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Logan-First R Rated Wolverine Movie?


Manhole Eunuchsbane

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Weak villains seems to be a problem for some, but honestly other than The Joker, Magneto, Loki, (and maybe Lex Luthor and General Zod from the original Superman's) what comic book films do people consider to have extremely well done villains? And the rare case when the villains are so good they tend to outshine the heroes (The Dark Knight). I'm glad that didn't happen with Logan. It was about him afterall. 

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I loved it but that's from someone who has been a fan since the cartoon and comics of the 90s. Easily Wolverine's best outing and possibly the best X-men film but that's largely because I love the western genre and this was as much a western as a superhero film.

The chemistry between Xavier, Logan and Laura was excellent and carried the film. I also liked how worn out and damaged Logan was in the film.

I agree that the mad scientist was weak and

they may have been better having x-24 as Daken rather than a zombie-logan

but I thought Holbrook was really good as a fun antagonist - maybe to the point where it would have been better to have him and the Reavers as a bunch of mutant hating zealots.

It's a long time since I've wanted to see a film again at the cinema but this is one of them. Given how sterile and by the numbers Apocalypse was it was so nice to watch something that was heartfelt and made me genuinely care about the fate of the protagonists. Rogue One Spoilers for a comparison

I know I've had several films to get to know Xavier and Logan but it was this film that still made me feel there was a great sacrifice required to save the kids, whereas in Rogue One I was left cold by the sacrifice - I appreciated what they achieved but wasn't sad at their deaths

I hope this cements fox's approach to their x-films going forward. Lower budget more freedom and making the characters work. Just like with Deadpool. But they don't have to be R-rated to achieive this - although apparently the R-rating meant a lower budget which also meant they didn't have to have a silly CGI fest at the end of the film.

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1 hour ago, Nictarion said:

Weak villains seems to be a problem for some, but honestly other than The Joker, Magneto, Loki, (and maybe Lex Luthor and General Zod from the original Superman's) what comic book films do people consider to have extremely well done villains? And the rare case when the villains are so good they tend to outshine the heroes (The Dark Knight). I'm glad that didn't happen with Logan. It was about him afterall. 

Well you've mentioned the best ones, Magneto, Bane, The Joker. Mixed feelings on Hiddlestone Loki but he's alright.

I also really liked General Zod in Man of Steel.

What works for me generally in films with super-powered characters is if the villain is also of a similar level. So not a regular human, like Lex Luthor in Batman vs Superman, or this anonymous guy in "Logan". So for instance, Darkseid would really work for me in Justice League, and certainly Thanos in the upcoming Avengers film, or Enchantress and other assorted villains in the upcoming Thor Ragnarok film.

In this film, I would have liked to have seen Mr. Sinister, at last.

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6 hours ago, Nictarion said:

Weak villains seems to be a problem for some, but honestly other than The Joker, Magneto, Loki, (and maybe Lex Luthor and General Zod from the original Superman's) what comic book films do people consider to have extremely well done villains? And the rare case when the villains are so good they tend to outshine the heroes (The Dark Knight). I'm glad that didn't happen with Logan. It was about him afterall. 

Ultron should have been an extremely well done villain. He was good, but not great. I felt like Ultron didn't quite live up to the marketing. The problem there though is that Ultron was originally conceived in a pre-internet world. Ultron in a connected world is either a lot less scary or a lot more scary. Of course for the movie he should have been a lot more scary, but in that sort of story there is almost no action as all the danger is via the internet.

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X-24 being

Logan's clone works well enough. It's Logan LITERALLY running away from his past and confronted with his very own worst self, with X-23 being his best

 

 

11 hours ago, Calibandar said:

 

In this film, I would have liked to have seen Mr. Sinister, at last.

 

He's too powerful for a solo Wolverine movie- Sinister used to beat up with ease teams with a dozen X-men, so there's really no way for Logan to win on his own, let alone an old, over the hill Logan.

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Was kind of disappointed after all the hype. It had good action sequences but was often very slow, and the villains were really lame. The ending was a bit too saccharine along with being stupid. 

