Spoilers Logan - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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I agree. I saw John Wick 2 and this movie was way more raw to me. Wick had more kills, more gore, and more splatter for the buck. But this movie made you feel every stab. These people were in pain.
This was perhaps the most depressing superhero movie of all time. If you even wanna call it a superhero movie.
I'm absolutely convinced that these people, especially at Fox, simply can NOT help themselves. They've so self-conscious they're making a superhero movie that they're always like "have we don't enough superhero stuff?". That's how they messed up The Wolverine. After all the hype, I was sure they'd learned their lesson this time. They still had to stick their thumbs up their bums and put X-24 in this friggin' thing. Stop trying to please the geeks. We're not idiots. We don't need massive fights to watch a movie.
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Why thank you !
Still think Wolverine did a 'Carrie' post credits. Doesn't make a lot of difference I suppose, as it's an alternative future, and even if it isn't, he'd have a different head if he's seen again...
The thing with this movie is, and I was talking with co-workers today about it, is that I wouldn't say it's a "great superhero movie" for that I think I'd still go for The Dark Knight, The Avengers and some of the other MCU movies, maybe even Deadpool; but this a "great superhero movie?" Nope.
Because for me "superhero movie" is a different scale than "movie." And, to me, a "good superhero movie" has to have fun, action, quips and one-lines, humor and big stakes. This movie didn't have any of that, at least not at meaningful levels.
So is it bad that this is not a "good superhero movie?" No. Because it's something better, it's a good movie. It's seriously very well made, shot, scored, acted, everything. The action scenes were a bit clumsy but the movie has heart and soul to it and is much deeper than even the deepest superhero movies that have ever come out. Dealing with superheroes way out of their prime in a world that seems to have no use for them anymore.
"Days of Future Past" was on FX last night and I watched it, which I'll never do again. Oh, it's a decent movie, but watching a movie on standard cable is aggravating, I swear they'd play 10 or 15 minutes of the movie then go to a 5-10 minute long ad break. Grrrrrr. And at the end of the movie we see Wolverine in "the future" in the school walking around taking in the re-arranged, brighter, future and he talks with Xavier and the latter realizes that today is the day Logan "returned" from his telepathic trip to the past.
It's interesting to see Wolverine in this movie as, well, a typical roguish hero with quips and liners, a swagger, fighting skills and being mentally sharp. Seeing Xavier in the future sequences the same way, at the top of his game and the head of this school. Then to see what they've become in Logan is, well, it's depressing. But depressing in an interesting way because it's the brutality of aging. Xavier is in his 90s and Wolverine is flirting with the bicentennial mark. To see Wolverine move with the "grace" of an arthritic old man, to shake and strain to do simple tasks like putting a shirt on, and to need reading glasses it's sort of sad. But interesting. To see the brilliant, optimistic, always charismatic and crisp Xavier reduced to a blabbering old man suffering from senility. The man who snarkily told Wolverine to put out a cigar lest he meddle in Wolverine's mind making him live out his days believing himself to be a little girl, he's now a man sitting in car telling his caretaker he has to pee and then in an indignity has to do it while Wolverine stands nearby.
It's that brutality of aging that even these heroes couldn't outmatch, even Wolverine. (Though it took him longer, and was rushed along in the last 40 years or so from the adamantium in his skeleton. I'd sort-of argue the movie takes place "too soon" and should've been another 10-15 years in the future. Sure, it'd likely mean Xavier is a centenarian now but not an impossible age to reach especially if we allow for mutants to live longer than humans in general.
That's what so good, for me, this is just a good movie and it could've been without the superhero elements mixed in (though in such a case it'd have a fairly different story.)
On Logan "not being dead."
I theorized the notion that this could happen and allow for a new actor to take on the Wolverine mantle without needing Jackman or having to shrug off the discontinuity in appearance.
As stated he had X-24's blood on him and the serum in him so we could allow for that all to completely regenerate Wolverine after a long period of time. Even allow for this to create the "Adamantium Beta" in him to effectively mean he has metal bones, not bones plated in metal, his body's healing factor now able to cope with the foreign substance in him, it's now a part of him. This also regenerates Wolverine to a younger age allowing for the character to be recast.
