Just watched last night after work and it was SO SO GOOD.
I was telling N that we should watch Logan for sure (when choosing which movie to watch) because 1. MARVEL LEH and 2. support my Disney stock haha 😂 the dividends they pay me are almost like I get to watch their movies for free…
So N said, eh then I also want to buy Disney stock.
💁 I told him, sorry too late Disney stock went up liao. Who ask you never buy together with me during the down last year? 😆
He was pouting after that HAHAHA
If you haven't watched it yet…warning that there will be spoilers in today's post!
POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD
5 Reasons why I loved the movie Logan
1. It is Hugh Jackman's swansong
Any Marvel fan worth his or her salt HAS to watch this. Isn't that a good enough reason lol.
I've seen Hugh Jackman in Wolverine since he took on the role 17 years ago when I was a kid. How can you not watch his final movie?!?
And this is one hell of an epic send-off to Wolverine. Marvel movies seldom make me cry, but I teared in this one.
In Logan, Wolverine isn't the Wolverine that we know anymore.
That's why the title of the movie is Logan, his given name. He's no longer as indestructible, he's slower, he's older, and he's broken.
What makes Wolverine, Wolverine?
To me, it has always been:
– his claws
– his ability to heal so quickly (giving him near immortality)
– his bad temper
– his tough on the outside, soft on the inside persona
– his scruffy hair lololol
This film focuses more on the grit that is Logan, rather than the wow factors of Wolverine. For one, the adamantium inside him is slowly killing him, and he no longer heals as quickly as before.
You know that's a sign that he's going to die soon right?
But the scriptwriters get to choose whether they want to keep him alive for one more movie, or kill him off now.
Actually the ending is damn obvious now that I think back. I think I was just so flabbergasted in the cinema when it happened because I was so caught up in the film that I was being guided by my heart instead of my brain then.
😭😭😭😭😭😭
2. You're watching Logan aka Wolverine's broken side
Logan has been through a lot. In previous films, we've watched him watch the people he love get cruelly killed and taken away from him. I always lose track of the Marvel universe timeline, but it is clear that there are gaps here waiting for another movie to fill. The emotional trauma is too much for any human to bear, and superheros are the same.
His human, softer side.
Logan is Professor Charles Xavier's caregiver. He works as an Uber driver (Lyft?) to earn enough money for Xavier's medicine and to feed his alcohol addiction. Alcohol numbs him from his physical and emotional pain, and is his only way to heal in the movie.
I don't like alcoholics but this was so, so painfully real. For once, I could actually relate to why he needed to turn to alcohol so badly. Poor Logan.
I'm used to watching a Wolverine who has that wry smile on his face as he takes on his enemies easily. Every knife or bullet is harmless against him as he heals almost instantly. We watch him fight and it takes a while before he even gets properly injured, but even then he always has one edge above his enemies.
Not in this film. Here, we watched Logan get beaten up terribly. His ribs and bones get broken. He doesn't heal as fast as before. And even though he still wins the fight, he's injured.
3. Where are all the other X-men?
I know, I know. This film is about Wolverine, not the other superheroes, but where are they and what happened to them? Where are all the other mutants?
Why is Logan the only one left with Prof Xavier in the end? Did everyone else…die?
And being a caregiver isn't easy, especially when you're taking care of the world's most dangerous mind, dubbed as a weapon of mass destruction by the government.
The film offered some clues without giving you answers in its entirety. It was almost as though the director was saying, look, I know you're a Marvel fan. Piece the clues together yourself.
In his final scene, Prof Xavier cries as he asks, "but I don't deserve it, do I?" as he remembers what he did, which Logan and Albino mutant Caliban hid from him. If he doesn't remember…is he suffering from Alzheimer's? After all, he didn't recognise Logan the first time in the water shed.
Alzheimer has thwarted Prof X abilities and made him an unpredictable telepathic nuclear bomb. It gets unleashed to devastating effect whenever Prof X feels threatened, which, unfortunately, happens quite often (can you blame the guy? He did, after all, spend most of his life among mutants and enemies who wanted his powerful brain for their own). Prof X even fears himself, which I think explains why he takes his medicine so readily whenever Logan instructs him to.
We're not told what exactly it was that Prof Xavier does, but the clue is given to us in a scene before wher they're driving on the highway after barely escaping from the casino with their lives. The radio talks about how the last attack killed hundreds of people…and the X men?
Wow. What a twist. But that'll explain why Logan was the only one left.
Maybe it is the adamatinum that makes them able to withstand Prof X's attacks a little better than the rest, so that was how Logan lived while everyone else died? Fan theories come on!
4. There's Laura aka X-23
Logan's genetic daughter by design, and whom daddy ends up protecting, albeit unwillingly. Laura also eventually comes to love Logan and sees him as her own father, though it wasn't so long ago when she was rude and rough to him when they properly met in the watershed.
Remember that vial of blood in the post credits scene in X Men: Apolocalypse?
You gotta hear her banshee screams and angry fights for yourself. Almost as though she's frustrated cos she doesn't want to fight or kill, but has no choice to or else she'll die / get captured.
When I first saw the trailer, I thought it was a boy 🙊
The young actress playing Laura, or Logan's daughter, is really one to watch. You'll ache as you see how much she wants to just be a child, but yet she has to always defend herself from her attackers when they come. Her stunts were also crazy amazing?!? I wonder how long she trained, or if they used a stunt double for her instead!
The ending scene when she cries over Logan's death and called him Daddy was so poignant and beautiful 💔 perhaps…we can look forward to a Laura movie?
5. Caliban the "mutant tracker"
Poor guy.
I absolutely loved this actor's acting! In some ways, Caliban felt like a tribute to the family life Logan could have had but never got.
That familiar nagging (like how a wife nags her husband? Lol) and caring for Prof X…
"You came to me years ago and you asked me to help you. But I can't help you now when you don't talk to me".
Piercing together the various clues scattered across the movie, my guess is that he used to work for the bad guys in tracking mutants down. Perhaps they rounded them up successfully and managed to kill most of them, while taking their DNA to create their own walking human soldiers.
Perhaps, ridden by guilt for killing his own mutant kind, that was when Logan came to him and asked him for help to look after Prof X, whom everyone believed to be dead in the last telepathic attack?
When that horrible bounty hunter said, "bring me my tracker", I had thought originally that he planted some tracking device in Logan's car. But no, it turned out to be Caliban he was referring to.
And Caliban sacrificed his life in the end by blowing himself up, which saved Logan and Laura. Why? What made him so willing to die for them? Guilt? Love? Fear? Or something else?
Food for thought: The film pays tribute to ideas of discrimination and human greed.
From Michael Roffman's review:
"Mangold’s sobering commentary on a not-so-distant American life. Given that so much of the action takes place around the Mexico border and through the small towns of Middle America, there are many allusions to today’s embroiled political anxieties — from immigration to unemployment to gun violence."
My favourite types of films are the ones that are a filmmaker's social commentary at the same time – Train to Busan was the last movie to have had this same impact on me.
Logan makes you reflect on how man has a tendency to fear and oppress those who are different from them. The movie talks about how "no new mutant has been born in the last 25 years" – why?
I googled for the answer and found it in the comics: the Legacy virus killed the mutants. Maybe the last of then died by Prof X's mind?
"Logan’s cinematic journey began 17 years ago in a forest. He was making money fighting in cages. A young girl saved him then, she showed him what it was like to have a family, what it felt like to be good. In Logan, it takes another girl to show him who he really is, to remind him that his life was worth something.
It is the perfect swansong he could’ve got."
From another reviewer who loved the film as much as I did. I couldn't have put it any better myself.
