Spoilers Logan - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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You're not taking into account all the mutant-caused disasters over the next few years. A few new mountains is probably the least of their concerns.
Saw it today. I was over hyped. Online all you see is "Best X Men movie ever!" "Best comic books movie ever!" etc. And I bought into it too much. So it disappointed. It was good but I couldn't help thinking it could have been better. I have a feeling I'll like more in the future once the hype has died down and I'm seeing it without baggage.
The trailers gave away too much. You knew the story, start to finish (except for the final villian) from them. Which isn't a problem specific to this movie by any means, but is a problem.
All the acting is great. Everyone is at the top of their games and Mangold knows how to bring out the best in his performers. Jackman and Stewart were fantastic as always. The caretaker relationship was very real, from personal experience. Two perfect pieces of casting 20 years ago. They made the X franchise imo.
Mangold isn't an action director. I've never been impressed by an action scene in any of his movies and he continues that streak here. People keep saying that the X23 fights are so good - has everyone forgotten Hit Girl already? That was nearly a decade ago and blows X23 out of the water.
Mangold didn't seem to take much advantage of the R rating either. While the claws through the mouth view at the start was impressive it was the only moment where the violence really seemed that much more than a PG 13 movie. PG 13 is crazy violent now - I was expecting something more visceral in what was supposed to be a hard R film. It reminded me of those "Unrated cuts" of movies that come out once in awhile where they add a grand total of 87 seconds of on screen gore that the MPAA made them cut. Nothing particularly noticeable. I get that they want this to be a movie that parents will still bring their older kids to see / buy on blue ray despite the rating but it would have been a better film if it lived up to its promise.
The villians motivion rang hollow. So they want the kids to avoid patent infringement by other companies and lawsuits. So they spend millions of dollars, lost dozens of highly trained, augmented special forces, and killed countless innocents hunting them down? Cause that somehow makes it less likely they'll be sued? And is cheaper to do? And they're going to keep doing it? At what point does the finance department say "Hey, we've lost our brand new hugely expensive super weapon, $100+ million dollars in equipment and manpower, and are facing numerous police investigations and civil suits. Maybe we just let the mutant kids go hide and live their lives away from us where they don't cost us any more money? And if they grow up to make public claims we just deny it since they have no physical evidence and everyone with the company will have long sinse retired and/or died?"
Making GMO's responsible for a secret genocide? Really, movie? I'm surprised you didn't make the serum at the end homoeopathic medicine applied by a certified reiki instructor.
The Deadpool teaser was funny. I'm ashamed to say I spent most of it wondering why they had all the Firefly posters. Then I remembered....
The trailers gave away too much. You knew the story, start to finish (except for the final villian) from them. Which isn't a problem specific to this movie by any means, but is a problem.
All the acting is great. Everyone is at the top of their games and Mangold knows how to bring out the best in his performers. Jackman and Stewart were fantastic as always. The caretaker relationship was very real, from personal experience. Two perfect pieces of casting 20 years ago. They made the X franchise imo.
Mangold isn't an action director. I've never been impressed by an action scene in any of his movies and he continues that streak here. People keep saying that the X23 fights are so good - has everyone forgotten Hit Girl already? That was nearly a decade ago and blows X23 out of the water.
Mangold didn't seem to take much advantage of the R rating either. While the claws through the mouth view at the start was impressive it was the only moment where the violence really seemed that much more than a PG 13 movie. PG 13 is crazy violent now - I was expecting something more visceral in what was supposed to be a hard R film. It reminded me of those "Unrated cuts" of movies that come out once in awhile where they add a grand total of 87 seconds of on screen gore that the MPAA made them cut. Nothing particularly noticeable. I get that they want this to be a movie that parents will still bring their older kids to see / buy on blue ray despite the rating but it would have been a better film if it lived up to its promise.
The villians motivion rang hollow. So they want the kids to avoid patent infringement by other companies and lawsuits. So they spend millions of dollars, lost dozens of highly trained, augmented special forces, and killed countless innocents hunting them down? Cause that somehow makes it less likely they'll be sued? And is cheaper to do? And they're going to keep doing it? At what point does the finance department say "Hey, we've lost our brand new hugely expensive super weapon, $100+ million dollars in equipment and manpower, and are facing numerous police investigations and civil suits. Maybe we just let the mutant kids go hide and live their lives away from us where they don't cost us any more money? And if they grow up to make public claims we just deny it since they have no physical evidence and everyone with the company will have long sinse retired and/or died?"