If they're going to use X-23 more then they may need to being her into the past by some means and that could allow for Wolverine to travel into the past too in order to unite with the other X-Men.
Sort of a humorous side discussion/observation.
Did anyone else get a "bickering old married couple" between Logan and Caliban. Caliban being in the "feminine" role? The way they fought and Caliban slightly egged on Logan struck me as kind of like a bickering couple. (This is not to say they actually were a "couple;" not that there's anything wrong with that.)
It almost seemed that way between Logan and Xavier in the rest of the movie with the way they sort-of bickered but the "son taking care of with an ailing parent" vibe came through much more. Like when they're in the car and Xavier is explaining X-23's foot claws (which they didn't have her use nearly enough) and Logan is just, "Uh huh, yeah fascinating, take your pills! Let me see!" Some of that kind of reminded me of the way I am with my father occasionally when he starts talking about something out of nowhere and providing no context. (Though for him it's just usually an outburst of statement not due to any form of senility.)
Anyway..... that's all I got right now.
Because for me "superhero movie" is a different scale than "movie." And, to me, a "good superhero movie" has to have fun, action, quips and one-lines, humor and big stakes. This movie didn't have any of that, at least not at meaningful levels.
So is it bad that this is not a "good superhero movie?" No. Because it's something better, it's a good movie. It's seriously very well made, shot, scored, acted, everything. The action scenes were a bit clumsy but the movie has heart and soul to it and is much deeper than even the deepest superhero movies that have ever come out. Dealing with superheroes way out of their prime in a world that seems to have no use for them anymore.
"Days of Future Past" was on FX last night and I watched it, which I'll never do again. Oh, it's a decent movie, but watching a movie on standard cable is aggravating, I swear they'd play 10 or 15 minutes of the movie then go to a 5-10 minute long ad break. Grrrrrr. And at the end of the movie we see Wolverine in "the future" in the school walking around taking in the re-arranged, brighter, future and he talks with Xavier and the latter realizes that today is the day Logan "returned" from his telepathic trip to the past.
It's interesting to see Wolverine in this movie as, well, a typical roguish hero with quips and liners, a swagger, fighting skills and being mentally sharp. Seeing Xavier in the future sequences the same way, at the top of his game and the head of this school. Then to see what they've become in Logan is, well, it's depressing. But depressing in an interesting way because it's the brutality of aging. Xavier is in his 90s and Wolverine is flirting with the bicentennial mark. To see Wolverine move with the "grace" of an arthritic old man, to shake and strain to do simple tasks like putting a shirt on, and to need reading glasses it's sort of sad. But interesting. To see the brilliant, optimistic, always charismatic and crisp Xavier reduced to a blabbering old man suffering from senility. The man who snarkily told Wolverine to put out a cigar lest he meddle in Wolverine's mind making him live out his days believing himself to be a little girl, he's now a man sitting in car telling his caretaker he has to pee and then in an indignity has to do it while Wolverine stands nearby.
It's that brutality of aging that even these heroes couldn't outmatch, even Wolverine. (Though it took him longer, and was rushed along in the last 40 years or so from the adamantium in his skeleton. I'd sort-of argue the movie takes place "too soon" and should've been another 10-15 years in the future. Sure, it'd likely mean Xavier is a centenarian now but not an impossible age to reach especially if we allow for mutants to live longer than humans in general.
That's what so good, for me, this is just a good movie and it could've been without the superhero elements mixed in (though in such a case it'd have a fairly different story.)
On Logan "not being dead."
I theorized the notion that this could happen and allow for a new actor to take on the Wolverine mantle without needing Jackman or having to shrug off the discontinuity in appearance.
As stated he had X-24's blood on him and the serum in him so we could allow for that all to completely regenerate Wolverine after a long period of time. Even allow for this to create the "Adamantium Beta" in him to effectively mean he has metal bones, not bones plated in metal, his body's healing factor now able to cope with the foreign substance in him, it's now a part of him. This also regenerates Wolverine to a younger age allowing for the character to be recast.
