I love when the hero chooses their loved one over the world, like to hell with saving everything if you can't be part of it, but I also love when the villain chooses their loved one over the world, like to hell with destroying everything if you have to go down with it

1. Logan (2017)

Spoiler warning? Probably.

At the time, this was one of those ‘once in a blue moon’ movies. It took a character we’d seen portrayed by the same actor for 17 years over a period of eight movies and gave us something we never knew we needed. James Mangold flipped the formula on us and delivered a film that didn’t need to promote a franchise or pander to a whole host of demographics so that they could get as many people in the cinema as possible. Those who worked on it looked at the people who had followed the X-Men movies, even those who were just kids when the first movie came out at the start of the millennium, and decided to treat the audience with dignity and respect, knowing at the very least, those who had grown up watching Hugh Jackman in this role from the beginning would be old enough to view a movie like this. They gave this iteration of the character a proper send-off before he was left to stagnate and fade. It was something that hadn’t really been done in the superhero genre before and I would argue, hasn’t been done since. They gave us Logan.

How do I explain that this is my favourite movie of all time? Yes it is well-made. Yes, it ticks a lot of the technical boxes I look for in movies. It is what it is because it stems from a franchise of films based on comic book superheroes. Without the highs of movies like X-Men: Days Of Future Past, or lows of movies like X-Men Origins: Wolverine (which I still kind of find fun to watch), would Logan exist today? Or, if the answer is yes, how different would it be if we took even one of those movies away? Everything happened in the order and time it did and as a result, this movie came into being. I doubt the connection I have to Logan would be as strong or even have developed in the first place if it didn’t have those previous entries to continue the character from. I remember going to see Logan in the cinema when it was released and at the time, I didn’t think all that much of it. Characters that I had grown to love over the years from when I was a child died in front of me and when they died, they died for good. No resurrections this time. And I knew that. But I sat, stone-faced, unmoved by what I was seeing and now, two years on from watching it initially and having seen it multiple times since, I have to ask myself… why? My most recent viewing had me bawling like a baby. Why was my earliest reaction to my now favourite movie so mild? When you think of grand climaxes to beloved characters, especially superheroes, it’s not uncommon to think a proper send-off is something akin to Avengers: Endgame. I’ve seen Wolverine built up over 17 years. He fought a samurai robot in The Wolverine; he went up against the Dark Phoenix in The Last Stand and had the skin torn away from his body repeatedly in an attempt to keep her from destroying everything; he stopped an apocalyptic extermination of mutants in Days Of Future Past. So logically, doesn’t he deserve a goodbye that measures up to those standards we’ve applied to him over the years? To put him in a situation that requires him to save the world? Is this the ending I wanted when I saw the movie for the first time? Logan is small-scale. It deals with a situation on an intrinsically human level. The only goal is to protect a child and get away from the bad guys, who serve as a last middle finger to a character who has gone through so much shit and who at this point, at almost 200 years old in the year 2029, just wants to buy a boat and live out the rest of his days in peace with his oldest and only remaining friend. Logan understands the scale it conveys and uses that to its advantage, grounding the character and the story as a whole in order to give it the emotional weight and resonance it needs to serve as not just a decent end for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, but a notable, spectacular end for an iconic character in popular culture.

How original Logan is in terms of the story it tells and how it goes about certain elements is debatable, although I’m not entirely of the opinion that it’s even trying to be so unheard of in every department. Yes, I’ve never seen anything like this before in the confines of an existing character who, up until now has only been seen to operate under the restriction of what is appropriate to a viewer aged 12 or above. I’ve never seen this kind of story told in as bleak a fashion when it comes to comic book superhero movies. But no, this is not the first and only movie to tackle the themes it’s going for or the type of story it tells. We’ve all seen road trip movies; there are countless tragic hero stories and antagonists set on building armies. How many times have we seen a movie where the villain is just an evil version of the hero? This isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Juxtaposing Logan (aka James Howlett/aka Wolverine) with X-24, a younger, stronger version of himself was a brilliant way to go. It speaks subconsciously to the characters’ fears and what he sees himself as. He is his own demon. This film takes a lot of inspiration from and pays homage to the type of stories that are told in old Westerns, specifically the 1953 film ‘Shane’, where a gunslinger hopes to settle down with a family but is forced into a battle between two separate parties. Mangold goes as far as to literally show a scene from Shane in Logan to highlight this and say that it’s not a wholly new concept for a movie, but wears its inspirations on its sleeve and even acts as a tribute.

