Submitted by diba@vt.edu 
(May 18, 2003)X2--the plot--proverbial evil guy wants to destroy the freaks, ie. the mutants. So, right up front you know this film is going to appeal to the SciFi crowd; there's nothing like yet another handsome Hollywood face to the rescue of the underdog to bring us to the theater in droves, and Hugh Jackman fits the role of handsome Hollywood hero, to a tee.
What made this film interesting to me, however, had less to do with an endlessly reworked Hollywood formula than it did with the real spectre of "Nanotechnology" looming on all of our prospective global horizons. The thing is, we are positioned, voyeuristically through the film, to identify with the persecuted mutants, and the intro as well as the concluding remarks are carefully wrought to posit the mutants as natural, and I use the word natural loosely, evolutionary byproducts, aka our gone--but not forgotten-- demigod Darwin.
But these mutants are not evolutionary byproducts, and it does not require a careful reading of the film to see this. The mutants were created by a science/technology gone awry (doesn't it always?) and yet, our position as viewers of the ensuing travesty of justice, not unlike our own politically inspired global politics these days, demands that we participate, as all engaging film does. If we align ourselves with Striker, who is trying to destroy the mutants, we are "the evildoers", and so, the default position is to find one’s self pro-mutant, and this, it would seem, is what the film has really set out to do. In light of the ungoverned agenda of nanotech, or atomtech, around the world, I think the end result for this film is to, ironically, give license to those who wish to create the mutants, and employ them considerably less glamorously than Hollywood has.
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