In 2008, Mark Millar and Steve McNiven did an eight-issue storyline in Wolverine’s solo book entitled “Old Man Logan,” riffing on an appearance by a future version of Logan that same year in Fantastic Four (also written by Millar). Postulating an alternate future where super-villains won and killed most heroes, the older Logan in a dystopia proved hugely popular, and he got his own title, and was brought into the present of the Marvel Universe after the present-day Logan was killed.
When Hugh Jackman and James Mangold sat down to figure out the third and final film in the Wolverine trilogy, Old Man Logan was a natural starting point.
Given the dystopian future for mutants postulated by X-Men: Days of Future Past (which we’ll get to later this year in this rewatch), portraying a future in which things had gone badly for mutants worked quite well in the movie X-continuity, just as it had in the comics. (In fact, the comics version of Old Man Logan followed a similar character arc to that of Rachel Summers, a.k.a. the second Phoenix, trying to stop an awful future from happening.)
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Vengeful
Seventeen years after debuting in the role, it makes sense that Jackman would finally grow weary of Wolverine—and, more to the point, start aging out of it. It’s a very physical role, so it makes sense to lean into that aging process, especially when the comics provided a ready-made solution in the Old Man Logan storyline.
Mangold and his cowriters also worked several other comics characters into Logan’s dystopia: Laura, a.k.a. X-23 (played by Dafne Keen), Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and the Reavers, Caliban (Stephen Merchant), Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant), and, of course, Professor Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart, the only person besides Jackman to appear in all three Wolverine solo films). X-23 was originally created as a younger, more fun version of Wolverine for the X-Men Evolution animated series, later incorporated into the comics, and taking on the mantle of Wolverine after Logan died. Pierce was a member of the Hellfire Club, a longtime foe of the X-Men, and the only founding member of the Club’s Inner Circle who wasn’t a mutant, but rather a cyborg—his distaste for mutants led to a break from the Club and he formed the Reavers to hunt mutants. Caliban, Rice, and Xavier are all more or less as they were in the comics, respectively, a mutant who can detect other mutants (though the movie’s Caliban is more eloquent than the third-person-speaking comics character), the son of someone Wolverine killed when he went crazy after having adamantium inserted into his body, and the founder of the X-Men. Early drafts of the script had Victor Creed as well, and Liev Schreiber had expressed an interest in reprising the role, but the part wound up cut from the screenplay.
Both Jackman and Stewart have stated that Logan was the swan song for them as Wolverine and Xavier, respectively, but both also left open the possibility of coming back under the right circumstances.
“Bad shit happens to people I care about”
Logan
Written by James Mangold & Scott Frank and Michael Green
Directed by James Mangold
Produced by Lauren Shuler Donner and Hutch Parker and Simon Kinberg
Original release date: March 3, 2017
In 2029, Logan is working in El Paso as a limo-driver-for-hire. Some Mexican gang bangers try to boost his car while he’s taking a nap in it, a decision they don’t live to regret.
Logan still heals from his wounds at the hands of the would-be thieves, but it’s much slower than it used to be. He crosses the border into Mexico, where he’s caring for the 90-year-old Charles Xavier, giving him meds to suppress his telepathy and control his seizures. When he does have a seizure, it’s felt by everyone in the immediate vicinity. To that end, Logan—with the help of a mutant named Caliban, who can detect other mutants—has Xavier holed up in an abandoned smelting factory. Xavier is not dealing well with his weakened state, as the meds Logan has him on also make him loopy. We learn from a radio report later on that many of the X-Men were killed by a telepathic attack by Xavier during one of his seizures; Xavier himself doesn’t remember this, though he does recall that he did something horrible.
During a funeral that he’s driving some of the mourners to, Logan is confronted by a woman named Gabriela Lopez, who tries to appeal to “the Wolverine,” but Logan wants nothing to do with her. Logan also has come to the attention of Donald Pierce, who works for Alkali-Transigen, an offshoot of William Stryker’s concern that put the adamantium in Wolverine way back when. Pierce is a cyborg, and he’s after Lopez, urging Logan to contact him if Lopez should get in touch with him again.
Lopez actually hires Logan formally, though Logan doesn’t realize it’s her at first. Before he leaves, Xavier makes noises about there being a new mutant nearby and that they’ll meet at the Statue of Liberty, but Logan reminds him that there’ve been no new mutants born in twenty-five years and the incident at the Statue of Liberty was a long time ago.