The acting is superb, as if anyone needed to be reassured. Hugh Jackman gives maybe the best performance of his career in this. He gives it his all, as someone who clearly cares a lot about the character of Logan/Wolverine and manages to portray him in a way I never knew I needed. Patrick Stewart takes his iconic Professor X (someone we’ve known on the big screen just as long as Wolverine), who’s always been such a wise and collected authority figure, and twists him into this heart-breakingly haunted ghost of his former self, dipping in and out of sanity as he battles with the very human disease of dementia. Dafne Keen as Laura is exactly the fire this film needed to elevate itself past being just above average. A girl of few words but a presence that is felt so strongly. For a first feature and from someone so young, I’m amazed at how spot on the casting for this character was.

Violent and visceral; I now feel every emotional beat like a punch to the gut. The sound and cinematography are so well done and make for some heavy scenes that are meant to establish characters or make the audience feel horrible and upset. The first scene itself lets us know exactly where Logan is at in life and it’s genuinely one of the many highlights. The writing is pitch perfect; it is everything that I want and more and, if I’m in the right mood, has no problem reducing me to tears. The ever-memorable screenplay gives these characters a lot more depth than they had previously by honing in on what is explored in the previous movies. We always knew Logan was a pretty tragic character but never before have we seen the extent of how haunted he is. The sadness of it all comes from realising he has constantly been dealt a bad hand for nearly two centuries and is seldom given much of a break. Every time I revisit Logan I find something else to love about it. Possibly my one and only gripe is that the score could be better and really, as scores go, it’s still decent. With all the blood and action and misery and sorrow and blood (again) that is exhibited, I hang on to the small glimmer of hope that takes this movie to the end, in what is a heartbreaking finish but also an immensely satisfying one. I’m not sure I’ll ever tire of this. I can’t see myself one day feeling like I no longer get enough out of it to warrant watching it again. Logan brings a magnificent conclusion to a character I’ve followed for so long and I’m so thankful that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine wasn’t left to collect dust until retiring in a most lacklustre fashion. This is everything I love about film.

Thoughts on Logan

Ok, finally got to see Logan. For the sake of my in-box, here are some thoughts:

Overall Opinion:

Unlike some folks, I wouldn’t say it’s the best superhero movie ever made, although it’s certainly one of the best. It’s definitely the best Wolverine movie ever made by a long margin, and arguably the best X-Men movie ever made, far better than anything that Bryan Singer ever touched. 

At the same time, it’s not the model for all superhero movies to come: it’s a very idiosyncratic, small-scale action film that works primarily because the audience has a long-term relationship with Hugh Jackman as this role. It’s not the hard R violence that makes it work, it’s not even the avoidance of 90% of superheroisms that makes it work - it’s that this movie is particularly suited to this particular character, and what makes movies good is when movies are grounded in character.

About the Movie and Its Inspirations:

I’ve heard it described as a “post-apocalyptic western,” but that’s not quite accurate. Things have gone really bad for the people we care about, but modern society (i.e, the post-industrial capitalist U.S) is very much present and ticking along just fine, having rolled over and ground down mutantkind like everyone else who isn’t wanted by the powers-that-be, whether that’s the poor Mexican women and children exploited by the evil corporation with shadowy ties to the U.S government, or black farmers trying to make a living in the shadow of automated agro-business conglomerates and self-driving trucks, or immigrants trying to make it to some sort of safety in Canada one step ahead of ICE. More on those themes in a bit. 

That’s not to say it’s not a Western (just that it’s not post-apocalyptic). while the action and the cinematography don’t really evoke Westerns, the landscapes - from the flat Mexican deserts to the rugged mountain forests of the Canadian border - definitely do. As does a rather beautiful sequence halfway through the movie where Logan, Laura, and Xavier stop to help a farming family corral some loose horses before staying the night. 

