Wolverine: Why is he so popular?

I feel like there was a more recent thread where Logan came up but with search down I can't find it so I found this with the google.

Saw Logan tonight, it is incredible. I vouched hard for the last Wolverine movie in some other thread (the one in Japan where he falls in love); never bothered with the first one which I heard was complete rubbish. But Logan is another level; certainly, by far, the best Xmen movie, and, if they choose for it to be such, a decent way to end the series. Jackman and Stewart are just great; the girl is great. The final scene is great. In the running for the best comics movie of all time.

I posted my review in the "Random Marvel Blabbery" thread... similar sentiments to yours!

(How painful was the Deadpool teaser that preceded it, though?)

haven't seen Logan but if you're talking about the phone booth teaser trailer, I love that thing to death

Diff'rent strokes, I guess...

Yeah it's possibly the best comic book film yet. Just leagues above the rest in so many ways. Also - Wolverine being Wolverine.

Ghost World? Akira? Danger: Diabolik? Scott Pilgrim? American Splendour? Snowpiercer? Nausicaa? When The Wind Blows?

Prof. X is very much a Clowesian grump in this movie. Also bearderine looks disturbingly like Mel Gibson.

Also, Snowpiercer was mostly rubbish

I would give the edge to The Dark Knight (it wasn't perfect, but was pretty darn good). Caveat: I have not seen every one of the other 5,980 comic book movies released in the past ten years.

The Dark Knight was dumb as fuck

The Dark Knight is an enjoyable movie, but the title character is the least interesting thing about it. Wolverine is consistently the most interesting thing about the movies he's in.

Did I miss an explanation about why there are no more mutants or is that in a line midway through the film?
Was aware of the comic arc where mutants died out from I think about 10 years ago. But wouldn't be something that would be immediate to large chunks of the audience. Or there would be a large amount of the audience who wouldn't be familiar with it at least.
Also does this story directly map to other comic arcs?

Oh, I didn't quite make the connection with the corn syrup: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/03/logan-x-men-killed-westchester-incident-professor-x-where-are-the-mutants

This was like Mad Max + The Road + Hanna + X-Men.

The Dark Knight was dumb as fuck

Nah, you must be thinking of one of the other two Nolan movies... "The Dark Knight" (2008) was pretty awesome!

xp in the movie they breeze over it in a couple lines, amazingly - through secret gene therapy in public water/food they weeded out mutantkind in a generation

the movie is very loosely inspired by a story called Old Man Logan which is much much worse than the movie turned out, they only took the bare bones of the plot (buddy road trip in an apocalyptic wasteland with old Wolverine) and changed the story and characters entirely. honestly the movie is more "inspired" by video game The Last of Us than anything else imo

the dark knight was totally great, it's board heresy to actually say so though for some reason. probably lingering Bush-era hatred

Xp, had this written.
Yeah got what Xavier said, missed the corn syrup.
Did wonder if it was Old Man Logan based but not sure where the cbr I had is. Couldn't get a new d/ld last week.

Funny seeing Stephen Gervais-buddy as Caliban.
Not sure what else he's done filmwise.

xp in the movie they breeze over it in a couple lines, amazingly - through secret gene therapy in public water/food they weeded out mutantkind in a generation

I agree this was oddly tossed-off (and was one of the few false notes in the plot for me; could that really be feasibly implemented / "work"? hard to suspend disbelief).

If we're doing spoiler-y discussion, one other small thing that bugged me was the pivotal cell phone video -- no way could she have recorded/edited that (she wouldn't have even been allowed to have a personal phone in there, let alone stand around filming... and some of the shots were just impossible!). I realize they had to deliver the background info to the viewer (and Logan) with more "impact" than if the nurse just told the story to the camera. I guess including more conventional "flashback" images, to accompany her narrative, would not have fit the style of the film. Not sure how I would have solved that problem, as director.

(A final thing I wasn't crazy about was the graphic fate of certain sympathetic characters... but I'm a softy in that regard.)

One other thing I thought was funny was the idea that kids would be safe once they had asylum in Canada (head bad guy: "We must stop them before they reach the border!"). Those Reavers didn't seem like the type to respect territorial sovereignty! But maybe the point was just that the kids would be well hidden, or Alpha Flight would be protecting their asses...

(I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, but that's just because I liked the movie so much overall that these few things stand out as "off notes" or w/e)

not tossed off! there is a whole section of the movie where they fight GMO corn bullies. if anything, dr. posh nosh should have not blabbed and bragged bond villain style, and they could have just let the camera rest ominously on a box of corn flakes.

True, they did their due diligence in setting it up... but the reveal was still somewhat startling, and only left me thinking, "They found a way to get the *whole world* eating that corn syrup?"

monsanto doesn't play around.

I thought the well-edited cell phone video was strange as well but I let it slide.

maybe video editing apps have gotten really good and user-friendly by 2029

I may be totally making this up, but is it possible that it was just US mutants that died?

The Dark Knight's greatness is only a heresy on the other board, I think.

xp
You know, that's a good point, I forgot it's "da fyooture"... (I thought the prominent Sony branding of the phone was interesting, considering it's a Fox movie... you'd expect that in a Spider-Man pic.)