As it happens, Lopez is staying at the Liberty Hotel (ahem), and when Logan arrives, he’s pissed at being tricked. But Lopez is offering thousands of dollars—enough for Logan to buy the boat he’s got his eye on. Xavier will be safer out on the ocean. (For his part, Caliban—who can’t abide the sun at all—isn’t particularly sanguine about the boat plan, but Logan doesn’t seem to give much of a shit about that.) Lopez wants him to take her and her daughter, an eleven-year-old girl named Laura, to North Dakota.
However, when he decides to take the job, he arrives at the Liberty Hotel to find Lopez dead and Laura missing. He returns to Mexico only to find that Laura stowed away in his car—and Pierce and his gang of Reavers has found him. Xavier is thrilled at the arrival of Laura—she’s the new mutant he told Logan about—Logan is more concerned with the fact that their hideout is blown.
To Logan’s abject shock, when he takes on the Reavers, he gets help from no less a source than Laura herself. She’s an even fiercer fighter than he is (especially in his weakened state), with two adamantium claws per hand instead of three, and also single claws in her feet.
They manage to escape, leaving a lot of dead Reavers behind, but Pierce captures Caliban. They head north, and watch the video on Lopez’s phone. Laura isn’t actually Lopez’s daughter, but she is part of an experiment being conducted in Mexico by Transigen to create mutant children, using genetic material from other mutants—Laura was created using Logan’s DNA. Lopez was a nurse at the facility, and she worked to get the kids out of there once it was clear (a) that they were created to be soldiers and (b) that that aspect of the program wasn’t working and Transigen was going to kill them all.
Lopez had no idea if any of the other kids got out. There are coordinates in North Dakota that they got out of an X-Men comic book (which Logan reads at one point and finds contemptible). Allegedly from there you can get to a haven for mutants in Canada called Eden.
Logan thinks the whole thing is nonsense, but Xavier encourages him to go anyhow, especially since the smelting plant is burned, so they drive north.
They stay in a hotel/casino, but Pierce tracks them with help from Caliban. Logan returns from trading in the limo for a pickup truck only to be hit by one of Xavier’s seizures—which is the only thing keeping Xavier alive, as Pierce’s goons are trying to kill him, but the telepathic attack is freezing them. Between them, Logan and Laura, thanks to their healing ability, are able to resist Xavier enough to kill the Reavers before injecting him with his meds.
The trio get into the truck and continue to drive north. At one point, they’re nearly run over by some automatically driven trucks, which also run a family transporting some horses off the road. Xavier telepathically calms the horses enough to make it easier to corral them, and Logan helps with the corralling, and also aids them in getting their car out of a ditch. In gratitude, the Munsons offer them a meal and a place to stay the night. Logan wants to keep moving, but Xavier accepts on behalf of his “son” and “grand-daughter.”
They enjoy a meal with the Munsons; Logan even smiles once. But as Xavier is preparing for bed, the water conks out. Turns out the Munsons are in a constant fight with a corporate farm (it was their trucks that ran them off the road) that bought up all the land around them. They constantly mess with their plumbing and other things. Eric Munson goes to the corporate farm to restore the water, and Logan goes with after putting Xavier to bed. The farm owners threaten Munson with a shotgun, which Logan breaks over his knee, convincing them to go away and impressing the heck out of Munson.
While they’re gone, Dr. Zander Rice, Pierce’s boss, steps in, giving the Reavers another soldier: a more direct clone of Logan. Its growth was accelerated, and he’s a pure rage monster with Wolverine’s powers. He kills Xavier and the entire Munson family, and he comes close to killing Logan and Laura, but they’re saved by Munson’s dying act, which is to drive a truck into the clone—dubbed X-24 by Rice; Laura is X-23—and shoot him in the head. While X-24 can heal from that, it’ll take a while, and Logan and Laura get away with Xavier’s body. Caliban meanwhile kills himself with a couple of grenades rather than continue to betray his friends.
The truck breaks down after they bury Xavier, and Logan collapses from his injuries and exhaustion. Laura steals a car, gets Logan into it, er, somehow, and drives to an urgent care facility (with the help of some boxes serving as a booster seat so she can see out the windshield). The doctor urges Logan to check himself into a hospital, advice he naturally doesn’t take.
For the first time, Laura speaks, albeit in rapid-fire Spanish. She all but bullies Logan into continuing the journey to North Dakota even though Logan is convinced that Eden is not real. En route, Logan falls asleep at the wheel, exhausted. Laura helps him pull over, and then he takes a nap, but once he’s asleep, Laura gets behind the wheel and drives the rest of the way to the coordinates from the comic book.
Logan keeps an adamantium bullet around. Xavier warned Laura that Logan might try to kill himself, and he asked her to make sure he didn’t. Laura winds up putting the bullet in her pocket.
