Logan, Hugh Jackman's dark and gritty swan song as the adamantium-enhanced Canadian mutant, has been out for two and a half weeks now, with an impressive box office total to date of over half a billion dollars. As usual, attendance dropped dramatically after the first couple of weeks, and now that the fan boy rush is out of the way, I'm hoping to see the film sometime in the next week or so. I have three potential opportunities lined up, and I'm confident that at least one of them will come through - if it's more than one, well, all reports indicate that it's a well done movie, so I won't say no to additional viewings.
So far I've managed to avoid seeing any serious spoilers regarding the plot, but the overall mise-en-scène is clear from the trailers: an older, less confident Wolverine, bitter, disillusioned, and perhaps slower to heal as his abilities diminish with age, who is taking care of a decrepit Professor X. There are no mansions, no stealth jets, but rather rusty sheds and battered cars instead.
A lot of fans were hoping that the movie would be closer to the 2008 comic book series Old Man Logan. This eight-issue alternate future* story takes place in a United States that has fallen to an alliance of super-villains, with the country divided between the Red Skull, Doctor Doom, the Kingpin, and the Hulk, who has killed the Abomination and taken over his domain on the West Coast. An aging, pacifist Logan, sworn never to use his claws again, lives a quiet life with his wife and two children while operating a farm on the edge of nowhere in Hulkland.
When his bucolic lifestyle is threatened by the Hulk Gang, whose members are the incestuous offspring of Bruce Banner and his first cousin the She-Hulk, Logan agrees to go on an extended road trip with a blinded Hawkeye in order to raise enough money to pay off his protection fees. As they travel from Logan's home in California to New Babylon, the Red Skull's capital city on the East Coast, Hawkeye discovers how the other X-Men died during the final battle with the super-villain alliance and the reasons for Logan's resulting renunciation of violence.
Ultimately, they're betrayed to the Red Skull, but Logan defeats him and uses fragments of Iron Man's armour from the Skull's trophy room to rapidly return to the West Coast, where he discovers that the Hulk Gang has killed his family in advance of the deadline for his payment, prompting the return of the Wolverine - claws and all.
Everything I've seen suggests a different future for the last X-Man in Logan, along with some substantial retconning for the child companion who appears in the trailers. Based on the configuration of her claws, she's got to be X-23, a clone of Logan who made her first appearance in the 2003 X-Men: Evolution animated series before moving to the comics. The comic book version eventually took over as the new Wolverine after Logan lost his healing abilities and then suffocated after being encased in adamantium.** At 12, Logan actress Dafne Keen seems a bit young to step into Logan's shoes, assuming that it is in fact the same character.
Which leads us to the big question: does Logan survive the movie? Does the Professor? Given that both Jackman and Patrick Stewart had announced that it was their final turn as those characters, it would make a lot of sense if one or both of them dies - why would a scriptwriter miss that opportunity?
However, that leaves a bit of a gap for the First Class series. James MacAvoy has been doing an excellent job as the young Professor X in those films, but Mr. Jackman has been the only person to play Wolverine. Will they simply leave him out of future films in the series?
There's no reason that they can't recast the role, but it feels like a loss. Hugh Jackman has done outstanding work as Logan, regardless of the quality of some of the scripts that's he's had to work with, and anyone who takes over will be faced with the huge challenge of attempting to match the high standard that he's set for the part.
But, let's face it, nothing lasts forever, and sooner or later, even the Wolverine has to hang up his claws - one way or another.
- Sid
* It has become difficult to keep track of all the X-Men alternate futures, to be honest.
** If any readers are going, "Wait, if he's dead, what about the Old Man Logan thing?"- as above, alternate futures. but you're right, it's confusing. Even so, being dead isn't always a permanent thing in either comic books or comic book movies.
