Hollywood likes nothing better than to be stuck in a profitable rut, and history shows that, having stumbled across a money-making genre, studios will neither hesitate nor shirk from exploiting cash cows till every drop of financial milk is squeezed from them. That artistic merit will likely suffer as formulae are relentlessly repeated until audiences grow weary of watching essentially the same film again and again is always but a secondary consideration. In a way, who can blame them? Studios are, after all, behind all the pompous marketing rhetoric and sloganeering about ‘quality’ entertainment corporations with shareholders to please, obligated to make a profit.
So, like relentless waves pounding a beach, we have seen genre after genre enjoy periodic popularity, only to end up waning as quality drops and the audience moves on to the next craze: so has it been with westerns, epics, science fiction until the cycle repeats itself with an Unforgiven, Gladiator, or Star Wars revival.
These days we are in the age of the superhero. With the advent of the Marvel/DC multiverses and the consequent deluge of standalone films, Disney and Warner Brothers have planned out another decade’s worth of movies starring their heroic icons.
Yet, as strategic as all of this sounds, Hollywood is repeating the same mistakes. Rather than invest time in planning out how to deal with the inevitable day when interest in the genre wanes and ends, the studios will simply keep churning stories out until the trend shows them losing money. Inevitably, like the western, historical epic and science fiction waves (yes, Star Trek/Star Wars fans, one day these cults too shall pass) the superhero box office reign will die out with a whimper.
This need not be so. Logan shows how the genre can go out, with dignity intact.
The character of Wolverine, aka Logan, played by Hugh Jackman over 17 years and eight previous movies in Marvel Comics’ ‘X-Men’ universe, is a mutant berserker whose most prominent weapons are razor-sharp adamantium (metallic) claws, coupled with the feral drive necessary to use them. But the PG-13 ratings on the ‘X-Men’ franchise instalments have limited what directors were willing to show onscreen. Logic dictates that slashing weapons do wreak horrible damage on human bodies, but the movies have had to be coy about the doomed victims Wolverine takes out, concealing the wounds and dropping the bodies offscreen. Death is sanitized.
That ends with ‘Logan’, the first R-rated Wolverine feature, and the first to openly -- even lovingly -- focus on the character bisecting heads and punching through skulls. Inspired by ‘Deadpool’s unexpected financial success, Fox authorized director James Mangold (who also helmed 2013’s ‘The Wolverine’) and his crew to go hard-R on ‘Logan’, likely the last film to feature Jackman in the iconic role. The rating is fully embraced, with graphic violence, profanity, and even a few stray seconds of female toplessness. This is an intense, brutal film, full of sudden waves of bloody mayhem. But the real brutality isn’t in the severed limbs and heads, it’s in the film’s overwhelmingly dark emotional content and tone. This is by far the grimmest the ‘X-Men’ series, if not the entire superhero genre, has ever been. There are no cameos from characters beyond the tight circle of dramatis personae, no causal, witty banter or puerile jokes. Just a whole lot of exhaustion, resignation, and a steady march toward the end of this particular branch of the X-storyline.
In style, feel and world weariness, this is the comic book version of Unforgiven.
Mangold and co-writers (‘The Wolverine’ and ‘Minority Report’ screenwriter Scott Frank and ‘American Gods’ writer/showrunner Michael Green) have managed to achieve something that’s been rare over the past decade-plus of grim-n-gritty superhero takes: they earn the tone by developing a rich, even nuanced emotional landscape around their characters. And they show a focused commitment to the theme by taking their story to an uncompromising, even horrifying (but not entirely unexpected finale. Plenty of recent superhero films dabble in grimness seemingly out of a feeling that it makes wish-fulfilment hero-fantasy more serious and adult (Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is a rare exception in that his films’ sense of gravitas comes from compellingly strong story foundations). ‘Logan’ tells an actual adult story about despair, decay, and death.
1. PTSD Characters
The film is set in 2029, at a point where the X-Men appear to be gone, and no new mutants have been born in 25 years. (The film never actually tackles the first point, though there are some subtle, discomfiting clues that have nothing to do with Sentinels or supervillains.) Logan/Wolverine, is working as a limo driver under his original name, James Howlett. He’s aging badly: his unbreakable adamantium skeleton is slowly poisoning him and his mutant healing abilities are failing, leaving him heavily scarred and in chronic pain that he medicates with generous helpings of alcohol and anger. He mostly spends his time scrambling for money to support his old teacher, Charles “Professor X” Xavier (Patrick Stewart, returning to the role he’s played on and off since 2000), now a feeble, declining man in his 90s, unable to fully control either his body or his powers. Also playing house with them is Caliban (longtime Ricky Gervais partner Stephen Merchant), a pale, sun-sensitive mutant with an extraordinary ability to scent and track other mutants. Like Logan and Charles Xavier, he’s worn and weary from traumas both clear in his situation, and unspecified in his past.
Caliban makes it clear that their life of hiding in an abandoned, isolated refinery can’t last: Xavier’s health is declining, and he’s dependent on illegally acquired medication to hold back violent seizures that cause his powers to run amuck. Then Logan is drawn into a conflict between an organization called Transigen and its experimental subject X-23, also known as Laura (Dafne Keen), who has a great deal in common with Logan. Soon the characters are on the run together with Transigen’s cyborg security honcho Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) in pursuit, backed by Zander Rice (Richard Grant), the son of the man in charge of the original Wolverine project.