The other kids are waiting for Laura there. Logan is shocked to see that they’re all okay. The leader of the kids—Rictor—gives him the envelope of money Lopez had originally offered Logan, but he says the kids need it more than he does. (The kids also trim his beard and cut his hair so he looks like he did when he was with the X-Men.)
The kids head off to the border to Eden, but Rice, Pierce, and the Reavers have tracked them with drones. Logan takes on the Reavers, as do the kids themselves. Laura uses the adamantium bullet to kill X-24, but it’s too late to save Logan, who dies—but the Reavers are toast, at least. The kids bury Logan and then continue north.
“I suck at this”
It’s funny, James Mangold’s goal with this movie was pretty much the same one Christopher Nolan had with The Dark Knight Rises: to take an iconic superhero and show the end of his career, the one story that you almost never see in the source material. By their serialized nature, superhero comics are ones that are geared toward never ending, and even when they do end, half the time, they come back later on anyhow.
But where Rises was an incoherent mess, Logan is much more tightly plotted, much better acted, and generally more effective.
Jackman has said that Unforgiven was a major influence on this film, and one of Logan’s strengths is the same as that of the Clint Eastwood film, specifically with regards to the aging process and how it can affect someone for whom violence is an everyday part of life.
To Jackman’s credit, he looks old in this movie. He doesn’t just count on the gray coloring they put in his hair. Throughout the movie, he’s slow, broken-down—defeated. He’s going through the motions. We see it in his very first scene: the younger Wolverine wouldn’t have hesitated to tear apart the guys trying to boost his limo. But now, he gives them the chance to walk away, and even after they shoot him and he gets back up, he is reluctant to go full crazy on them.
Eventually he does, but unlike every other time we’ve seen him, Logan hesitates. And when he’s finished, it takes him a while to recover. There are lots of wonderful little touches showing how much he’s slowed down, from one claw not coming all the way out to the limp he walks with throughout, to the simply defeated look in his eyes. Just to remind us what he used to be, we have his performance as X-24, a pure killing machine who is the old Wolverine turned up to eleven.
And yet, he’s still recognizably Wolverine. Heroic impulses aren’t his forte, by his own admission, but he will protect people who need it, whether it’s the person who gave him a family all those years ago (Xavier), or yet another young woman who needs his help (Rogue in X-Men, Laura here).
What I particularly love about the movie, though, is that it still has the same message that all the best X-Men stories have: hope. Xavier’s dream has always been for mutants and humans to live in peace, and his actions have always been to make sure that mutants are safe and cared for in a world that hates and mistrusts them. Those themes are still at the heart of this story, whether it’s the search for the mythical Eden, or simply the act of helping Laura get away from Transigen.
The theme is given added tragedy by Xavier’s awful mental state. Sir Patrick Stewart gives one of his greatest performances—in a career full of truly great performances—as he goes from broken down and scattered to suddenly much more focused when he has a mutant to help in Laura. His breakdown is heartbreaking, seeing this regal, noble figure whom we’ve seen played by two different actors through a long and heroic life reduced to hiding in a giant metal box in Mexico so he doesn’t accidentally kill any more people he loves.
In the end, both Logan and Xavier give their lives so that the kids Transigen created have a chance at survival. Tellingly, we never do find out if Eden exists or not, but at least the kids have that hope. It might be enough, it might not, but at least they’re fighting; at least they’re trying to make a better life for themselves.
So much of this movie hinges on the performances of its three leads. Jackman and Stewart are more than their usual brilliant selves, taking the characters they’ve already done extensively in several films and kicking it up a notch for their twilight days. But we also expect great things from these two actors, who are among the finest we have. No, the revelation here is the newcomer, Dafne Keen. The character she plays has three modes, Laura before Xavier dies (who stares intently without speaking), Laura after Xavier dies (who speaks in rapid-fire Spanish and broken English, but who still has the same intensity), and X-23 (a killing machine who screeches just like an actual wolverine). Keen absolutely nails all three modes. What I particularly love is that she does a picture-perfect imitation of Jackman’s pissed-off glare that he made Wolverine’s trademark way back in X-Men—a stare Jackman himself never really uses in this movie (except as X-24, that is; never as Logan, though). It’s a stellar performance, and one suspects we’ll have lots more of Keen being amazing to look forward to in what should be a brilliant career.