<i>if anything, dr. posh nosh should have not blabbed and bragged bond villain style, and they could have just let the camera rest ominously on a box of corn flakes</i>

...and speaking of product placement, wasn't it Kellogg's Corn Flakes that Laura was eating in Caliban's shack (before she calmly busts some heads)? That must have been a deliberate nod to the GMO storyline, I didn't catch that.

as someone in that general industry I assure you we are ambivalent to mutant powers

I'm all 'bout them GMOs; don't care if they suppress my healing factor

the worldwide by 2029 thing seems plausible, china actually planted as much corn as north america last year

People are complaining about glucose-fructose syrup's debilitating effects in the real world. That's corn derived I think.
Wonder if that's why I didn't take it in with the mutant demise cos it had me linking it elsewhere.

My wife declares Logan to be the most violent film we've ever seen, and I was all, "No, surely not!", but actually having trouble thinking of one more so, having avoided torture porn so far. Really liked it, the whole downbeatness and minimal apparent CGI. And the Xavier seizures were genuinely upsetting to experience as viewers.

Also, the actress playing Laura, where do they find a child who can act like that? Especially as it's almost all body language for the first 2/3 of the film.

watching this a couple days after my grandfather's funeral, when he was very mentally disconnected toward the end, made Patrick Stewart's role seem very true

the medicated parts where he doesn't know quite what's going on and lays blame on Logan, not for any specific thing but just all kinds of blame, because he has no control or even understanding of his life, was very realistic

Jackman is getting the lion's share of credit/publicity for the film, but Stewart did just a great a job on his way out

Also, the actress playing Laura, where do they find a child who can act like that? Especially as it's almost all body language for the first 2/3 of the film.

Apparently they looked high and wide, and found her in a UK/Spain family of actors. Something else I read said that an earlier draft had Laura talking a lot, from the outset; and a writer came in and stripped the dialogue way down, confident that she shouldn't speak until towards the end. (I think this is all in the film's Wikipedia entry, which was pretty much the extent of my post-viewing "tell me more" research.)

Phew, that was heavy! Really good though. Feel like they could have left the violence offscreen for the first two-thirds of the movie and it would have been ok (and maybe a bit more impactful). I was numb to it by the end. The scenes between Logan and Xavier were heartbreaking. And yeah - the girl who played Laura was amazing.

Also, as far as I could see this was wonderfully free of a Stan lee cameo! Hurrah!

Pretty sure he was at the casino

Aw, fuck

He should have left his wig off to respect the theme of aging

yeah, the idea that stan lee will still be alive, still hanging around being boring in 2029 one of the most frightening things about that projected future

This was like Mad Max + The Road + Hanna + X-Men

and a wee bit of children of men, right?

i wasn't super into this for a lot of different reasons which are too boring to get into here but i thought the scenes that were about family dynamics were really well done, and yes patrick stewart and the little girl were both really great

Downloaded this and loved it, mostly, but had to skip over the wholesome farm family interlude. I was shocked by how long it goes on--the action comes to a complete stop for 15 minutes! Feel like Wolverine and X23 could have learned the This Is What A Loving Family Looks Like lesson in a fraction of that boring time.

The farm family thing was where the movie really hit the skids for me - up until that point I was really digging on the setup, this very unfamiliar situation for the characters, seeing stuff like Wolverine loading Professor X's wheelchair in the trunk - so many really good details and you don't have a really strong sense of where this is all going. As soon as the farm family shows up it locks into a much more predictable movie: these guys are obviously all doomed and from there on out we're going to be in a Waterworld remake. There are still great moments after that (the little doctor's office scene was really well done in a non-showy way, I thought) but it becomes a more generic movie, with a particularly dicey final action sequence - oddly evocative of X-Men 3, of all things, and the kids alternated between forgetting they had superpowers, and then using them in ways that really felt like the B-team came in to do the shots and the effects.

Seemed particularly shitty that Wolverine basically dooms the family by getting involved in the confrontation with the evil agro corporation - hard to watch that and not think "oh, what, so Logan's gonna skip town tomorrow and these thugs are gonna come back around and burn the house down, or what?" It's also in this stretch that we wind up Professor X's arc and it seemed a really perfunctory end to this character, after all these years. But then the same could be said for Logan also.... evil twin Wolverine just didn't work well for me as a main antagonist. I get what they were going for thematically, but it doesn't quite take off as anything really interesting even if the fights are great.

y'know I was just thinking the other day about how I wish you had continued that Claremont/X-Men blog

I think about that a lot! Always feels like something we MIGHT pick back up again someday, maybe with slightly different expectations for ourselves. I fell out of keeping up with current comics again right around the time we lost track of the blog, and that was a small but subtle angle of interest, being able to refer to much more recent developments. But I was always really itching to get to the point where we could alternate between X-Men and New Mutants, all the different artists coming and going, the recurring themes becoming clearer and clearer with time even as you can feel Claremont constantly itching to escape any kind of fixed setup or status quo for the book... ahhhh, I love that whole period. Maybe! Maybe!

I'm not even a big X-Men fan (altho the apex of Claremont's run did coincide w my peak superhero-comics-buying years ie, the mid-80s), I just dug the approach and perspective on something that's so canonical