Wolverine was introduced in 1974 at the end of Incredible Hulk #180 by the late, great Len Wein & Herb Trimpe, inserting himself into a battle between the Hulk and the Wendigo. A Canadian secret agent, codenamed Weapon X, Wolverine spent issue #181 fighting both Hulk and Wendigo, failing to stop either one. A year later, Wein used him as part of his new team of X-Men introduced in Giant-Size X-Men #1, and he quickly became the most popular of those new characters; his combination of snotty-brawler personality, tendency to explosive violence, and mysterious past proved to be incredibly compelling, particularly in the hands of Wein’s successor, Chris Claremont, and his longtime collaborator, Canadian artist/co-plotter John Byrne. He became Marvel’s most popular character, matching, if not supplanting, Spider-Man as the company’s flagship hero in the latter two decades of the 20th century.
When the X-Men hit the big screen in 2000, the character did likewise for the growing series of X-films.
Details about Wolverine were revealed slowly in the comics, over the course of many years. Initially, he was just a mutant with better-than-usual fighting skills. Wein’s original intent was that the claws were part of his gloves, but Claremont later revealed them to be natural, and he also had an adamantium skeleton. When the X-Men (and the readers) find this and other things (like that he speaks Japanese, or his real name) out, they inevitably say, “You never told us,” to which he replies, “You never asked.” It became an entertaining running joke.
His fast-healing ability wasn’t revealed until about five or six years after his introduction, which explained how he was able to have his skeleton replaced and how he’s able to pop his claws through his skin without bleeding to death. When Magneto removed all the adamantium from his body, he discovered—to his surprise—that he had bone claws underneath the metal. While he considers Logan to be his real name, that was one he adopted, and his birthname of James Howlett wasn’t revealed until much later.
Helping with Wolverine’s mystery is that he himself has very little memory of his life before he was rescued by James MacDonald Hudson and his wife Heather, who took him in and recruited him to Canadian intelligence, where he worked until he left to join the X-Men.
Bits and pieces of his backstory were filled in over the years, particularly in the various Weapon X series (first in Marvel Comics Presents, and then in a solo series), in Wolverine’s own 1990s series, and eventually in great detail in the two Origins miniseries and then the Wolverine: Origins ongoing.
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Vengeful
As played by Hugh Jackman—a last-minute replacement for Dougray Scott in 2000’s X-Men—Wolverine became just as popular in the movie version of the X-Men as his four-color counterpart. He was the central member of the ensemble in four of the six X-Men movies (and made cameos in the other two), and was a natural for the first spinoff.
The intent was for this to be the first in a series of “Origins” films, with the second focusing on Magneto. Besides Jackman—who co-produced the movie and consulted on the first-draft script by David Benioff—Liev Schreiber was cast to play Victor Creed. The real name of Sabretooth in the comics, unlike the Sabretooth who appeared in X-Men, Creed hews more closely to the comics’ version of the character.
Various characters who hadn’t appeared in the X-trilogy show up here: Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson (a.k.a. Deadpool, though the resemblance between this character and either the one in the comics or the one in the more recent movies is poor), Taylor Kitsch as Remy LeBeau (a.k.a. Gambit), Kevin Durand as Fred J. Dukes (a.k.a. the Blob), Lynn Collins as Silverfox, Dominic Monaghan as Chris Bradley (a.k.a. Bolt), Daniel Henney as Agent Zero (a.k.a. Maverick), and will.i.am as John Wraith. In addition, younger versions of William Stryker and Scott Summers are played by Danny Huston and Tim Pocock, respectively. Brian Cox had wanted to reprise the role of Stryker, established in X2, with digital trickery used to de-age him. While the filmmakers declined to do so, Sir Patrick Stewart did make a cameo as a digitally de-aged (and ambulatory) Charles Xavier.
The movie was not particularly well received, though it made quite a bit of money for the studio. However, they quickly abandoned the “Origins” notion, with the planned X-Men Origins: Magneto shelved and reworked into 2011’s X-Men: First Class (which we’ll be covering around the end of the year). Jackman would get two more Wolvie solo films—having covered his past here, 2013’s The Wolverine will deal with his present (specifically the aftermath of his killing Jean Grey in X-Men: The Last Stand), and 2017’s Logan his future, taking place in 2029.
“I’m the best there is at what I do…”
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Written by David Benioff and Skip Woods
Directed by Gavin Hood
Produced by Lauren Shuler Donner and Ralph Winter and John Palermo and Hugh Jackman
Original release date: April 9, 2009
We open in Canada, 1845. Young James Howlett is very ill, looked over by his best friend Victor Creed (who has sharpened his fingernails to points). Creed’s father arrives and harasses Howlett’s mother. Howlett’s father goes to stop him, but is shot and killed for his trouble. Howlett screams with grief and six bone claws extend from his hands. He kills Creed’s father, whose dying breath reveals that he’s Howlett’s biological father, not the man who raised him.