Making GMO's responsible for a secret genocide? Really, movie? I'm surprised you didn't make the serum at the end homoeopathic medicine applied by a certified reiki instructor.
The Deadpool teaser was funny. I'm ashamed to say I spent most of it wondering why they had all the Firefly posters. Then I remembered....
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Well, not many PG-13 movies have a 100 "fucks" being uttered. It can be argued if it's necessary but that earned it's R rating on its own. I thought the violence was visceral enough, I didn't need to see outright disembowelment.
Hyperbole. Fuck is not said 100 times. Parental advisory have it at half that. And even then, we're not talking Deadwoodian swearing where the language is an integral part of the product - it's just fuck, repeated a bunch. Only one of which the inclusion or exclusion of which would have affected the films effect - Xavier in the back of the car when he's seemingly struggling whether or not to say it, the uptight Brit that he is. And one fuck is fine in PG-13. There policy on fuck has seemed too be shifting recently as well as they've been occasionally allowing more.
Again, I'm reminded of unrated movie DVD releases where they substitute the take with shit with the take with fuck to no discernible difference to the film.
I don't need torture porn gore either. I'm not saying that is needed. I'm saying a better action director than Mangold is needed to embrace the freedom and effectiveness of R rated violence and gore to seperate it from PG13. John Wick 2 came out a few weeks ago - look at the violence in either of them. So much better. So much more visceral. So much more impactful. You can feel the guys neck breaking on John's kitchen counter. I don't feel that in this movie anywhere.
Again, I'm reminded of unrated movie DVD releases where they substitute the take with shit with the take with fuck to no discernible difference to the film.
I don't need torture porn gore either. I'm not saying that is needed. I'm saying a better action director than Mangold is needed to embrace the freedom and effectiveness of R rated violence and gore to seperate it from PG13. John Wick 2 came out a few weeks ago - look at the violence in either of them. So much better. So much more visceral. So much more impactful. You can feel the guys neck breaking on John's kitchen counter. I don't feel that in this movie anywhere.
I didn't sit and count them but it was certainly more than *one*. Hell, they met that during the Deadpool tease.
...Never claimed it was only said once. Wrote that it was said 50 times according to parental advisory counts. Half your claim that it was 100. Only one time that mattered.
None of which changes the statement that I don't feel the movie took full advantage of the R rating, especially in the action department, regardless of how many random (pointless, interchangeable) fucks were thrown in. I can see no substantial difference in this movie if it had been filmed for PG13. Not in plot, dialogue, or action.
Deadpool was built from the ground up to be R and it shows. It took advantage of the rating. It's hard to picture that film as PG13 to the point I want to watch it edited for TV just to see how they do it.
Logan seems like it was a PG13 movie that the studio suddenly decided it should be R so they threw in a bunch of random fucks and used the CGI gore budget a bit. Which, from some reports, is pretty much what happened after Deadpool hit it big.
My saying this is not my attempt to argue it is a bad movie. I wrote as many positives in my first post as negatives. This is a good movie. I suspect I'll like it more in the future. It does have its problems though, this being one of several I brought up.
None of which changes the statement that I don't feel the movie took full advantage of the R rating, especially in the action department, regardless of how many random (pointless, interchangeable) fucks were thrown in. I can see no substantial difference in this movie if it had been filmed for PG13. Not in plot, dialogue, or action.
Deadpool was built from the ground up to be R and it shows. It took advantage of the rating. It's hard to picture that film as PG13 to the point I want to watch it edited for TV just to see how they do it.
Logan seems like it was a PG13 movie that the studio suddenly decided it should be R so they threw in a bunch of random fucks and used the CGI gore budget a bit. Which, from some reports, is pretty much what happened after Deadpool hit it big.
My saying this is not my attempt to argue it is a bad movie. I wrote as many positives in my first post as negatives. This is a good movie. I suspect I'll like it more in the future. It does have its problems though, this being one of several I brought up.
I've seen violence in PG-13 movies, it does go further than it has in the past. But the violence in this movie was very violent and earns the R-Rating. It's not always about the level of blood you see but just how, well, *violent* the violence is and when you're seeing a 10-year-old girl slicing people's faces off with razor-sharp metal claws things are put on a whole new level than PG-13. The couple times we see X-24's head blown off is far more violent and graphic than PG-13 can do, the mutant girl who basically vaporizes a guy with the ground debris is pretty damn violent.
