1 Year 100 Reviews — Logan

Bryson Roberts
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

From the very opening sequence of the movie, one thing is made painfully clear: this is going to be a miserable experience.

And it very well should be. Logan is set up to be the final hurrah for not only Hugh Jackman’s run as the Wolverine but the X-Men universe that has been running for nearly two decades at this point. Even though a lot of people saw X-Men: First Class as a reboot, it was really just a prequel that fed into the Other X-Men movies. It is kind of incredible to think that this franchise has been running longer than The Avengers by nearly a decade and has roughly just as many films in its library. Aside from Jackman and Patrick Stewart, everyone who started in these movies has moved on from the superhero genre. At this point, the franchise itself is about as old and worn-out as Wolverine is in this movie.

And that pretty much is the point. Logan is itself a metaphor for the X-Men franchise as a whole. The franchise needs to end because dragging it on any longer will only make it sadder and weaker. The fatigue Wolverine feels is kind of the same as the fatigue felt by audiences toward these movies. And, regardless of how many movies they shoehorn into this universe, Logan will still work as the perfect bookend for it.

All this makes me wonder if this movie will make any sense or be as good without the historical context going into it. Like, will people thirty years down the road be able to appreciate all the wonderful thing this movie accomplishes? Will many of these elements even make sense without having watched the previous movies leading up to this? I would like to think so, but this is literally something only time can tell.

On its own, what makes Logan work so well is the fact that it feels completely different from other superhero movies. While the R rating helps in this regard, it is far from the main reason for this. Instead, it is the fact that nothing Wolverine does feels glamorous. He is gross, ill, and just exhausted. Even the action and gore is unglorified, feeling just as misanthropic and miserable as anything else. And, I think this movie needed to be R-rated in order to tell the story as powerfully is the movie does. After seeing this, it becomes even more obvious how silly the violence in other X-Men movies look because of the lack of gore.

Even though the movie is gut-wrenchingly depressing and kind of painful to watch, that tone is strangely cathartic. You want it to end just as bad as the suffering characters on screen do. And, I think, this run of the franchise needs to be put down as well. I love the X-Men movies on the whole, but enough is enough. Let it rest for a few years (I would say 10, but realistically let’s say 5), then reboot the whole dang thing with new actors, a different mix of mutants, and start making different stories we haven’t seen yet.

Of course, this is Fox’s cash cow and they will run it into the ground before they do something smart.

A-

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