The other performances are a bit hit-and-miss. Boyd Holbrook is quite good as Pierce, as they changed him to a good ol’ boy who’s a bit of an X-Men fanboy, but still quite happy to kill folks on Rice’s behalf. The Pierce of the comics is quite possibly the blandest antagonist in the 55-year history of the team, so any change is for the better. The same cannot be said for Caliban, as the Gollum-like character of the comics has been altered into Yet Another Snarky Dude In A Marvel Movie (latest in a series! collect ’em all!). The normally reliable Richard E. Grant creates no impression whatsoever as the very bland Rice, and Eriq LaSalle mumbles his way through the part of Munson (I needed the closed captioning to know what the heck he was saying). Having said that, LaSalle absolutely nails Munson’s final moments as he takes out X-24 with his truck and tries to do the same to Logan, but he’s out of ammo in his rifle, and then he falls dead. The sheer fury on LaSalle’s face is palpable.
This is a fantastic movie about aging, about hope in the face of unrelenting despair, about redemption, and about trying to make a better life for yourself in a world that wants to kill you. It’s nothing like an X-Men movie and yet it’s the quintessential X-Men movie.
Next week, we’ll do another Mark Millar creation, Kick-Ass.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is at Dragon Con 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend, doing an obscene amount of programming, including panels, autographings, a reading, and tons and tons and tons more. Find the (very) full schedule here. If you see Keith at the con, feel free to hand him a mug of coffee, as he’ll likely need it.
Technically, at least three actors have played Xavier. There was the kid version in First Class, yea?
“X-23 was originally created as a younger, more fun version of Wolverine for the X-Men Evolution animated series”
Hardly “more fun” — in fact, very much the opposite of that. In her two appearances on the show (written by Christopher Yost & Craig Kyle), X-23 was even more of a dark, angry, tragic figure than Logan himself. She’d been created in a HYDRA lab and raised to be the perfect killing machine, so she’d had a loveless, traumatic upbringing and was very cold and emotionally closed off. When she broke out and learned she was cloned from Wolverine, she blamed him for the hell that was her life and thus hunted him down intending to kill him. After they reconciled, she went off on a mission of vengeance to hunt down and kill the HYDRA members who’d done all this to her. The movie version of the character is actually very close to the Evolution version.
X-Men Evolution seems to have a reputation as a lightweight, mediocre X-Men show, and that’s a fair description of its first season, maybe even its second (although the animation throughout was just about the most consistently high-quality, beautiful work I’ve ever seen in a TV series). But despite its very, very slow start in season 1, its storytelling got deeper and richer and more mature with each successive season, and it really kicked into high gear after the existence of mutants became public knowledge at the end of season 2. X-23 was introduced in season 3 and returned in season 4.
As for Logan, I can’t add much to what Keith said. It’s by far the best of the Wolverine solo films and possibly the best of the X-Men film franchise. And Dafne Keen is an extraordinary screen presence.
If Laura had her bones laced with adamantium while still a child, how does she grow?
The thing I find interesting about this movie and Deadpool (which came out a few months prior) is that they both needed to be rated R to work. Deadpool needs to be outrageous in a way only an R rating can get away with, or he’s not really Deadpool, and Logan needed the range to show some very dark scenes in Logan’s life in order to have the proper emotional impact. (Yes, you can argue the case — both characters come from comics, which usually aren’t R-rated content. But I still think that the R rating gives both characters room to be true to their depictions that they wouldn’t otherwise.)
And this, ultimately, is how you do a dark superhero movie properly. It has to end on hope, or it’s not a superhero movie. Although I collect superhero movies, I don’t own this one, because I hesitate to rewatch it. Not because I didn’t like it, but because it’s such an appropriate ending that I feel like the story is done, and I wouldn’t gain anything by revisiting.
@3 Somehow they figured it out, with Mad Science (because with Mad Science, anything is possible. I think it is the lack of ethics committees that helps) of course.
It isn’t really important to the movie.
If Mad Science isn’t good enough then, they laced her bones and immediately fed her a magic cupcake.
I really wanted to like this movie. It has many elements I usually enjoy, namely the desolate western settings and the old dog who has to do the right thing. But I found it be a slog, frankly, and the graphic violence so overdone it became tedious. Maybe if they had saved the full-on slice-and-dice blood-and-guts stuff for the end it would’ve had more impact, but by the time it reached the climax I was numb to it all.
One small detail I appreciated, though, was the glimpse of self-driven cargo trucks crowding the highways. A nice bit of futurism amidst all the other stuff.
I loved this movie, hands down for me the best of all the X-Men movies. It was absolutely the perfect ending for Logan; I’d have been disappointed if they’d let him ride off into the sunset.
Ditto for me. I’m glad they didn’t stick too closely to the comics’ story line. The movie is amazing, and the three leadds give a very affecting performance.