Moreover, the film’s thematics lean heavily on one Western in particular: early on in the movie, Laura and Professor X watch Shane on the TV, especially the final scene in which Shane (one of the most archetypal lone gunslingers ever) explains why he has to leave rather than settle down. This gets recapitulated at the end when Logan dies, as Laura repurposes his monologue as a eulogy, having few other words to explain what Logan’s life meant. It’s not hard to draw parallels here: like Shane, Logan is an initially reluctant combatant who eventually gets drawn into a conflict not of his own making, there’s also a strong theme of eras passing (just as the mutants are no more, Shane points out to the villain that the farm rather than the cattle ranch is the future of the West), and of course, much like Shane Logan is someone whose life has been indelibly marked by violence who finds a final meaning in ridding a community  of men of violence before removing himself so that there “are no guns in the valley.” 

I’ve also heard Logan described as inspired by Old Man Logan. That is not the case (thank god), and the movie is better for it: the only things the two have in common is that Logan is old, there’s no superheroes anymore (although the supervillains have NOT taken over) and there’s a road-trip. It is much, much closer to Death of Wolverine and X-23: the central plot is an Wolverine whose healing factor is failing him finding meaning by putting an end to one more attempt to recreate Weapon X (with the main difference being that he kills the son of the head scientist rather than the man himself) and the way that his relationship with Laura Kinney allows him to find some measure of fulfillment and create a legacy that will carry on after his death. 

That Logan ends the movie buried under rocks with a cross turned to the side to indicate that he died in the faith of Xavier after all rather than mummified in an adamantium shell is not much of a difference: what matters is the Beautiful Death seemingly set down by destiny for Logan, that he will die in victorious battle protecting mutant children from the evil men who would exploit them. 

Incidentally, for a film that otherwise eschews continuity like the devil, one of the unmistakable callbacks in the film (and arguably the core image around which the film was built) is to the mansion fight sequence in X2 - aka the main reason why Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has such a grip on the memory of X-Men fans. Once again, it’s Wolverine against military baddies, although here we have a double chase sequence as Wolverine hunts Donald Pierce’s Reavers (yes, it’s that Donald Pierce, X-Men’s most fabulous anti-mutant bigot cyborg) as they hunt mutant children trying to make it to the Canadian border. 

Themes and Politics:

So as many people have pointed out, there are a lot of political resonances in Logan that probably weren’t intended as a statement on Trump’s America (since the film was written between 2013 and 2015) but it’s not like one couldn’t hear the rumblings and see the signs if one was paying attention. 

Logan takes a clear, thematic, but not didactic stance on issues of immigration: it starts from the very beginning of the film where we see Logan crossing a highly-militarized border as part of his daily commute or dealing with drunken teenagers standing up through his skylight shouting “USA! USA! USA!” as they pass by a border checkpoint, and it moves to center stage when Gabriella, a whistleblowing nurse who used to work for Transigen, tries to get him to help an undocumented child cross the border - not into the U.S, because the U.S is clearly no longer a place of opportunity or refuge, but into Canada. 

Through Gabriella’s story, we learn about the broader political situation, that begins to link in more and more issues. In an act of globalized regulatory arbitrage that’s straight out of my colleague’s book pictured above, Transigen located itself in the Mexican border region so that it could take advantage of laxer regulations, paramilitary support from the government (thanks in no small part to Transigen’s connections to the U.S military-industrial coalition because they’re really Weapon X), and it is darkly implied, a steady source of disposable bodies of women of color to use as incubators for genetically engineered mutant babies thanks to the ongoing crisis of murders and disappearances in Ciudad Juárez.

From Gabriella’s whistleblowing camera footage, we find that Transigen followed a policy of deliberately dehumanizing its creations - considering them nothing more than patents and copyrights - as both a way to justify human experimentation, abuse, and the creation of child soldiers. And this attitude flows through directly to Doctor Zander Rice’s reveal that they’ve been spreading genetic weapons through the mass market food chain in order to quietly sterilize mutantkind and make the X-gene once more a controllable part of the government’s arsenal, the way Weapon X always wanted it to be. 

Arguably, the political story of Logan is one of global intersectionality: the same corrupt, violent corporate/government forces working against poor women and children in Mexico are the same forces working against African-American farmers in the heartland are the same forces who’ve been working to dehumanize mutants from the beginning, and the only way to preserve hope for the next generation is for everyone to get together at Eden and fight back.