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

[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"?