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19 hours ago, Calibandar said:

Well you've mentioned the best ones, Magneto, Bane, The Joker. Mixed feelings on Hiddlestone Loki but he's alright.

 

In this film, I would have liked to have seen Mr. Sinister, at last.

Loki works largely because the rest of the MCU villains are so bad.

I do wonder where Sinister is - he was clearly name-checked in the post credits scene of "apocalypse" and surely

the weapon x samples stolen were the ones used to make x-23, etc and that the company that wiped out mutantkind was Sinisters?

.

Maybe they only heard about Bryan Cranston wanting to play Sinister while "logan" was being filmed and they demoted mad scientist guy so they can have sinister in another film.

6 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Was kind of disappointed after all the hype. It had good action sequences but was often very slow, and the villains were really lame. The ending was a bit too saccharine along with being stupid. 

Which elements were stupid?

I thought it was convenient there was a house at the meeting point. Until that I thought it was nice how the comic created a legend/meeting place for them without being true. It would have been nice to know whether Canada was a safe haven for mutants or not as a lot seemed to rest on that assumption.

Another I read yesterday suggested that one event mentioned in the film was even darker than I'd originally thought

the director discussed how the film was initially going to open depicting Xavier's mental episode in Westchester. It strongly implies that's how the X-men were killed. At least all the ones who'd survived the mutant plague. If that's the case then Xavier's life is indeed a tragic one but it also says a lot about Logan's dedication to the man as some iterations of Logan would have put Xavier down for that.

 

 

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Loved it, felt a bit slow at times (especially in the beginning) but overall it was a great experience. I think i'll be watching it again this weekend. Loved the action and the full-on berseker mode that a Wolverine movie deserves.

I heard that the director wanted to

show us in the intro what happened to the X-Men with a flashback but he ultimately decided against it. i think it would have worked just fine, maybe in the Bluray version we will get that scene

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5 minutes ago, GeorgeIAF said:

Loved it, felt a bit slow at times (especially in the beginning) but overall it was a great experience. I think i'll be watching it again this weekend. Loved the action and the full-on berseker mode that a Wolverine movie deserves.

I heard that the director wanted to

  Hide contents

show us in the intro what happened to the X-Men with a flashback but he ultimately decided against it. i think it would have worked just fine, maybe in the Bluray version we will get that scene

 

I think the reasoning for cutting it was justified. Opening with a big SFX scene sets the wrong tone and shifts the focus away from Logan and onto Xavier and the X-men. If they filmed it, I'd like to see it though. I'm not sure they did film it because

they would probably have had to involve some of the X-men cast and mediasites are notoriously good at noticing and reporting that

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5 hours ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

X-men Last Stand might be more for you.

Nope, hated that. Much of the drama wasn't because the villains were good, it was because the heroes were really stupid.

Thematically it was good, but it required a suspension of disbelief in people behaving like idiots that I just couldn't give. 

 

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4 hours ago, red snow said:

I think the reasoning for cutting it was justified. Opening with a big SFX scene sets the wrong tone and shifts the focus away from Logan and onto Xavier and the X-men. If they filmed it, I'd like to see it though. I'm not sure they did film it because

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they would probably have had to involve some of the X-men cast and mediasites are notoriously good at noticing and reporting that

 

Yeah they didn't film it.

Quote

“It actually hits home a lot harder than the versions that really painted out specifically the flashback. Of course there are versions we wrote that were never filmed with the actual flashback of what happened, but I’ve found the experience of watching it is far more poignant to just know that it was something really regrettable and it was bad and most likely, friends were lost. Or maybe it was people we didn’t know.”

http://screenrant.com/logan-movie-professor-x-backstory-cut/

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8 hours ago, red snow said:

Which elements were stupid?

  Reveal hidden contents

I thought it was convenient there was a house at the meeting point. Until that I thought it was nice how the comic created a legend/meeting place for them without being true. It would have been nice to know whether Canada was a safe haven for mutants or not as a lot seemed to rest on that assumption.

