It’s easy to dismiss sci fi flicks as clumsy and loud, but the critiques miss a key virtue. Unlike other genres, fanboy blockbusters are a constantly innovating form, with an important message about the present even as they outline visions of our future. In romantic comedies, the scene can shift from the Civil War to the Los Angeles real estate market as long as boy meets girl amidst the bayonets or billboards. Horror movies can switch weapons with no fall-off in audience long as there are coeds to dice. Come Oscar season, World War II films are such a reliable source of nominations that Kate Winslet’s turn as a sexy Nazi became a simultaneous joke on the genre and a lock for the Academy Award.

Science fiction and superhero movies don’t have the luxury of simply finding the latest neighborhood where attractive singles are settling or the flashiest car on the market and plugging those accessories into a formula. By nature, those films have to imagine the future, to put something on screen that audiences would never see in their everyday lives. Sometimes, those visions are farfetched, unrealistic, paranoid, immature, or deeply cheesy. Of the four major sci-fi movies being released this spring and summer, two feature vengeful giant robots. Another centers on a guy who metalizes his skeleton, and the fourth plants spaceships in Iowa cornfields. They’ll vary in quality, and plausibility, but at least they have something to say about the perils and opportunities of the future.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first of these movies, is a perfect example of the power of a bad fanboy movie. The film is far too full of cheap-looking special effects and dialogue that seems ludicrous outside a cartoon bubble to be really absorbing. But Wolverine has far more to say about its chosen subject, the scientific manipulation of the human body, than, for example, the romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has to say about relationships between men and women.

The movie is the origin story of one of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters, a Canadian roughneck named Logan, who—thanks to a genetic mutation—can sprout claws and heal rapidly from serious injuries. In the film, Logan decides to undergo a procedure to coat his skeleton in super-strong metal after a series of tragedies leaves him seeking revenge. The experiment Logan participates in provides a breakthrough for a group of scientists who give Logan’s powers to another superhero, Wade Wilson — and then sew his lips shut. When the two modified men fight for the last time the awful power of technology is less evident in Wade’s threatening new abilities than in the mutilation of his formerly delicate, expressive mouth.

The actual science in Wolverine may be outlandish, but the dilemma is not. Debates about the potential applications of available technology color arguments over issues like the morality of screening of fetuses for genetic defects when such screenings could encourage parents to abort children with a wide range of traits. It’s one thing to think about the misdirection of science in the abstract: it’s quite another to watch those consequences acted out violently on screen against a character whose only apparent crime was his verbosity. That one striking image of a character’s mutilated face doesn’t do a lot to redeem a deeply mediocre movie. But it offers more than Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which dishes up the message that a modicum of contrition expressed at an appropriate moment makes up for a life of emotional abuse.