Howlett—disgusted at this revelation and frightened of these weird claws that he seems to have—runs away. Creed follows, and they agree to stick together. Over the credits, we see them fighting side by side in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. Some time after the latter, Creed—who was already pretty unstable—starts attacking his fellow soldiers. He and Howlett are both imprisoned, and then recruited by Colonel William Stryker. He’s putting together a commando team of powered beings to do covert ops for the U.S. government.
The team includes Creed, Howlett, Wade Wilson (who is a devastatingly brilliant fighter, able to deflect bullets with his swords), Agent Zero (who can draw, aim, and shoot faster than anyone, with perfect accuracy), John Wraith (who can teleport), Chris Bradley (who can manipulate any electronic device from a light bulb to a computer), and Fred J. Dukes (who is super strong and immovable).
Their first mission is to Lagos, seemingly to stop a diamond smuggler, but Stryker is actually interested in a meteor fragment that the diamond smuggler has on his desk. (So much so that the team kills a lot of people to get to it.) He got it from a small rural village, and Stryker heads there (ignoring calls from headquarters, which Bradley is able to jam). The villagers hold the fragment sacred, as it fell from the sky, and Stryker orders Creed to kill the villagers. Howlett stops him, and then walks away from the team, tossing his dogtags to the ground.
Fast forward six years. Howlett is now calling himself Logan and living with a woman named Kayla Silverfox, a schoolteacher in rural Canada. One night she tells him a fable about a wolverine.
Bradley is now working a carnival, and Creed shows up and kills him. Stryker tracks Logan down and warns him that Bradley is dead, and so is Wilson. Stryker tells Logan that he fears someone is tracking down the old team, though Creed is still alive. Logan isn’t interested in rejoining Stryker and tells him to pound sand. When Stryker tries to appeal to his patriotism, Logan reminds the colonel that he’s Canadian.
Creed himself shows up and attacks Silverfox. Logan finds her dead, and loses it. He goes to Stryker, who explains why he was so hot for that meteor in Lagos. Using the metal from the meteor, he has created an unbreakable compound called adamantium. He wants to bond the metal to Logan’s skeleton, making his skeleton unbreakable, his claws unstoppable. His healing ability makes him the only choice to undergo the experiment. In order to stop Creed, Logan agrees. Stryker offers him his old dogtags back, but Logan insists on new ones that say “Logan” on one side and “Wolverine” on the other, in tribute to Silverfox.
The process succeeds, but is so incredibly painful that Logan runs away from the facility after trashing it. He’s taken in by a couple, Travis and Heather Hudson, and he struggles to deal with his new metal claws.
Agent Zero kills the Hudsons and blows up their house. Logan attacks him and the soldiers with them, taking them all down. Logan kills Zero—who has mentioned an island where Stryker is now based—and tells Stryker that he’s going to find Creed and then go after Stryker. Stryker warns him that he won’t like where this road will lead.
Logan goes to Las Vegas, where Wraith now owns a boxing club where Dukes trains. Dukes has let himself go to seed, but Wraith is trying to train him. Dukes tells Logan that Creed is working for Stryker, and nobody knows where the island is. One person who might know is Remy LeBeau, a mutant in New Orleans who managed to escape the island.
Wraith and Logan go to N’awlins to question LeBeau, who thinks they work for Stryker, and he refuses to go back. Creed shows up, thus obviating the need to search for him, and kills Wraith. Logan fights him, but it’s interrupted by LeBeau, who doesn’t realize that Logan’s on his side. Creed escapes, and LeBeau realizes his mistake.
Stryker is now based on Three Mile Island. LeBeau has a plane he won in a poker game and he flies Logan there. Stryker has been using Creed to collect powers from mutants both dead—like Wraith—and alive—such as a young man named Scott Summers who fires optic blasts—and pool them inside a single mutant. This pool of dead mutants is Wilson. (Ahem.) He has several young mutants prisoner and is experimenting on them.
To Logan’s disgust, Silverfox is alive and was working for Stryker—he promised to free Silverfox’s sister Emma if she did as Stryker wished, including helping Creed fake her own murder. Logan fights Creed and defeats him, refusing to actually kill his brother. He and Silverfox free the kids, including Emma and Summers.
