I think people are finally starting to get tired of superhero movies. When Spider-Man came out in 2001, it was a novelty. Nobody complained about the cookie-cutter plot or its predictability; it was a spectacle and it served mostly to wow and amaze. It’s alreay almost been a decade, and in that time, Marvel has inundated us with these film adaptations– we’ve now seen Daredevil’s acrobatics, the incredible cosmic powers of the Fantastic Four, and Tony Stark’s genius technology, all brought to screen. X-Men Origins: Wolverine might wow and amaze us too, with Wolverine’s huge, metallic claws and his healing factor, Gambit’s exploding cards and his staff acrobatics, and Deadpool’s… well, all the awesome stuff he does that I really would rather not spoil. But we’ve already seen three other X-Men movies and therefore dozens of other mutants with their incredible powers. Like the continuing excessive violence we’ve come to expect from horror films, super hero movies have begun to desensitize us to the spectacular.
Or, may I say, it’s done that to a lot of us. Personally, I’m still enthralled with seeing comic books brought to life, but I think that’s because I was waiting for this particular age of pop culture through my whole childhood. I was reading comics and obsessing with superheroes when the closest you could get to seeing them brought to life was excellent animated shows like Fox’s Batman: The Animated Series, Spider-Man and X-Men. Mainstream comics brought to screen were limited to Batman, Superman, and a couple of low-budget attempts by Marvel including Captain America and the much-hated Punisher. Now “superhero” is its own film genre, and with two or three coming out each year (sometimes more) I personally find myself watching more movies in general. It really is my favorite genre.
So the question I find myself asking is whether or not I would have enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine if I didn’t already know the Wolverine story. Because if you look it solely on its faithfulness to the comics, it does a bang-up job. The movie’s teaser, where Logan and Victor are children during the Civil War, is right out of Origin, the excellent four-part miniseries from the 90s that chronicled Wolverine’s early history, as are his bony claws. The film makes a lot of additions to the origin that weren’t in the comics, and while I didn’t think they were neccessarily improvements over the original material, I thought they were respectful to that material, often clever, and made it more than just a Wolverine flashback movie. When the title was first revealed, I thought X-Men Origins: Wolverine sounded like a direct-to-video cartoon movie, but the writers took that title and ran with it. I would have to spoil some of its best moments to explain why, but this is as much a set-up for the X-Men themselves as it is a Wolverine Origin story. You’ve probably seen that Cyclops is the movie from the trailers– don’t worry, there’s a very good reason, and no, he and Wolverine never meet.
It’s not only respectful to comic book canon, but it seems to remember nearly everything that happens after it. This is one of the best prequels I’ve ever seen (high praise, because I general don’t like them) because it takes the background Wolverine learned in X2 and runs with it. Stryker’s past is explored and his origin, about his mutant son who killed his wife, is left intact, helping to make him a tortured character before he starts the Weapon X project. Sometimes it feels like the only reason Gambit is in this movie is because fans missed him in the others, but Remy Labeau’s name is on a monitor from the Weapon X project in X2, making it only logical he should be here. He was one of the many mutants Stryker captured and experimented on. Some fans might argue that he didn’t get enough screen time or that Taylor Kitsch doesn’t sound caijin enough (and I would agree on that point) but his presence makes sense– although by the end, you wonder where the heck he is during all the important stuff in the later X-Men movies. And there are a lot of little nods for fans, including a scene where Logan gets the motorcycle jacket he wears in the later films. I love the casting choice for Kayla Silverfox– she reminds me a little of Femke Jansen, and I wonder if that has something to do with why Logan goes after Jean-Grey in the X-Men movies.
And it doesn’t have that annoying issue everyone had with X-Men 3– too many characters and not enough time to develop them. There are a lot of mutants in this movie, but it’s about Wolverine, not them, so it’s okay when they only appear in a chapter of Logan’s life and then disappear (or come back briefly later for various reasons). This movie spans a lot more time than the other X-Men movies, and that helps it immensely. They have a lot of fun with Blob, Gambit, and especially Sabretooth, and by the end, I was glad the whole movie wasn’t just Wolverine fighting and running from the government. Victor (Sabretooth) is scary, demented, and smart– everything he wasn’t in X-Men. Probably the only canonical thing it ignores is that Sabretooth, later, is just a lumbering henchman. Here, he has his own agenda and motives, and he’s probably the cloest (from my recollection of the comics) to his comic counterpart than anyone else in the movie except for Wolverine.
It’s definitely not perfect. Sometimes I feel like it isn’t giving its viewers enough credit. I don’t want to give away how Wolverine loses his memories at the end, but the movie comments on it ad nauseum before it happens. I would have bought it without the exposition of why it works, and frankly, it seemed hokier with that explanation. I think if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I think an opportunity was missed to use this movie and tie the X-Men into the rest of the Marvel movie canon, with all the Avengers stuff they’re doing in their other movies– a friend of mine suggested it might have been neat to see a glimpse of Captain America fighting with Wolverine during WWII. And how many times are we supposed to think Wolverine and Sabretooth running at each other is cool? They run right at each other four or five times in the movie– it seems to be their only move. Just once, I would have liked to see them walked toward each other slowly, growl menacingly, and then throw down. But nope, constant running, yelling, then slicing. Although Sabretooth’s catlike movements are pretty neat.
I still haven’t answered the original question. Will you enjoy this movie if you aren’t already a fan of the frachise? Maybe. Certainly not, if you’re expected The Dark Knight or Iron Man. And herein lies the problems for a lot of critics, including Roger Ebert. So far, the concensus seems to be that it’s too much about action and not enough about character. And I’d say that’s because too many comic book movies exist now for comparison. It isn’t enough anymore to be Spider-Man, you have to be Spider-Man 2, a movie with more character depth, with less predictability. And even that is hardly enough in 2009. Now we’ve had The Dark Knight, a movie with such depth it doesn’t feel like a comic book film most of the time– it’s a gritty crime drama that just happens to have characters running around in costume. And Iron Man is about a guy who learns to take responsibility for the mistakes he made throwing his millions around– it’s not about a guy who decides to put on a suit and become a superhero.
So it seems like, despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, there’s no longer any room for the comic book action movie, as we saw, loved, gushed over, and set records with in 2001. No, the Wolverine movie is not deep character drama. No, it doesn’t have much to say about society or the human condition that X2 didn’t already cover (people hunt/kill/are afraid of what they can’t understand, etc). Yes, it’s another revenge story, although I give it credit, because while he’s seeking revenge, Wolverine instead discovers a way to be heroic. Okay, so he doesn’t remember any of it later, but he is essentially the same character he is before he loses his memory, which might be a commentary on what makes up someone’s personality.
But it’s also what Wolverine’s origin was supposed to be. Wolverine is not a deep character. You can’t put him in a crime drama. You can’t put him in a mystery. He slashes things with his claws and he’s impulsive, so if he thinks somebody killed his girlfriend, he’s going to go try to kill him. The movie is good because it makes X2 (still one of Marvel’s best, I think) even better than it was, and because it manages to be an X-Men movie, before there’s any X-Men. I feel like it was made for me, and maybe not for everyone. But if it had come out after the first one, around the same time Spider-Man came out, I think audiences would have had a different reaction.
LLAP
-Cap’n Logan