 

 

Now that I'm at my computer I can go into depth a bit more, since it's pretty heavily spoilery.

Spoiler

The movie starts out pretty well, establishing the sad pathos of Logan and Charles and the pathetic dream they have, along with the introduction of Laura. The opening fight sequence was great with a lot of largely decent choices, though I don't understand why they weren't attempting to kill Logan more at that point. I love how Laura is incredibly deadly but can't defy the laws of physics, and bigger men can overpower her and use leverage to hold her down. Reminded me a lot of Hit-Girl. 

Getting on the road to Oklahoma and the casino scene was also good, and established more of Charles and Laura, and the seizure/paralysis scene was oddly compelling. 

But then the movie kind of goes off the rails. Logan et al deciding to hang out at a house and never attempting to determine how they're being tracked was stupid; they never once think about how they were followed or why the dudes show up at the casino. Weapon X-24 being the enemy was fine, I guess, but not as satisfying as I'd like; it felt like the only mutations worth a damn in this world were Logan's, and while thematically it worked it wasn't interesting from a combat perspective. Caliban going out with a bang was cheezy, especially when he had done so much to hurt the others. And the only real danger that the thugs presented seemed to be in killing innocent bystanders. 

The next parts - of Laura and Logan fighting and coming to grips with the trip and Logan's mortality - were good. Eden, however, was not. Laura required massive help to get to where they needed to go, but the rest of the kids appeared to be able to travel easily from Mexico to North Dakota without any help or transportation, and most of them aren't remotely as capable as Laura is. We don't even get any exposition on how they did it. We don't even get a hint from Gabriella that they did - the last we saw was them running out of the base haphazardly. But they're all there, at Eden, and ready to go over - and thanks to a fairly stupid clue (why does both the comic book AND the picture have the coordinates?) the bad guys are there at the precise time they're going to cross. 

And instead of grabbing them at the house when they're sleeping, they wait for them to attempt to cross. 

And instead of the kids fighting back at all, they are just running randomly through the forest. The kids have been at least somewhat trained in fighting; why aren't they going after these guys? Why are they running like it's a game of Red Rover? Heck, why is Transgen even interested in them, given that they've shown zero interest in the kids prior to this? At this point everyone is acting stupidly - the villains, the heroes, everyone. 

I don't even mind the adamantium bullet thing, as implausible as it would be (if adamantium could cut/penetrate adamantium Logan shouldn't ever be able to block the claws of Weapon X-24, as an example). It worked fine and was thematic and absurdly telegraphed. Logan dying was good. But the whole fight felt bizarrely capped. Pierce never really materialized as a capable villain or an intelligent one, never was a particular threat, and ended up being just a crap bully. Rice was meh as well. 

It was one of the better superhero stories and the R rating definitely helped. The acting was great, especially Stewart and Jackman. But the plot felt oddly disengaging to me.

 

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17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Now that I'm at my computer I can go into depth a bit more, since it's pretty heavily spoilery.

  Hide contents

The movie starts out pretty well, establishing the sad pathos of Logan and Charles and the pathetic dream they have, along with the introduction of Laura. The opening fight sequence was great with a lot of largely decent choices, though I don't understand why they weren't attempting to kill Logan more at that point. I love how Laura is incredibly deadly but can't defy the laws of physics, and bigger men can overpower her and use leverage to hold her down. Reminded me a lot of Hit-Girl. 

Getting on the road to Oklahoma and the casino scene was also good, and established more of Charles and Laura, and the seizure/paralysis scene was oddly compelling. 

But then the movie kind of goes off the rails. Logan et al deciding to hang out at a house and never attempting to determine how they're being tracked was stupid; they never once think about how they were followed or why the dudes show up at the casino. Weapon X-24 being the enemy was fine, I guess, but not as satisfying as I'd like; it felt like the only mutations worth a damn in this world were Logan's, and while thematically it worked it wasn't interesting from a combat perspective. Caliban going out with a bang was cheezy, especially when he had done so much to hurt the others. And the only real danger that the thugs presented seemed to be in killing innocent bystanders. 