Then they’re confronted by Wilson. Logan sends Silverfox off with the kids while he fights Wilson. He has swords that come out his arms akin to Logan’s claws, Wraith’s teleporting, Summers’s optic blasts, and a healing factor. They fight on one of the smokestacks, and then Creed arrives to save Logan on the nobody-kills-my-brother-but-me principle. They fight Wilson together, using the same back-to-back tactics they used in combat when they were younger, and eventually defeat him, cutting his head off and destroying the smokestack.
Creed then attacks Logan, but LeBeau saves him. Creed gets away, and the kids are rescued by a bald telepath in a helicopter who identifies himself as Charles Xavier.
Stryker confronts Logan with a gun filled with adamantium bullets and shoots Logan in the head. Silverfox also dies, having been wounded earlier. LeBeau finds Logan when he wakes up, but he can’t remember anything; while his brain heals the physical damage from the bullets, the memories are gone. His dogtags read both “Logan” and “Wolverine,” but he can’t remember anything else, including LeBeau and Silverfox. He goes off on his own.
“…but what I do isn’t very nice”
From 1994 to 2000, I was the editor in charge of a line of Marvel Comics-based novels and short-story anthologies. It was, prior to 2008, the biggest, most extensive line of interconnected Marvel stories told in a form other than comic books.
Among the fifty-plus books we did in that line, which was co-published by Byron Preiss Multimedia Company and the Boulevard Books imprint of what is now the Penguin Publishing Group, was a 1998 hardcover novel by Christopher Golden called X-Men: Codename Wolverine. It told a two-track storyline, one in the present day, one in the past, during Logan’s days as a covert operative. An old mission comes back to haunt them, as the people involved in a search for a disk years earlier are kidnapped in the present day. It was a fun espionage adventure from Wolverine’s pre-superhero career.
I had high hopes that X-Men Origins: Wolverine would be similar in tone to Golden’s book. There’s a lot to be mined in Wolverine’s mysterious past—indeed, comics writers have spent a lot of time the past four decades mining it—and I thought this movie could do likewise.
Things start out promising, with the history between Sabretooth and Wolverine fighting alongside each other through so many wars, then being recruited by Stryker. When they’re flying to Lagos, I thought, all right, this is what I signed up for. There’s even some overlap in the characters involved, as the 1998 novel featured not just Creed, but also Wraith, Agent Zero (when he was calling himself Maverick), and Silverfox.
And then we don’t even get halfway through the first mission before Wolverine quits in a huff and we fast forward six years to Creed killing off the members of the team, as if that’s supposed to mean something. But we only saw the team for half a second, so neither Wolverine’s departure nor Creed’s tracking them down to kill them has much of an impact, beyond the sundering of the two half-brothers. I had more emotional connection to the doomed X-Force team in Deadpool 2, for crying out loud.
Then we get Silverfox. In the comics, Silver Fox was also a love interest for Logan who died, but she actually was a strong character in her own right, who led Hydra for a time, as opposed to a schoolteacher with a mutant power who was manipulated by Stryker. Here, as played by the supremely bland Lynn Collins, she’s a plot device, and not a particularly interesting one.
Not that the other characters fare much better. The character Ryan Reynolds plays is a good one, but he bears no resemblance to Deadpool except for using the scarring of the surgeries done on him to mimic the comic character’s mask (going so far as to sew his mouth shut). It’s pretty revolting, and were it not supposed to be an iconic character like Deadpool, it might have worked better. (Though I did love Logan’s line about Stryker finally finding a way to shut Wilson up.)
Reynolds, at least, will be able to redeem Deadpool down the line. Would that the same could be said for all the others. Liev Schreiber doesn’t sound like Sabretooth, he sounds like a bored hipster. He conveys none of the menace of Creed, and his physicality is lacking. His leaping about like an animal on all fours probably looked great on the storyboards, but looks idiotic when shown. Kevin Durand in a fat suit is pretty awful (though still probably only the second-silliest thing he’s ever worn on camera), will.i.am and Dominic Monaghan create absolutely no impression whatsoever as Wraith and Bradley, and the less said about Taylor Kitsch’s spectacularly bland Gambit the better. Though I suppose I should be impressed that they managed to make Gambit boring. I’ve never had much use for Remy LeBeau, but whatever I may think of him, he was never dull until this movie. And Danny Huston gives no sense that he will age into anyone as talented as Bryan Cox. (They should’ve shelled out the money for the CGI to de-age Cox, it would’ve been a thousand times better than Huston’s tired mustache-twirling.)
