to deliberately stir up hostility between mutants and normals so that he can have his war and win it. So it would be consistent with that policy that he deliberately didn't wait for clinical trials to find out if the cure was temporary; his aim was much better served by immediately issuing propaganda which made lots of mutants assume the worst. Even a temporary cure, after all, would be a strong weapon for the normals' side in a war, so whether it was hugely evil or only slightly evil he wouldn't have wanted it around.

Though, I suppose, his treatment of Mystique after she was cured does rather suggest that he really had assumed without question that she'd never be of any further use to him.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Magneto: Good point. In fact, it probably makes sense for him to act quickly and decisively either way, even a temporary cure would cause great problems for him.

But he might have reacted less violently if needle guns and so on were temporary to people who'd undergone due process of law, as might Furball and the X Men.

Mystique: That bothered me an awful lot in lots of ways the first time. The best analogy I can come up with is someone brain-damaged, and not considered a real person any more in a battle zone. But even then you'd try to care for them if you could. Magneto really does seem to assume it's over without question. And even that she's on the other side, considering he let her live, but didn't bother asking her to be quiet or setting her up with a retirement.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

In fact, I can't decide if Mystique throwing in with the humans supports Magneto's assumptions (she went to the other side when she turned human) or against them (she would have stayed with him if she could, only his betrayal made her look for revenge).

[simont]

I think we can't deduce anything about that from what we know. She did have a strong contempt for normals before she was cured, and it's hard to imagine her instantly putting that aside; I'd be more likely to think that at least at first she'd feel huge resentment that not only were these rotten bastards still around but now everyone was going to treat her as one of them. On the other hand, if Magneto had taken her with him and treated her well in gratitude for past service, she might have found that the other mutants on Magneto's team weren't as personally grateful and saw her as the enemy or potentially so. Her betrayal by Magneto might have flipped her into an attitude she otherwise wouldn't have taken, or pushed her faster into one she would eventually have come round to, or made no difference at all.

(It's odd: I keep using the word "normal" whereas you say "human". I know the latter is the terminology they all used in the films, even the "good" mutants once or twice, but for some reason I can't quite bring myself to use it and thereby tacitly agree to the idea that mutants aren't "real" humans.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

It's odd: I keep using the word "normal" whereas you say "human"

Ooh, good point. I think I was just picking up the terminology from them (though I'm not certain). Certainly, "humans" is disturbing, I'd definitely include mutants in humanity, even phoenix, the suggestion otherwise is disturbing. (But it didn't bother *me* particularly because I'm used to the idea of non-humans automatically being people and having the same rights, etc)

But then, "normal" has awkward connotations too. You use it to mean most common, but it could alternatively suggest there's something wrong with people who *aren't* normal.

If you admit "mutant" as an objective word for the people in X-men, what is a fair word for everyone else? Mundane suggests itself, but is offensive the other way.

[simont]

Indeed, "mundane" is of course how the Psi Corps refer to normals behind their backs.

I can just about see your point about "normal", but I still think it's less bad than either "mundane" or "human", and importantly although some people think there's automatically something wrong with not being normal, not everyone does. Both the other terms are hard to see as anything other than insulting on the part of whoever thought them up.

I don't know what you'd pick if you still weren't happy. Hmm. "Mutant" means "changed", so we're implicitly recognising that humans used to not have special powers and now some of them do. So "original", or some synonym of that, might be a place to look which doesn't introduce any more connotations than are already implicit in "mutant"?