The next parts - of Laura and Logan fighting and coming to grips with the trip and Logan's mortality - were good. Eden, however, was not. Laura required massive help to get to where they needed to go, but the rest of the kids appeared to be able to travel easily from Mexico to North Dakota without any help or transportation, and most of them aren't remotely as capable as Laura is. We don't even get any exposition on how they did it. We don't even get a hint from Gabriella that they did - the last we saw was them running out of the base haphazardly. But they're all there, at Eden, and ready to go over - and thanks to a fairly stupid clue (why does both the comic book AND the picture have the coordinates?) the bad guys are there at the precise time they're going to cross. 

And instead of grabbing them at the house when they're sleeping, they wait for them to attempt to cross. 

And instead of the kids fighting back at all, they are just running randomly through the forest. The kids have been at least somewhat trained in fighting; why aren't they going after these guys? Why are they running like it's a game of Red Rover? Heck, why is Transgen even interested in them, given that they've shown zero interest in the kids prior to this? At this point everyone is acting stupidly - the villains, the heroes, everyone. 

I don't even mind the adamantium bullet thing, as implausible as it would be (if adamantium could cut/penetrate adamantium Logan shouldn't ever be able to block the claws of Weapon X-24, as an example). It worked fine and was thematic and absurdly telegraphed. Logan dying was good. But the whole fight felt bizarrely capped. Pierce never really materialized as a capable villain or an intelligent one, never was a particular threat, and ended up being just a crap bully. Rice was meh as well. 

It was one of the better superhero stories and the R rating definitely helped. The acting was great, especially Stewart and Jackman. But the plot felt oddly disengaging to me.

 

Some great analysis there and you uncovered some added layers of stupidity now you mention them that I can see would be irksome.

I definitely thought it was stupid how

they spent so much time with that family given they were being hunted down. The weird thing was that Logan knew he was endangering them - it was more Xavier insisting they spend more time there

The kids

not fighting back and just running away did seem odd to me as well. I put it down to them being immature and frightened as together they could have easily beaten the soldiers (their powers were far stronger than Laura's) but now you've pointed out that they got that far on their own the "they were scared kids" doesn't hold up as well.

Regarding the labs I was also struck by it being somewhat unimaginative to

think healing power and claws (adamantium seems an abundant metal these days) is the most useful weapon when there were all the other bigger powers to tap into. Also, how useful is X-24 really as a super soldier? He seemed incapable of thought so at best could just be a glorified attack dog.

 

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As an example, here's how you can make it almost immediately better:

Spoiler

Laura - like all the kids - has a tracker on her, spliced into one of her claws (because otherwise her body would just spit it out). That's how they first track her at the casino, Logan thinks, so in a painful sequence they have to remove one of her claws for a bit, cut out the tracker, and then put it back - this establishes that adamantium can be used to cut through it, too. 

THEN they go to the house, because they figure they've lost the trail and are safe. But unbeknownst to them, Caliban has turned and is tracking them. Even reveal caliban here, so that we actually see the villains thinking ahead and doing smart shit, and make it so the good guys weren't being totally dumb and suffering for their bad choices like a horror movie. 

You can also change the dynamic of the X-24 fight by not giving him adamantium. Make him have the bone claws, and give the reasoning behind wanting to get Laura that she has adamantium that they want to make their weapon better. That's the real reason they want her specifically back, and why they don't care about the other kids. It also makes the fight a bit more balanced and you can make X-24 a lot more bad-ass without being as powerful. You can also make him more feral - note that without the adamantium his healing factor is insanely fast, he's far more ragey, and far less in control. 