The title character doesn’t come across so hot here, either. Jackman seems to be sleepwalking through most of the picture. In every other X-movie he appears in, he takes control of the action—the camera almost always focuses on him, even if it’s just a joke cameo like in First Class—but here, he’s just either upset at Creed or blandly angry at Stryker. His anger and rage is irritatingly subdued—he’s only convincingly rage-y when he leaps from the vat after being implanted with the adamantium.
To make matters worse, the actual plot makes no sense. Bad enough we have no emotional investment in the systematic killing off of this team we barely met, but Stryker’s subsequent plan makes no sense. Why go to all the trouble of turning Logan into a killing machine if you’re then going to spend the rest of the movie trying to kill him? This plot flaw is, in fact, so bloody bog-obvious that General Munson actually points it out to Stryker. (Munson, by the way, is one of the best acting jobs in the whole damn movie, played brilliantly by Australian actor Stephen Leeder, whom I remember fondly from the Farscape episode “Nerve” as Commander Javio.)
Stryker’s response is the same as that of every other villain ever, which is to kill the general—except Munson has already said he’s shutting the project down, and generals are part of a chain of command. In fact, in a mid-credits scene, Stryker is taken in for questioning regarding Munson’s death. I suppose it’s possible that Stryker fobbed it off on Logan or Creed or Wilson—in fact, he had to have, since we’ve already seen that two decades or so hence, he’ll be a presidential aide…
Still, what Stryker is trying to accomplish could charitably be called unclear, and not always consistent with how he was portrayed as an older man in X2.
There was a chance to tell a good movie here, a nifty little adventure flick with mutant commandos going on interesting missions. Instead, we were teased for that movie and got something far less interesting.
Next week, we move on to The Wolverine.
Keith R.A. DeCandido recently won the Scribe Award, given by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, for Best Short Story for his tale “Ganbatte” in Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, a Lydia “Warbride” Ruiz story about martial arts, the Florida Keys, and sexual harassment.
As a huuuuge Wolverine fan growing up, and after an excellent turn in X2 (but less so X-Men United), I was super pumped to see an origins movie for Wolverine. The movie was so horrifically bad, that I still have a bad taste in my mouth, even after the excellence of Logan.
Jackman was still good in X-Men United — he wasn’t the movie’s problem — but yeah. Wolverine’s backstory is tailor-made for a great adventure story and they totally botched it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Had forgotten that this one had both Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins in it a few years before they reunited to offer a couple more bland performances in another film that, while better than this one, still entirely failed to live up to its source material: John Carter.
Although this film was savaged by its fanbase, once I finally saw it, I thought it wasn’t nearly as bad as its reputation. It is rather mediocre, to be sure — it’s sketchy, feeling like an abbreviated version of a fuller story. The relationship between Logan and his brother Victor is ill-defined–what makes Logan more moral and Victor more heartless? What shaped them differently if they lived and fought side by side for so long? So from an emotional standpoint, it’s somewhat lacking. But as a narrative revealing the backstory of the X-Men film trilogy, I think it held together pretty well. It didn’t feel fundamentally wrong to me, just kind of superficial. But it did a good job staying true to what the prior films established and explaining Logan’s past. Unlike Keith, I found Danny Huston convincing as a younger version of Stryker, and they recreated the Weapon X lab pretty well.
In particular, I appreciated getting an explanation for the “Wolverine” nickname. In the comics, that name makes sense because Logan is small and relentless, but for someone of Hugh Jackman’s size, you’d think he would’ve been nicknamed for a larger animal. So that always bugged me. This movie finally gave the name an explanation, and one I found rather touching.
@3/hoopmanjh: I quite liked John Carter. It had a weak beginning, and a lame title, but once it got past those first two scenes, it was really pretty impressive. And I thought Lynn Collins was excellent as Dejah Thoris.
I thought the Blob was sort of fun. Dumb, but fun. The rest was just dumb. Striker’s ‘plot’ is the worst kind of mastermind plot, where neither the means nor the ends make any kind of sense. What did they need Logan for at all? How did freaking Wolverine not notice that his girlfriend wasn’t actually dead? Did the plan really revolve around him not attempting to get any medical attention for her, or at least dealing with her remains?
This stuff wouldn’t bother me if the rest of the movie was fun, but it isn’t. Oh, I just remembered; the fight at the end is probably supposed to be the ‘real’ story of the Three Mile Island accident, right? I lived in Harrisburg for a while; if they had actually done some shooting around there instead of on studio lots, that might have been a bit fun.
I thought this movie was okay. It was there, it fills an afternoon with some mildly interesting action set pieces, it is not offensively bad or rage inducing in the way some blockbusters are (coughTLJcough) but I wouldn’t deliberately seek it out either. It is a movie for when you are channel surfing while bored, or for when (again, while bored) you are looking at the “customers also watched” suggested playlist. That is pretty much all I can say about it. Well, that and without Bad Deadpool here, we wouldn’t have got Good Deadpool later.