I’ll be another outlier here. The performances are fine, but I ended up disliking the movie.
I thoroughly enjoyed the performances by the stars, thought the story was a little simple but well told, it perfectly bookended Logan’s part of the Mutant Movie-verse, and I left the cinema utterly satisfied with having seen it. Just… I don’t really feel the desire to rewatch it. I think, if anything, it told its story too well. When the credits rolled at the end, I felt it had been such a definitive ending that I really did feel that the story was over. It was done, finished. IYSWIM.
@3 – Do we know if her full skeleton was laced with adamantium? Or just her claws?
Sigh. For some reason I cannot see comments today. So I have no idea if I am just repeating things. But anyway…
First off I wholeheartedly agree with you about Dafne’s performance. It was nothing short of a revelation for me. I was not a visibly impressed with a performance since Silence of the Lambs. Just wow.
The one thing that I could not stop giggling about from this film was the line Grant said about stopping them before they hit the border. What? Why? These people have murdered they way across the country with complete impunity. But the thought of crossing that Canadian line would bring them to a complete stop.
I get that this is somewhat a commentary on the US, but I couldn’t help but think that the whole world now lived in mortal dread of Alpha Flight. Hunters in northern Maine making damn sure that they don’t stray past the wrong trees. People in Washington sweately making sure that they have all their papers in exacting order before getting within eyesight of the border checkpoint.
None of our maple syrup comes from Vermont anymore.
Nobody, but nobody messes with Canada.
Anyway, that’s what I got from the film. I might have been in a weird head-space.
Comments haven’t been loading for me lately in Chrome, but they load in Firefox, and – strangely – in incognito Chrome.
Comments occasionally go away for me, but work in a private window on Safari. Happens once or twice a year. This has been happening today and yesterday. Clearing my cookies has fixed the problem in the past, can’t be bothered today. Anyway, try clearing your cookies.
@13/Gerry: That’s odd, since I’m having the opposite experience — comments in Chrome but not in Firefox. (And I tried clearing my cookies.) EDIT: But a Firefox private window does work. Huh?
Is it me or is there a kind of familial connection between Laura and Eleven from Stranger Things? I’m not suggesting plagiarism, but I think it’s interesting that you have these two young, occasionally mute female characters with amazing powers who are grappling with father/mentors and authoritarian organisations.
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With regard to the physicality of the role, the changing requirements of superhero movies haven’t done Jackman any favours either. In 2000, Wolverine in <i>X-Men </i> looked like an ordinary, fairly muscular man. Fourteen years later, Wolverine in <i>Days of Future Past</i> looked like he was trying to hold in a nuclear explosion by sheer force of will. Getting into that kind of shape at 46…geez.
@17/Moderator: Thanks, that worked. Odd that you have to clear the whole browser and not just this site.
@18/Dean: There’s also the fact that DoFP Wolverine had his chest shaved and waxed to fit modern standards of male beauty, even though the comics’ Wolverine is one of the hairiest comics characters aside from those who have literal fur coats.
Cleggster: Yeah, I thought that use of the Canadian border as an impenetrable barrier was pretty hilarious, especially given that crossing the Mexican border earlier in the film was no problem at all. (But then, Transigen had their big lab in Mexico, so their employees going across the border was probably easier. But then #2, Transigen was also Alkali, and they had a base in Canada, so what the heck?)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@11: I think only her claws were coated with adamantium, like in her origin comic.
@16: The stories do kinda have their parallels, don’t they? (Also, Millie Bobby Brown auditioned for Laura before she got into Stranger Things, so there’s that.)
Now here is a movie! Looking at the X-Men movies as a whole, I am struck more by individual performances than by the films themselves. Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen were distinctive and vital takes on their characters–Jackman may have been too tall and lean for Wolverine, but he made it work for him anyway. The later movies likewise were mostly vehicles for Lawrence, McAvoy, and Fassbender. The movies themselves were overall pretty turgid and lifeless though, and everyone else mostly seems to be there to just fill up the space around the leads.
This felt like the first time for me where the whole thing worked as a movie–and it used those performances in the service of what it was doing. Contrast to The Dark Knight Rises is correct I think; Nolan’s films always felt to me like they were using their characters in service of Big Ideas without really caring who these people were. I was never entirely convinced of the characters as people with motivations, so in the end I felt like TDKR was assaulting me with ideas rather than telling a story.