If they're going to use X-23 more then they may need to being her into the past by some means and that could allow for Wolverine to travel into the past too in order to unite with the other X-Men.
Sort of a humorous side discussion/observation.
Did anyone else get a "bickering old married couple" between Logan and Caliban. Caliban being in the "feminine" role? The way they fought and Caliban slightly egged on Logan struck me as kind of like a bickering couple. (This is not to say they actually were a "couple;" not that there's anything wrong with that.)
It almost seemed that way between Logan and Xavier in the rest of the movie with the way they sort-of bickered but the "son taking care of with an ailing parent" vibe came through much more. Like when they're in the car and Xavier is explaining X-23's foot claws (which they didn't have her use nearly enough) and Logan is just, "Uh huh, yeah fascinating, take your pills! Let me see!" Some of that kind of reminded me of the way I am with my father occasionally when he starts talking about something out of nowhere and providing no context. (Though for him it's just usually an outburst of statement not due to any form of senility.)
Anyway..... that's all I got right now.
To say that superhero movies must be fun and light as a requisite puts a terrible limit on them. I'd say that Logan is very much a superhero movie, especially given your last line in the part I quoted above. The genre doesn't have to be so narrowly defined. I get what you're saying though. We're so used to the fun and the spectacle that this seems like it's "more" when it's just going with a different approach.
It feels less like a superhero movie, because with a few minor tweaks it could have been told without any superpowers at all and still strike all the same notes.
Pretty much what I'm driving at. Even the most serious and "dramatic" of superhero movies (The Dark Knight stands out most in my mind right now) there's still some "superhero qualities" to it. Costumes, some big threat, gadgets a notable villain. But for the most part on the face here, we've got what's just a very solid movie that happens to feature superhero characters.
What I take issue with is the notion that a superhero movie can't have a meaningful story or include the the elements of what's considered to be a quality film.
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Unless they put her in a New Mutants movie and set it in 2030...
Yeah, that's a bit of mis-speaking on my part. Superhero movies can certainly have meaningful story and have elements of quality films; they just generally don't. This is a "superhero movie" only because it contains superhero characters but that fact isn't overly integral to the plot, change some elements and this could just be any other movie. The girl is a fugitive/needs to get to Canada for some other reason that's not her fault, she's being pursued by government agents that want her back for sinister reasons, and the man tasked with doing all of this is impersonal, burnt-out, drunk and his senile father. The drunk once a hero in his younger years (lauded officer, decorated military person) but that time is long behind him.
Again, just how I see things. It's impossible to compare this movie to, say, Deadpool, Iron Man, The Avengers which are all, in my opinion, good, fun, movies that do a lot of things for the comic-book genre but they're very different movies than what we have here, because they're different movies. It's like comparing a comedy to a drama, both can be stellar movies but stellar for different reasons.
That was a fairly small element in the movie, had, largely, already occurred as well as being a running theme in all of the X-Men movies. More over it wasn't the driving plot/point of this movie, the extinction of mutants was immaterial to what Logan was tasked with doing or the journey he needed to take as a character throughout the movie. Remove the "extinction of mutants" thing and you don't change the story at all, you still have Logan tasked with helping this girl being sought out by the government get to Canada. He did it out some sense of purpose in having to do this, not to ensure the survival of "mutant-kind."
You can, but a lot of the time it detracts from the movie when a guy dresses in spandex and wears a cape.
^ You'd have to find the right tone and balance.
I didn't respond to the rest because I had no opinion on your take. I apologize for replying to an opinion you put out there. I can't promise I won't do it again.
Or, since this is an alternative take anyway, they ignore the origin in Logan and she just shows up in the next movie at this age (or older with a new actress) due to technobabble advanced ageing technobabble.
I bet there's a count out there somewhere with how many times the mutants in these movies have been cast, recast, new origins, died, brought back to life no explanation. It'd be a lot. A strict canon is not something they care about. They just want to make cool movies.
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