Was what you thought of him “smarmy douchebag who is just a hodgepodge of cliches and offensive stereotypes who somehow made bad phonetic accents seem acceptable in comics”? Because boring is an improvement to that.
@@.-@ CLB
I agree with you on the problems of John Carter, but I also thought that it was a little slow in the middle too when they were walking through the desert. It could have used another action set piece in there. It could have been a bit snappier. Although I admit this might just be an after effect of me being so dog tired the first time I saw the movie that I did fall asleep in the middle and have just been ascribing that to the movie ever since. I did the same thing in Transformers: Age of Extinction when I fell asleep as they were infiltrating the factory and woke up when they were in China, but people agree with me that that portion of that movie was completely unnecessary.
Oh, I didn’t think John Carter was terrible — it was enjoyable enough, and I’ll almost certainly rewatch it before I rewatch X3 or this one — but I wasn’t impressed with it as an adaptation of the books.
Fun fact: The part of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the film was played by Daryl Sabara, who had previously played Juni in the Spy Kids films.
I liked John Carter quite a bit also, but Kitsch didn’t impress me overmuch there, either. The movie still worked because Carter is more a conduit for our experiencing Barsoom than he is an actual interesting character, and yes, Collins was magnificent as Thoris, way better than she was here.
random22: Claremont was doing phonetic spellings of accented speech looooong before he created Gambit.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@5/Colin R: Yeah, the Three Mile Island climax was kind of silly for me, because I remember watching the news footage of the accident, and it didn’t involve the physical destruction of the cooling towers, just a radiation leak (which created a lot of panic at the time but ended up having essentially no measurable long-term impact on cancer rates or mortality rates). But action movies these days need their big cataclysmic climaxes. Not enough to have a fight on top of a landmark, you have to destroy it utterly.
The main problem with this prequel is that…it’s a prequel. We know where the storyline’s going so nothing surprising or important can happen. Towards the end of the film, Wolverine promises to Gambit that he’s going to kill Stryker, Creed and everyone else. Oddly, next time they meet, Gambit acts as though he did, even though at that point the entire audience goes “Well, you won’t, because they’re still alive in the second and first movies respectively.” So instead they bring in this Weapon XI guy for Wolverine to fight and kill in the last act in order to give it some sort of climax while all the villains skip off retribution-free to pop up again in twenty years’ time. (Stryker’s punishment for multiple murders of innocents is…having to walk a lot? Okay…)
I had no idea that guy was meant to be Deadpool until people started complaining about it, and no idea who Deadpool was other than that he was important enough to get half a page in an X-Men guide I had. I had no idea who the other guys were either apart from Blob, so didn’t care if they were being misused. The involvement of Gambit did feel like the producers getting fed up of being asked when Gambit would appear so just casually giving him a throwaway appearance, which was a bit of a waste, although I’m not as concerned with the timeline as some people were. (I always got the feeling that the people insisting he was meant to be Rogue’s One True Love actually had no idea why, they’d just read it somewhere.)
And slightly disconcerting to see a large amount of Australian actors turning up in supporting roles. To me, Stephen Leeder will always be Inspector Carter, and that’s shortly after Wolverine’s dad being Shane Ramsay.
cap-mjb: I always find it hilarious that people forget that Gambit originally showed up helping out Storm (who had been temporarily made into a teenager and out on her own), and didn’t even meet Rogue (who was off with Magneto in the Savage Land) for quite some time after he joined the team.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@10, 11 The effect of the 90s X-Men cartoon?
@10/cap-mjb: “The main problem with this prequel is that…it’s a prequel. We know where the storyline’s going so nothing surprising or important can happen.”
Except that it’s a prequel about the life story of a character whose memory was wiped and whose past was a mystery. So there were plenty of surprises, things we didn’t know before. What makes a story worthwhile isn’t just the ending; if that were the case, every book would have only one page. The worth of a story is in seeing how you get to the ending. A lot of the time, especially in series fiction, it’s not that hard to predict the ending of a story. What makes it worth reading or watching is the journey. Sometimes knowing where a character is going can make it more interesting to see how they got there. (The one thing that worked best for me in the Star Wars prequels was the palpable sense of dread in Revenge of the Sith as events inexorably moved toward the tragic ending we knew was coming. It wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful without that foreknowledge.)