In Logan though, Jackman and Stewart are completely comfortable in the skins of these characters, and strong enough to show us them at their broke-down worst. There’s no convincing needed–this is just what Logan and Xavier look like when they are old, and what they do when they are beat-down. The somewhat rambling and open-ended nature of this story is fine–that’s part of the point even, as these two men die but the story of mutants lives on with Laura (and yeah, Keen was great too.)
I just couldn’t get into this movie – I will probably never watch it again. I’m sure this is in part because the particular genre it’s emulating just isn’t one I tend to enjoy, but it just did not really bring me any joy to watch.
I agree with you on all of the performances (and hope we do see more from Dafne Keen) but personally, I thought any exploration of the themes (or any pretense of hope) was muddled by the extreme gore porn of the movie. I know that in part the movie was trying to subvert ‘comic book violence’ but it still felt to me like the movie was taking a little too much glee in showcasing it. I knew as soon as the Munson’s gave their names that they would be dispatched in a gory way, and so it prevented me from getting attached to/interested in their characters at all. And while Dafne really did give a powerful performance, it still made me uncomfortable to be more or less ‘rooting’ for a child basically turned into a super violent child soldier.
Plus, I just tend not to enjoy movies that have to go full nuclear on the pasts in order to tell a compelling story, just so they can end on a thin thread of ‘hope’. Stewart really did give an amazing performance, though.
@18/Dean: The Onion AV Club has been running a similarly themed series for the last few months called “Age of Heroes” and a while back covered “Wolverine.” The reader comments turned to Jackman’s physique over the course of the X-Men movies, with many readers making similar observations to yours. There’s a bit of inconsistency, of course, with the deciding factor seeming to be whether or not the actor will have to go shirtless at some point. So Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth have to be jacked to the max as Cap and Thor, while RDJ, while in excellent shape for a man his age, gets to go a bit easier on the training regimen (and the fact Iron man’s powers come from the armor, rather than the character’s physiology plays a role too). Alexander Skarsgard has talked a number of times about the ordeal he was put through to play Tarzan two years ago.
Speaking of Tarzan, I think we have to go back 35 or 36 years ago for the prototype of this sort of god-like physique to Miles O’Keeffe in the remake of “Tarzan the Apeman.” God-awful doesn’t even begin to describe the movie, but man, did the dude look the part. Also, I will forever be in O’Keeffe’s debt for being the source of one of my all-time favorite MST3K gags:
“How much Keeffe?”
“Miles O’Keeffe.”
@24 / wizard clip: I’m ashamed to admit that I only knew of Miles O’Keeffe in the context of the MST3K joke. I had no idea his career was so recent, or lengthy.
@25/Brian: Don’t feel too bad. Most of O’Keeffe’s post-Tarzan output was pretty low-budget, under-the-radar stuff, though he does belong to that rather exclusive club of actors who played Tarzan and then went on to play sword wielding heroes in movies costarring Sean Connery, the other one being Christopher Lambert. Now that I think of it, Connery himself, in his pre-bond days, played a baddie in a Tarzan film with Gordon Scott. Maybe some enterprising soul could create some sort of “six-degrees of separation” type game with Tarzan and/or Connery at the center. For example, Casper Van Dien played Tarzan and also appeared in “Starship Troopers” with Clancy Brown, who appeared in “Highlander” with Connery and Lambert.
@26/wizard clip: Yes, Connery was a supporting villain in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, which as it happens is showing on Turner Classic Movies this coming Saturday (Sept. 8) at 10 AM Eastern (well, 10:08, after a Popeye short).
Speaking of Gordon Scott, his subsequent movie Tarzan the Magnificent (on TCM 9/22 at 10 AM) had the villain played by Jock Mahoney — who would take over as Tarzan in the following film! Imagine how Internet fandom’s heads would explode if that happened today — if, say, Ian McKellen had replaced Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier.
As it happens, the only reason Miles O’Keeffe became an actor was because the original Tarzan actor hired for the 1981 Tarzan the Ape Man remake quit or was fired, and O’Keeffe, his stunt double, was hastily promoted to the lead role. Whoever that actor was dodged a bullet, since it’s an astonishingly awful film.
@27 /ChristopherLBennett: I’m pretty sure the actor originally cast as Tarzan was Lee Canalito, who’d been in “Paradise Alley” with Stallone a couple of years prior. I seem to remember reading that he couldn’t keep his weight down, so the Dereks gave him the boot. Sadly, even though O’Keeffe looked like a Boris Vallejo book cover brought to life, there was no salvaging this movie.
