10 Dark Films For Dark Times

When it’s revealed that mutants live among us and possess such powers as telepathy and the ability to walk through walls, an ambitious Senator demands a simple answer to a simple question – “Are mutants dangerous?”

After all, he reasons, the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with mutants or to be taught by mutants. “We must know who they are,” he says, “and above all, what they can do.”

Now read those words over again, replacing mutant with your minority group of choice and you’ll realize why Bryan Singer’s X-Men is so much more than a “mere” superhero movie.

It could have given its characters soap opera motivations, but there’s something believable about the conflict between Eric Lensherr and Charles Xavier, former friends who separate into two groups with very different approaches to the prejudice they face. Xavier favours diplomacy but Magneto, a concentration camp survivor, lost his faith in human beings a long time ago.

Arriving in America in 1949, he expected to find the “land of tolerance”, but quickly came to realize “there is no land of tolerance. There is no peace. Not here, or anywhere else.”