Now, it’s true that the way XMO:W chose to tell that backstory was mediocre. But that’s not an indictment of the entire category of prequels, any more than getting one bad sandwich is an indictment of all sandwiches. It just means they didn’t find the right balance, the most effective to way to tell a prequel — either by centering the story on the unfolding of revelations we didn’t already know, or by building effectively on the sense of a looming tragedy that we knew was coming.
I suspect the genesis of the Rogue/Gambit relationship was that Jim Lee enjoyed drawing his trenchcoat and her bolero/bomber jacket. Ah, the early 90s, when all superheroes wore jackets.
No superhero pulled that off Like Jack Knight
I feel something should be mentioned that this was done during the writers strike. Probably a decent enough reason for the script to be hot garbage.
Part of the reason Wade is arguably the best written character in the first 30 min is because his lines were written by Ryan. Ryan Renolds didn’t know who deadpool was till this movie. The Writer for deadpool (after seeing van wilder) thought he was the only person who could do it. The studio respected his wishes. Then the studio liked what they saw and were going to make an origins deadpool movie until they saw the final result of this.
I will say that most of this movies parts work within their segment, but they dont work together. Like a bunch of puzzle peices about the same thing, but from different sets.
Ahg, I hate this movie. And I love bad films. I watched Manos 5 times, both with and without riffing. But this abortion…
I respect everyones opinion on a work of art. I am a huge fan of the John Cater books (or as I like to call him, Captain Coincidence.) So I don’t want to devalue anyone who likes this. But for me…..gah!
That worst parts were when the internal consistency really forced the characters to run face first into a wall. Example: Styker has just revealed that everything has been his fault. “Wuahahaha. I am responsible for everything! All your suffering is by my hand and I will continue to do so. And there is nothing you can do about it. Especially since you are an unstoppable killing machine with razer sharp claws and a hair trigger berserk rage standing 10 feet in front of me!”
Oh, you killed me and ruined mine and everyone else life. Walk until your feet bleed.
An admantium bullet specifically erases memories?
I love a good prequel, but not when it forces you to have events and characters act the complete opposite of the way they should just for the sake of the earlier story. If you can not handle it, don’t try and tell something original. Or don’t if you really lack the talent.
Ok, that came off mean. Sorry. This was one of the few films that I actually hated while watching. Like I said, I am often quite tolerant of films and can enjoy what other hate.
Except the Dark Knight of course. grrr
I always felt like Gambit and Rogue were shoehorned together because of their accents, Cajun and Southern Belle, respectively, much like how Black Panther and Storm were put together because they were both from Africa. That isn’t to say, however, that those superficial relationship origins didn’t lead to actual meaningful relationships (depending on the writer).
That said, I’ve always liked Gambit, mostly because of the Marvel vs. Capcom arcade game, and this version of him felt a bit underserved. I always thought that Josh Holloway would have made a better Gambit, and I think I remember at one point he was rumored to be attached to the role in either this or the aborted Gambit solo movie (which, last I checked, had Channing Tatum in the role, though it’s been a while since I checked).
The movie started out OK, got kind of shaky, and then went completely off the rails in the final reel. Even if I didn’t know what Deadpool was supposed to be, that final battle was just a mish-mash of over the top effects. An ending more grounded in reality would have worked much better. And it wouldn’t have required them to ignore this movie’s continuity when Deadpool finally made it the big screen.
@15: Reynolds was actually well aware of Deadpool by 2009, he had been campaigning since 2004 after Blade Trininty for a full Deadpool film starring him.
Check out the end-credits for Deadpool 2 to see a good joke about how Reynolds views Deadpool’s appearance in this movie.
It was funny that the studio and producers blamed the performance of this film on the early release online of a cut with unfinished SFX. That wasn’t the movie’s problem…
As far as John Carter, another funny reaction was some critics and viewers calling it derivative of Star Wars, when of course, it was the other way around. Frickin’ Tatooine is Mars and Dune combined.
Cleggster: the adamantium bullets don’t wipe memory as such, but they penetrated his skull to hit the memory center of his brain. As Stryker himself said, the brain would grow back, but the memories would be gone.
KAsiki: ZetaStriker is correct. Reynolds was already trying to do a DP movie before this.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@21 A DP movie? Was that on purpose? It seems very on-brand for Deadpool.
It’s funny that the other ‘Origins’ movie also had a climax where mutants were at the center of a near-disaster (the Cuban Missile Crisis.) This could have gotten pretty silly. I am morbidly curious about which mutants were present at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, or the Great Molasses Flood.
I never understood how an adamantium bullet would penetrate adamantium. Isn’t the whole point that adamantium is indestructible? Could an adamantium bullet fired from a handgun have enough force to penetrate adamantium?
