The Danger Room. Unheard of in the films until X-Men: The Last Stand. First known to me from that lame X-Men XBox game. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I would have assumed that they had made it up for the game; it seems the perfect construct for pre-game training. For those who don’t know what the Danger Room is, it’s like a holodeck, but with balls.¹ And the X-Men use it to train in…

…UNTIL NOW!

Ahem.

Whedon’s second X-Men story isn’t quite as interesting as his first. “What if there was a cure for mutants?” is a topic that leads to plenty of interesting ethical issues and parallels with real life. “What if one of the X-Men’s cool gadgets went psychotic?” is less immediately appealing. It turns out to be cooler than it initially appears — an old, bald cripple that we know and love turns out and gets to be nicely morally ambiguous.

‘Dangerous’ is reasonably spectacular, too. Action in Manhattan. Action in the Danger Room. Action in Genosha. Very orange action in Genosha. Genosha is orange. Violence and violence and more violence makes for a fun read, but by the end things seem a little on the superficial side.

That’s not to say nothing’s happening with the characters. Just not much. Kitty and Colossus are awkward around each other after their romantic reunion. But by the end, they’ve… gotten a little less awkward. Emma Frost, oh she of the relentlessly displayed cleavage, acts repeatedly suspicious, but nothing much comes of it. Yet. This becomes somewhat frustrating; what would seem to be her imminent betrayal of the X-Men consistently feels more interesting than the actual plot.²

‘Dangerous’ has some cool moments. It has some amusing puns on the word “danger”. It has the Fantastic Four, briefly. But it just doesn’t quite get there. And you know why? Because in the end, it’s “what if Frankenstein’s Monster was an angry room, or possibly a robot?” That’s why.

1. Er, and if you don’t know what a holodeck is, well, there’s no hope for you. Or more likely, me. ↩
2. Although for this ignorant X-Men n00b, the last panel substantially erodes this interest. ↩

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Sunday, March 11th, 2007. It concerns such pressing issues as books, comics, marvel, x-men. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.