No messing with redheads

The X-Men trilogy has been a superior translation of comic book to big screen (although I wouldn’t bet money on this being truly ‘The Last Stand’; probably more like ‘The Second Last Stand’, given its ambiguous closing shot). Part of its charm has been the willingness of the writers to handle the metaphor of the comics: that the mutants are representatives of society’s minorities and outsiders. Most explicitly, its homosexuals.

This instalment presents its subtext more baldly than ever. Its bang-crash  storyline, i.e., the one that causes maximum kerfuffle, is intriguing. What the (evil, conservative) government likes to call a ‘cure’ for mutants is discovered in the near-future. Government scientists announce that volunteer mutants can be reprogrammed and made ‘normal’, by which they mean all-human. One Erik Lensherr, a.k.a. Magneto (Ian McKellen), is deeply suspicious of ‘the cure’ and when he finds a ‘cure weapon’ in the hands of a prison guard his suspicions appear to be confirmed — the government in fact intends to wreak a kind of genocide on its mutant population, cleansing them of their colossal, and threatening, powers.