Austin: a bullet of pure adamantium could probably penetrate a skull laced with adamantium with enough force. Remember, Logan’s skeleton is laced with the compound, not the pure metal itself.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
noblehunter: I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. *whistles innocently* *adjusts halo*
—KRAD
@13/CLB: Yeah, fair point, I was probably being a bit simplistic. I guess what I was saying was that the story it chose to tell was hampered by the need to tick all the relevant boxes and get all the characters in the places they needed to be for the later-but-earlier movies. I take your point about Revenge of the Sith (although even that, when you stop and think about it, is kind of hampered by the need to have Yoda go “If you try and don’t succeed, give up and go and live on a swamp planet for the next twenty years”), but prequels, like sequels, work best if they’ve actually got something new to say rather than rehashing old plot points.
Thank goodness I never saw this. I actually thought XMOW was going to be a straight up adaptation of the comics’ Wolverine: Origin which I also disliked so I never gave the movie a chance. From the description, it sounds like they take at least a little from the comic nevertheless.
I don’t think it really serves Wolverine to have an actual origin for him, because part of what makes him special is the question about his background. OTOH I have no problem with pre-Weapon X or pre-X-men Wolverine tales and I wish they had gone in that direction instead. I always kind of envisioned him like Powers’ Christian Walker where he is incredibly long-lived but can only remember clearly the last hundred or so years (to match a regular human lifespan).
I’ll miss Hugh Jackman as Wolverine though. And Logan was magnificent.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Even the title of the film is boring.
It’s interesting to note that pre-Game of Thrones David Benioff, who had a mixed bag of scripts to his name (Kite Runner, Troy) was hired to write this film. He wouldn’t write a movie script again for 10 years. He was partnered with Skip Woods, who would go on to write “masterpieces” such as The A-Team, A Good Day to Die Hard, Sabotage and Hitman: Agent 47. And people wonder why this film was so awful.
There are many things wrong with this movie, but the direction is not absolutely abhorrent. Gavin Hood does a passable job with some action sequences, but the rest of the film is so uninteresting it’s a wonder he didn’t just decide to stop shooting midway through. I mean, did anyone involved with this production actually think they were making a film of X2 quality?
There are several revelations that completely change Wolverine’s character, such as the revelation that the snarly mutant from X-Men, Sabretooth, is actually his half-brother. His amnesia was not caused by the trauma of his past, or even as a side effect of the horrific experiments conducted on him, because, you know, that would’ve made some amount of sense. Instead it was caused by a magical adamantium bullet, which has the powers of inducing complete amnesia, except in Logan (2017), when it can just straight up kill you instead.
The travesty that is the origin of Wolverine’s name. The horrific maiming of Deadpool, the Merc with a Mouth, as Knife-Man with No Mouth and Other Powers. The terrible Team X, consisting of a wasted Dominic Monaghan, a corny as hell Ryan Reynolds, who redeemed himself after 7 years and then would kill himself 2 years further on, a pointless celebrity cameo in Will.i.am, a continuity wrecking but ultimately harmless Liev Schrieber, and the Angriest. Wolverine. Ever!!! Does Gavin Hood have a screaming Wolverine fetish or something? My TV was visibly shaking with the power of some of those screams.
I watched this film out of a sense of obligation. Not because I wanted to, but because I was binge watching the X-Mem films before Apocalypse, had seen The Last Stand and thought things couldn’t get any worse from there. Oh boy was I wrong.
If The A-Team had had more sequences like the flying tank battle, Murdoch’s Helicopter Flight, and Face in tyres, and The Ending shipping battle, it would have been fine. It would have been good, but -like this- they wrapped an awful by-the-numbers origin story around it and an awful by-the-numbers spy movie around that.
Daniel: Keep in mind that at no point is Liev Schreiber’s character in this movie ever referred to as Sabretooth. And at no point in X-Men is Tyler Mane’s character ever referred to as Victor Creed. I think we can safely assume that they’re two completely different characters, source material notwithstanding.
I also agree with Christopher that the reason for him choosing the name Wolverine works in this context, since Hugh Jackman isn’t short. :)
Pretty much with you on everything else though…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@29/Daniel: Hey, I quite liked the A-Team movie. (I actually covered both it and XMO:W in a single blog post I called “Movies from the library that were better than expected.”)
Anyway, writers have so little power in the feature film industry, and any major film has so many different writers working on it with or without credit, that it’s really impossible to draw any correlation between who writes a feature film and how good or bad it’s going to be. The writers are basically treated as contractors hired to carry out the vision of the director and/or producer, which is why the quality of any given writer’s filmography can be wildly variable.
On prequels:
If the problem with prequels is that they’re prequels – that is, they are inherently flawed at their core – then the original Star Wars movies are now inherently flawed the same way.