Later they go to Eden and we think things are kind of okay, until we realize that the kids have trackers too - and they didn't get removed. Logan realizes this and prepares the kids for a fight. Logan realizes that he can't keep running from his past. We get a cool LA Confidential holed up fight between the kids and Logan and Laura vs. the soldiers, who don't care about the kids and are happy to kill them. It's brutal and violent and tragic, and we can even see some of the supersoldiers actually flex a bit of muscle this way. Logan finally takes the serum to be able to turn the tide, wipes out a bunch, but then runs out just as X-24 gets unleashed. Again, you can make everyone smart this way, as well as get more mutant fights vs. supersoldiers and less random thugs. The adamantium bullet makes more sense here too, as it would just obliterate X-24; alternately, you can go the Daken route, and have Logan drown X-24 in water - one of the only ways to kill a Wolverine. But not before being insanely stabbed over and over.

This keeps most of the thematic elements - the longing for family and togetherness, the old gunslinger running away from their trouble, the fighting of the new - while making much of the actual motivations better, and making much of the decision making much better.

 

 

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37 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

As an example, here's how you can make it almost immediately better:

  Hide contents

Laura - like all the kids - has a tracker on her, spliced into one of her claws (because otherwise her body would just spit it out). That's how they first track her at the casino, Logan thinks, so in a painful sequence they have to remove one of her claws for a bit, cut out the tracker, and then put it back - this establishes that adamantium can be used to cut through it, too. 

THEN they go to the house, because they figure they've lost the trail and are safe. But unbeknownst to them, Caliban has turned and is tracking them. Even reveal caliban here, so that we actually see the villains thinking ahead and doing smart shit, and make it so the good guys weren't being totally dumb and suffering for their bad choices like a horror movie. 

You can also change the dynamic of the X-24 fight by not giving him adamantium. Make him have the bone claws, and give the reasoning behind wanting to get Laura that she has adamantium that they want to make their weapon better. That's the real reason they want her specifically back, and why they don't care about the other kids. It also makes the fight a bit more balanced and you can make X-24 a lot more bad-ass without being as powerful. You can also make him more feral - note that without the adamantium his healing factor is insanely fast, he's far more ragey, and far less in control. 

Later they go to Eden and we think things are kind of okay, until we realize that the kids have trackers too - and they didn't get removed. Logan realizes this and prepares the kids for a fight. Logan realizes that he can't keep running from his past. We get a cool LA Confidential holed up fight between the kids and Logan and Laura vs. the soldiers, who don't care about the kids and are happy to kill them. It's brutal and violent and tragic, and we can even see some of the supersoldiers actually flex a bit of muscle this way. Logan finally takes the serum to be able to turn the tide, wipes out a bunch, but then runs out just as X-24 gets unleashed. Again, you can make everyone smart this way, as well as get more mutant fights vs. supersoldiers and less random thugs. The adamantium bullet makes more sense here too, as it would just obliterate X-24; alternately, you can go the Daken route, and have Logan drown X-24 in water - one of the only ways to kill a Wolverine. But not before being insanely stabbed over and over.

This keeps most of the thematic elements - the longing for family and togetherness, the old gunslinger running away from their trouble, the fighting of the new - while making much of the actual motivations better, and making much of the decision making much better.

 

 

They should get you for the screenplay of the remake in 15 years time. I'd have loved to have seen

a brutal attack on Eden with the kids using their powers to defend themselves against a competent attack from the Reavers

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Quote

It was one of the better superhero stories and the R rating definitely helped. The acting was great, especially Stewart and Jackman. But the plot felt oddly disengaging to me

I think I'd agree with this. Though like you I make the qualification that up and including the casino scene, it's fine.

I even liked the scenes at the house. They are aware they are being tracked of course, Logan keeps insisting that they should leave, but Charles just wants to stay because as he says, he hasn't had such a good evening in years. I agree that the kids not fighting back was really surprising, that made no sense to me given their powers. Zombie Logan did not work for me, just choose something else.

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Loved the film, don't care that much about timelines and such, but...

Spoiler

...I think this film actually works better if you imagine that all the previous movies are to be treated the same as the comics that you see throughout the film. Yes, something happened at the Statue of Liberty, but the film is as reliable as the comics. It's become a myth. It feels like, for such a worn out and dying pair as Logan and Xavier, the official past is almost too glamorous. 

Props to the movie for not cramming in some hot 20 something and sticking to what it needs to be; a movie about being old and approaching death.

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