The X-Men's Sentinels Make No Sense

One of the first articles that I wrote centered around the faulty metaphor that acts as the lynch-pin for the X-Men franchise. However, that isn't the only thing that doesn't work about this comic. After giving it some thought, I realized that the sentinels make no sense whatsoever.

For those unfamiliar with the comic, sentinels are giant robots that are designed to hunt down mutants. Yes, you read that right. I have a question, who's paying for this? No, really, our government spends a lot of money on relatively simple things like planes and tanks. Can you imagine how much it would cost to build just one of these things? They're five stories tall for crying out loud. Yet, here there are hundreds, if not thousands of them being produced en masse.

Even if you were to ignore our current government's fiscal woes and pretend that the U.S. government of the Marvel Universe has no debt or deficit so that they would even have a chance of being able to fund this, this is a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. No one on either end of the political spectrum would go along with this.

Going back to the money problem, you can't even say that it would be funded by private corporations because there's no profit in it unless there's some sort of military contract, which brings us back to the government.

Speaking of which, why doesn't the military use this technology? Could you imagine the sort of advantage we would have against enemies if we just sent our army of giant robots to rain down fiery death? Why aren't other countries terrified about the existence of these things? You'd think that the U.N might have something to say about a country having a vast army of death robots.

While creating counter-measures to combat mutants when they want to wreak havoc is understandable, this just doesn't seem like the way to do it. The Marvel Universe has established that there is technology capable of suppressing powers, whether it's via "cure" or an electronic collar. I would think that you would be better off putting your money into things like that rather than something as outlandish as giant robots. Giant robots are cool and all, but it just doesn't seem feasible.

I know that comics require a certain suspension of disbelief. Maybe it's unfair to chide something like this when I'm more than willing to buy into the functionality of the Green Lantern ring, but that's how suspension of disbelief works. Fantastical elements can work in a franchise that has it, whereas something as quasi-realistic as giant robots makes no sense in the context of a somewhat real world setting.