I’m glad you mentioned that detail about Jock Mahoney (who was the stepfather of Sally Field, who, in “Smokey and the Bandit,” was engaged to Mike Henry, who played Tarzan right after Mahoney. Tarzan really is the nexus of the universe!). Mahoney was in his forties when he played Tarzan, and maybe looked more like a leathery American cowboy than the Lord of the Jungle, but his stuntman background served him well in the role. Now that I think of it, if “Logan” had been made in the sixties, Mahoney might have been a good fit for the role.
@28/wizard clip: Yes, the Dereks’ Tarzan is one of the most incompetently made and acted movies I’ve ever seen, startlingly incoherent. Somewhat racist as well (though not as much as the movie it’s a remake of), and while I appreciate the surprising amount of time that Bo Derek spends topless or nude, even the theoretically sexy parts are often creepy due to the lack of consent involved. (Although the creepiest bit is when Jane’s father tells her that her conception almost killed her mother. I sincerely hope that was meant to be her birth and the writer or actor used the wrong word, because that line would be deeply disturbing otherwise.)
This has got to be the best superhero movie made since The Dark Knight (Sorry Winter Soldier). It’s just an excellent example of movie making by any standard of the genre.
I like both it and Rises for different reasons (the arguments for it being a “mess” have never made a lick of sense to me)
I very much enjoyed Logan although I felt the nudity was totally pointless and only there because they could rather than it being key to the story.
The other bit which always got me about this movie was a time scale problem. When Xavier and Laura watch Shane (a subtle metaphor there) Xavier talks about having seen the film is 100 years old and he saw it when he was a small boy which makes the film set in 2053 but I’m sure use a different date later in the movie (which I now can’t remember). I realise it is a minor detail but something that jumped out at me at the time.
Stephen: Patrick Stewart ad-libbed that line because he actually did see Shane as a boy. The year the movie took place (as I said in the rewatch) was 2029, so yeah, it doesn’t 100% track, but whatever, it’s a nice anecdote, and besides, Xavier’s isn’t all there anyhow…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Besides, people often facetiously exaggerate how long ago events in their past were as a humorous remark on their age. “Oh, I saw that movie a hundred years ago.” “Why, when I was in school back in the Dark Ages…” And so forth.
I didn’t realise the line was ad-libbed so thank you for that new bit of information.
The dating issue wasn’t a “it ruined the movie” moment, just something that caught me when I watched it.
@17, @19:
Because it’s a cached JavaScript resource causing the issue, most likely . That script is probably hosted by a cdn, so clearing the cache for the site won’t reload it.
I’m pretty sure that the existence of Eden is confirmed by there being a voice on the other end of the radio coordinating with Rictor for the final leg of their journey to the Canadian border.
@36 Good call! I pulled up the developer window in Safari and went through reloading the various javascript scripts, reloading the web page in between to check, and it started working after I reloaded confirm.min.js. Don’t know if that’s repeatable, as the problem is gone now, but saved me having to clear the whole cache.
I’m really bummed to find out that Liev Schreiber wanted to reprise his role and didn’t get a chance. Would have loved to see even just an update of where he is the new world.. Maybe we would find him hopeless and alone, falling off a ledge into a bay or something.
Something not actually established in the film, but I got the impression that Xavier’s seizures, especially the early one that effectively destroyed his school, were at least partially caused by exposure to the same GMO crops that were suppressing the X-gene — a kind of allergic reaction, perhaps.
Oh boy, this movie. I have trouble knowing where to start with this movie in that I find it one of the most unsettling movies in any genre I have watched in my entire life. Strangely enough while analysing it, the issue I have with it is not so much the Graphic violence, but more the loss of hope in the movie. Charles Xavier’s dream of Humans and Mutants existing together is dead in this movie and no human really seems to care*. It’s probably the one thing in this movie that really affects you and to a certain extent it’s because it’s not even really touched upon and most of humanity doesn’t even seem to mind.
Even more so than any of the comic storylines or movies this film just shows the apathy at what is essentially the genocide of a species of humanity and IT IS SO BLAND! There are no giant Robots hunting you down, no Mutant Human War where the entire planet is wiped of life by Shield Walls and Nuclear Missiles (as in the comic AoA storyline 1995). Mutants are destroyed by the food and drink we consume and THAT is the true banality of evil.
On a sidenote and hate to bring up The Second World War and the Nazi’s final solution but this reminded me so much of that, Kenneth Branagh starred in a adaptation of the day the Nazis formulated the Final Solution a few years ago and it involved High Nazi officials sitting round a table in a mansion for an afternoon discussing Train timetables.
I Imagine a meeting around about the time of the very first X-Men movie where Kelley is trying to get the Mutant Registration Legislation passed where you have a small group of people actually sitting there and deciding these things , maybe in the Hellfire Club with woman in lingerie serving them drinks. Now that is some unsettling harshness to me, far more than say Logan punching a man through the head with his claws or cutting off a man’s leg.