2. The X-Men Meets the Force
Logan was loosely inspired by the Mark Millar comics series Old Man Logan, though Mangold’s team takes virtually nothing from Millar’s storyline except the idea of a grizzled old version of Logan navigating an ugly post-X-Men future. Other cinematic touchstones are much more apparent. Mangold uses clips and quotes to draw a pointed comparison between Logan and the protagonist of ‘Shane’, the 1953 Alan Ladd Western about an aging gunfighter whose attempts to settle down with a family lead to tragedy. The “tired man travels cross-country with an endangered child” plot mimics both ‘Children Of Men’ (with all the despair, though without the bravura no-cut combats) and ‘Midnight Special’ (with all the spooky-kid action, though without the Spielbergian wonder). A deeply creepy moment with Laura’s classmates closely recalls the 1960 horror classic ‘Children Of The Damned’. And Mangold has said in interviews that another touchstone was Darren Aronofsky and Robert Siegel’s 2008 drama ‘The Wrestler’, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging bear of a man trying to come to terms with his past as his broken-down body betrays him.
But for ‘Star Wars’ fans, another close parallel may come to mind. ‘Logan’ is the ‘Force Awakens’ of the X-Men franchise, a conscious play on audience nostalgia that passes the franchise torch to a younger generation while respecting and admiring the older one. Laura and her contemporaries pass around X-Men comics as if they were holy writ, and they regard Wolverine as a legend -- not necessarily one too revered to tease, but certainly a figure of fascination and fear. Late in the film, one kid stares at Logan while clutching a Wolverine action figure, dressed in the bright yellow Spandex suit the films have always mocked and dismissed. These kids are like Rey meeting Han Solo for the first time in ‘The Force Awakens’, and finding out that their legends are real -- and that they’re sadly fallible, fragile, and all-too human. Like that film, ‘Logan’ embraces all the emotions a generation of filmgoers may have about Wolverine and the X-Men, but it also pointedly moves them offscreen, in favor of a new crop of potential heroes. (A ‘Logan’ sequel hasn’t been green-lit yet, but Mangold has already said he’s interested in pursuing the story as a franchise.)
That tender humanity gives ‘Logan’ much more power than the bloody anarchy of the fight sequences. The heart of the film is the tortured relationship between Logan and Charles Xavier, who resent and need each other in equal measure. Their relationship is marked by profanity and insults, and by Logan’s roughness and resentment. But Jackman brings across a deep, sullen affection for the old man that undercuts all Logan’s gruff fury and refusal to play hero. The great Stewart, for his part, turns Professor X into a heartbreaking figure, on the verge of disintegration from age and trauma, and prone to sentimental obsession over Laura. He’s midway between a doddering grandfather and the leader he used to be, and Mangold and his co-writers eke every bit of epic Shakespearean tragedy out of how far he’s fallen, from a world-shaking telepath to a querulous old man who has to be bodily hauled into a toilet stall, protesting all the way. He and Logan both hate their weakness and their reliance on each other, but they’re clearly family at this point, with all the mutual dependence and complicated history that entails.
And then Laura joins this unlikely family, and her relationship with both men becomes just as integral to the movie. Keen plays Laura as wordlessly feral, a raging echo of Logan in his younger days. Her resentment and resistance to this miserable new world are a match for his, but her indomitability and ferocious energy go a long way toward keeping the film from wallowing in its own misery.
3. A World of Hurt
There’s a tremendous amount of pain onscreen at all times, and only some of it is deliberately inflicted by characters attacking each other. Most of it is in Laura’s well-justified fury about her past, Logan’s watery-eyed daily physical agony, Caliban’s stress and misery over an untenable situation, and Charles Xavier’s exhaustion and guilt. No one in this film wants to be where they are, and only Laura sees a clear path to a better future for herself -- one that Logan thinks is a cheap fantasy. But her endearing link to Charles and her close parallels to Logan are a winning complication that shape the familiar backdrop of a reluctant-hero story. “I know you are still good inside… you want to help us,” one character tells Logan early on. It’s a cheesy, familiar trope, drawn out into a painful and visceral story.
While ‘Deadpool’s success made ‘Logan’ possible, the two movies take radically different tones with the same basic ideas about how family makes tragedy survivable. ‘Deadpool’ finds cynical, bitter, and playful humor even in the most miserable situations. ‘Logan’, on the other hand, embraces its misery, positing a world where heroism and even kindness are always brutally punished, and yet personal connection is the only meaningful resource left to its characters. Of all the X-Men movies to date, it’s the saddest and most serious, and the one that most challenges the familiar ideas of superhero narratives. But its uniqueness and its complete devotion to tragedy makes it feel like the most adult story this film series has ever told. The weight of graphic, grotesque violence hangs over the entire movie. But the daring emotional violence lingers longer, well after the lights go down on the final shot.
In ensuring that ‘Logan’ is a fitting coda to Wolverine’s saga (at least until the next reboot), Mangold has crafted an intimate epic entirely that challenges every other hero franchise to provide their characters with appropriate exits. After all, in Jackman’s case an entire generation has grown up with only him playing the character and become so invested in his portrayal they have been compelled to spend time and money on ‘X Men’ movies. This loyal audience knows that both actor and character are aging, and respect Jackman’s choice to go out in a fashion entirely appropriate to his story arc. Given that Robert Downey Jr. has been loudly contemplating hanging up his Iron Man suit, it affords the perfect opportunity for Marvel to give his incarnation of Tony Stark the same kind of dramatic send-off. Imagine a scenario where, even after the events of the traumatic ‘Civil War’ slugfest Stark somehow gives his life saving Captain America’s. While less bleak than ‘Logan’, it would bring a level of cocky pathos and set the stage for a different direction in actor or story.
After all, movies are the Homeric hymns of our time, and if we learned anything from those great tales from long ago, we know that even heroes are not immortal. And, much like the fungible "reality" that is our lives, one can only live with dignity, not die with it. So even if the last act of a superhero's life is infused with noble purpose, it will be remembered long after the other characters move on, and the audience has left the theatre.