The first scene excluded, the violence in this is pretty damn high and not PG-13 with CGI-blood added in for an Unrated home video release. The violence in this movie is strong, real, and even shocking. While I do agree that the action scenes weren't well put together, I disagree on comparing them to Hit-Girl in terms of violence. The Hit-Girl scene was very well shot and filmed but has nothing on seeing a feral child savagely hacking at people with razor-claws without regard to anything, that's a bit different than Hit-Girl's use of guns.
The first scene excluded, the violence in this is pretty damn high and not PG-13 with CGI-blood added in for an Unrated home video release. The violence in this movie is strong, real, and even shocking. While I do agree that the action scenes weren't well put together, I disagree on comparing them to Hit-Girl in terms of violence. The Hit-Girl scene was very well shot and filmed but has nothing on seeing a feral child savagely hacking at people with razor-claws without regard to anything, that's a bit different than Hit-Girl's use of guns.
Anyone who didn't see how it earned the R watched with their eyes closed and stopped listening aftet the first F-bomb (the limit is one, as I recall, for pg-13)
It felt like they almost unnaturally forced it all in to make sure there was no way it couldn't be R.
It felt like they almost unnaturally forced it all in to make sure there was no way it couldn't be R.
I did. I wrote a long post doing just that in which I brought up the poor action directing, poor villian and villian motivation, excellent dialogue, excellent acting, and excellent representation of the caregiver relationship. My thoughts on the rating were one part of that post. It's you and others replying that ignored all the other criticisms and compliments and focused exclusively on the one section about the rating, reducing my entire post to that one section. I'd love to talk about something else. No one replying to me seems to want too.
That was my point. It seems like a movie that was written to be PG13, then Deadpool hit, so they quickly threw in a bunch of fucks to make it R as well.
I disagree, and factually incorrect with regards to Hit Girl.
Well, that and the claws through everybody's heads. But I agree with you, then, regarding the language. Especially coming off of, what, 8 movies in a row with these characters that didn't really act or sound this way before. Sure, one is out of his mind and the other suicidal (taking the "hero" quite far away from "superhero"), but it was still jarring. At least to me.
Frankly, I don't care whether the movie earned its R rating or not. I tend to judge a movie solely on its writing - narrative and characterization.
The only action sequence directed by Mangold that really impressed me was the Tokyo bullet train sequence in "THE WOLVERINE".
The only action sequence directed by Mangold that really impressed me was the Tokyo bullet train sequence in "THE WOLVERINE".
There are PG-13 movies that have the F-bomb more than once. And then there was All the President's Men, which drops the F-bomb twenty-five times and was originally rated R, but was re-rated PG on appeal.
The MPAA's rules on ratings allow for some qualitative flexibility in this regard, rather than quantitative rigidity: http://filmratings.com/downloads/rating_rules.pdf
Kor
I had no idea!
Thanks for that, for some reason (probably based on the previous X-movies) I thought it was more quantitative, hence using it once in First Class then again in Days of Future's Past.
Thanks for that, for some reason (probably based on the previous X-movies) I thought it was more quantitative, hence using it once in First Class then again in Days of Future's Past.
I think as a general "rule of thumb," you usually won't hear it more than once or twice in a PG-13 movie. But there are occasional exceptions, as the ratings board can vote to allow for more based on the context in which it's used.
Kor
Indeed. She was fantastic.
Unfortunately, the film didn't live up to the hype. It was very good, but not the best superhero movie I've ever seen. The main problem for me was that it opened up too much towards the end :
The other children, the chase, the big superpower fight
They'd have been much better keeping it small, tight and intense - kind of True Grit meets First Blood.
By the way :
Logan's not dead. He's covered with X24's blood which is genetically identical to his own. He's badly wounded - there's no way it's not got into his system. It might take a while, but the uncompromised healing factor in X24's blood will inevitably start to repair him.
I watched carefully for one of the rocks to move, but they faded to black too soon...
I watched carefully for one of the rocks to move, but they faded to black too soon...
He's dead because Hugh Jackman is done. Until the day Hugh Jackman's business manager robs him/puts all his money in the next ponzi scheme and Jackman needs a fast pay day. Then he'll be alive again. Since this is a one off story not affecting the rest of X continuity (if you an even call the call the xmen films a solid canon, which you really can't) there won't be a need for a convoluted reason to bring him back to life. He'll just appear.
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