*I say that humanity doesn’t seem to care due to what we are shown in the movie btw. There is no way we know that Canada doesn’t just exploit the young Mutants who escape at the end, but I’m guessing giving the overall tone of this movie, the New Mutants do not live happily ever after.
*Edit, oh yeah there was the doctor scene, forgot about that.
On a happier note to end on btw, anyone who watches the Graham Norton show knows about Miles O’Keefe, as Graham’s love for him and constant phonecalls on the show to him were a major part of the show (I believe it was his Channel 4 Show not his current BBC 1 one). Poor Miles even agreed to come on the show in order to stop the calls, the week after he appeared, Graham phoned him again. It sort of became the UK’s very own Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel thing.
@41, that’s kind of the appeal for me. It wasn’t an assault by massive robots or big military action that laid low the mutant population, it was just life. By focusing on just a few people, it made it feel so much more real and personal. And there was still hope! Xavier, while suffering mental deterioration, still felt there was a chance. Laura had the dream of Eden. And in the end, Logan did what he does best – he saved people. And life isn’t always “happily ever after”.
The scene of Xavier’s burial felt very powerful to me. Logan, a man used to killing and the death of people he loves, got choked up over Charles’ death (and while tragic, the moment right after of him wailing on the car with the shovel was hilarious, though I’m not sure anyone else was laughing).
@42/ I can see what you mean by the notion of hope in the film and also that life isn’t always happily ever after, it just seems to me that the people who make the movies always portray the future of the X-Men as being so nihilistic.
Just once it would be nice to see Professor X’s dream come to reality and not always have Magneto proven right. The comic Mutant X (nothing in common with the TV show thankfully) had a world where Mutants were perceived as heroes and I loved that (well for the first 13 issues or so at least). I thought there may have been a hope that we may have seen some of that due to the end of DoFP in Apocalypse but we didn’t really, and this movie and the TV shows are certainly focusing overtly on the “protecting a world that hates and fears them” tagline, with extreme emphasis on hate and fear.
I don’t know as I say this movie unsettles me more than any film I have ever seen and maybe when I think about it is because Professor X never gets to see the World he spent his whole life working towards, except for one perfect evening which ends in a massacre.
I enjoyed this film, but it wasn’t great, and what bothered me most was that reviewers and audience kept calling it “the savior of the superhero movie genre”, when it does the opposite of that: it crafts a story where there are people with powers, sometimes doing heroic things, but it throws away most trappings of the superhero genre. It’s still a good X-Men film, or Wolverine film, because Wolverine works very well outside the traditional superhero setting, he’s basically designed to do so.
But calling it the savior of superhero movies, or the best superhero movie ever doesn’t sit well with me, and never will. It’s like saying “I like this hamburger, because they made it with salmon instead of ground beef, and they replaced the bread with pizza dough. They’ve saved hamburgers.” It might be great food, with a passing resemblance to a burger, but it’s not a burger per se, much less the ultimate burger.
Nothing of the above is the film’s fault. I found the movie quite enjoyable. Dafne Keen is great as Laura, and her action scenes were seamlessly done (it’s mostly CGI, but you can’t tell); while Patrick Stewart is heartbreaking as senile Xavier (el choo-choo!).
On a fun note, one of the songs in the movie is by a Uruguayan rapper (playing while he fights the gang members), who I also happen to know personally, Santi Mostaffa. That was quite a proud moment for Uruguayan nerds (and rap enthusiasts, some of us are both), and we got Santi to record a special introduction to the song for my podcast. :)
@39 – Mike: I understood that reference!
I doubt many will agree with me on this, but here goes. I don’t like this movie. At all. I respect what it was trying to do. I acknowledge that the performances in it are fantastic. But it’s so brutal, so cruel, that by the end all hope I had was crushed. The world it depicted was so bleak and dystopic that I found it impossible to believe that there would be any real sanctuary for the children. At best, they would have a temporary respite before something else horrible came and killed them all. It doesn’t help that the film absolutely wastes Professor X, setting up a character arc for him to have to come to terms with being the cause of his students deaths, only to cut it off in its tracks when he’s pointlessly killed by X-24. It just felt far too nihilistic for me. Here’s hoping that James Mangold doesn’t bring that kind of take to Indiana Jones, because if he does I’ll probably skip that one.
@45 – I agree! Just chiming in, because I often feel like the only person in the world who can’t stand this movie and have completely jettisoned it from any sense of my own headcanon.