Logan, An Ending
How the 2017 film uses a classic Western to encapsulate the fan-favorite hero’s cinematic journey.
LOGAN is violent, it’s brutal, and it’s rough — much like it’s title character. The film’s tone drew many comparisons to The Dark Knight, viewed by many fans as the benchmark of great superhero movies, until LOGAN released and proved itself a contender. And while the comparisons to Christopher Nolan’s film are not unfounded (to a certain point), LOGAN succeeds with a narrative heart and a consistency that many superhero franchises will never have.
(WARNING: Major spoilers ahead for Logan and Shane.)
In 2029, James “Logan” Howlett is a far cry from the hero we recognize. His healing ability has faltered and his once immortal body has begun to age. He works as a limo driver to raise money to buy a yacht that he hopes will take him and a dying Professor Charles Xavier — a father to him — away from the world that is killing mutants to near extinction. Seeking cash, Logan is hired to transport a young girl named Laura to a mysterious location in North Dakota called “Eden”. But when a mercenary outfit called the Reavers arrive to capture her, Logan learns that he and Laura share the mutant abilities that will be tested to save himself and the only family he has.
The film finds its heart in a sequence set at a hotel-casino in Oklahoma City. Logan and the others have escaped an attack by the Reavers and are hiding to plan their next move. Laura and Professor X are sitting on the bed and watching George Stevens’ classic 1953 Western, Shane. It’s no coincidence that co-writer and director James Mangold included this particular film in LOGAN as the title characters of both films share similar qualities: Shane is a lone gunfighter, a remnant from the past stuck in a time when people are governed by law and order, while Logan is one mutant against a world conditioned to hate him and his kind. In both Shane and LOGAN, neither of the protagonists portray their heroic archetypes. (Hence the title, LOGAN, with no mention of the X-Men or Wolverine, and not too far a stretch from Shane.)
Shane enters a beautiful Wyoming valley and meets the Starretts, one of many families of homesteaders under pressure by a ruthless land baron named Ryker to vacate their land. When Shane tries to teach the Starrett’s boy, Joey, how to shoot a gun, the boy’s mother argues that the valley would be a much safer place if there were no guns, a reality that Shane reasons simply isn’t the way of the world. Logan’s homesteaders were once the X-Men, who took him in as a reluctant leader in their fight against Magneto and other super-villains. In LOGAN, that family has been reduced to only Professor Xavier, who routinely reminds Logan that there is still time for him to live a meaningful life that he believes Laura is the key to. Logan is convinced that the mutant safe haven “Eden” that Laura is searching for only exists in an old comic book that she carries, which Logan dismisses as fictionalized garbage. Yet, in their respective films, both Logan and Shane experience what these idyllic lives would be like — if only for a moment.
Shane is taken in by the Starretts and is given a place to sleep and honest work on their ranch. In LOGAN, the travelers are taken in by a family of farmers after an accident on the road, and Logan sees the simple life that Xavier hopes for him to find when they break bread with the family at their table. Both Shane’s and Logan’s worldviews are reinforced when they are confronted by the literal duality of their characters.
The land baron Ryker hires the murderous gunfighter, Jack Wilson (famously played by Jack Palance) to intimidate the homesteaders off their land, but he proves to be too unpredictable when he kills a farmer in the valley out of pleasure. Dr. Zander Rice, the leader of the Reavers and the lab Laura escaped from, releases a feral clone of Logan named X-24 to re-capture her. The Reavers locate them at the farmhouse and X-24 kills the family and Professor X before Logan and Laura are able to escape.
With these unavoidable obstacles ahead of them, both Logan and Shane are convinced to put aside their differences and fight for those who need them. Logan buries Professor X and agrees to take Laura to North Dakota because he knows it’s what Charles would have wanted, and because he has no other course to take. They eventually reach a fire watch outpost station where the other child test subjects who have escaped Rice’s lab are waiting for Laura to make the final crossing to “Eden” on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. With Ryker’s men setting fire to their homes and Jack Wilson threatening to kill them off, the homesteaders decide to fight back and Shane steps forward to help them.
At the climax of their respective films, both Shane and Logan embody the icons they represent to the children in their lives — Jacob and Laura, respectively. Shane enters the saloon every inch the brave gunfighter Joey believes him to be to face off against Ryker and Wilson. Logan makes the complete transformation into Wolverine with the help of the children, who give him a serum that replenishes his abilities and a side-burn trim while he’s sleeping that mimics his comic book likeness. He sprints down the mountainside, cutting down Reavers and vehicles as he goes, to cover the kids’ escape.
But Logan is mortally wounded in his fight against X-24, and so is Shane in his shootout against Wilson and Ryker.
The scene in Shane that Laura and Charles are watching in the hotel suite is the very end, when Shane stops on his way out of town to tell Joey goodbye. As he rides further away, Shane slumps forward on his horse and leaves the world he has no place in, while the little boy screams out for him, “Come back, Shane! Come back!”
With his dying breaths, Logan tells Laura not to become the weapon she was meant to be — a struggle he faced his entire life. This is where LOGAN succeeds where the Batman franchise never will. For all the actors who have portrayed the Caped Crusader, there has only been one Wolverine: Australian actor Hugh Jackman, who first drew the claws in 2000’s X-Men (his third film) and has since taken audiences on a journey across seven films against Wolverine’s biggest demons and arch-enemies, while standing up for those closest to him. A journey that ends in LOGAN’s bittersweet conclusion.
Laura and the other children bury Logan in the forest. They stand over his grave and Laura recites Shane’s last words to Joey before leaving the valley, a eulogy that encapsulates the struggle both men faced their entire lives: to be something more than the sum of what they are.
“A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can’t break the mold. There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand that sticks. Now you run on home to your mother. You tell her everything’s all right. There are no more guns in the valley.”
The children leave to find “Eden”. Laura adjusts the cross standing over the grave to an X to memorialize Logan as the last of the X-Men, and joins the others. As the camera slowly pushes in on the grave, the same voice can be heard at the end of LOGAN as it is in Shane: “Come back! Come back!”
But it isn’t spoken by Laura.
It’s from the audience.