Because by the same logic, episodes 4-6 are now prequels to episodes 7-9.
Yes, yes they are.
What, just because the publication date is earlier, that changes things? It doesn’t. My children are of the “7-9 Generation” for lack of a better word. The know The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi far better than they know either the original trilogy or the prequels. But most importantly, episodes 7-9 tell a complete story: you can watch them without watching episodes 1-6 at all. They aren’t required viewing. Just like episodes 1-3 weren’t required viewing for those of us who grew up with episodes 4-6.
If all prequels suck, if all prequels are inherently flawed simply because they’re prequels… then episodes 4-6 now share that designation – from a certain point of view.
@33: I believe this is what they call Late Arrival Spoiler…
Prequels are hemmed in by the fact that their sequels are already written. Works don’t become prequels just because they have sequels later. cap-mlb gives a good example: if Revenge of the Sith was not a prequel to The Empire Strikes Back, they could have taken Yoda’s story anywhere they wanted: they wouldn’t be stuck on rails that had to lead to Dagobah somehow.
@33 “from a certain point of view”
Which is to say, a total lie.
That is certainly how Obi Wan used it.
I used to work in aftersales client care, and as such was a professional truth stretcher whose job it was to spin the whoppers that sales told people as being a truth of some sort and Obi Wan’s audacity with that one was a lie too far even for me.
I largely liked the earlier X-Men movies, and came to like Hugh Jackman as a result, but this film didn’t really do it for me. Overall, it just seemed to lack much of the elements that have driven the XM franchise, particularly the Xavier/Magneto philisophical debate, and other elements to make you think. Scott Summers struck me as being tacked on, and I felt I never got to know and subsequently really feel for the other captured mutants. Overall, I felt XMOW just seemed to add up to nothing but one action/big fight sequence after another, which to me quickly got boring, and left too little time to breathe. Just a mess of what could’ve been a good film
@33/danielmclark: “Because by the same logic, episodes 4-6 are now prequels to episodes 7-9.
Yes, yes they are.”
Well, strictly speaking, no, they aren’t. The word “prequel” doesn’t just mean “the earlier story in a sequence,” even though people have gotten into the habit of using it that way . In its original sense, it specifically means a sequel that’s set before the original (a “preceding sequel,” as it were) — something that comes out after a given work but takes place before it. The fact that it comes out later makes it materially different from a story that comes out earlier, because a prequel is still a followup in conceptual and narrative terms, building on the known events and concepts that the audience knows from the preceding story. Star Wars Episodes 1-3 foreshadow and build on elements from 4-6 throughout, telling a story that largely depends on what was previously established in 4-6 and answers questions that were raised in 4-6. But 4-6 do not foreshadow or build on anything in 7-9, because nobody had conceived of 7-9 when they made 4-6. That’s the material difference between a prequel (in the strict sense) and an actual earlier story.
This is a really bad movie, but at the same time, it’s so entertaining and rewatchable. It has tons of flaws, and the romantic subplot left me cold, but at least it’s So Bad It’s Good, unlike X-3 and (sorry) Apocalypse, which just feel like a chore to watch through for me.
@31: “Keep in mind that at no point is Liev Schreiber’s character in this movie ever referred to as Sabretooth. And at no point in X-Men is Tyler Mane’s character ever referred to as Victor Creed. I think we can safely assume that they’re two completely different characters, source material notwithstanding.”
I once read somewhere Marvel’s official online alternate reality listing stated Creed and Sabretooth are different people in the movieverse, but this is second hand info and to boot from even before Days of Future Past rebooted the timeline.
Similarly, Kayla’s sister in this movie (who was supposed to be a version of Emma Frost) is never called by name onscreen and is just “Emma” in the credits, so it’s easy to assume she’s a separate person from the Emma Frost who appears in First Class.
Well, Emma’s last name is more likely to be Silverwolf Silverfox, since she’s Kayla Silverfoxwolf’s sister. :)
(EDITED TO FIX TYPO.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42/krad: It’s Silverfox, isn’t it? Yeah, I figure that, at most, she’s Emma Silverfox, although I don’t think she was ever called Emma outside of the end credits.
GAH! I made that typo several times when writing the rewatch, too, annoyingly enough. But yeah, Kayla called her Emma once or twice in dialogue.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@44 – I’m interested why you never had much use for Gambit? Most X-men characters are teenagers who grew up in school and jump when Charles says jump and have no own life expirences which molded their character and values beyond Xavier’s point of view. unlike Wolverine and Bishop (who’s whole story at first was around Gambit or better said the traitor), which leaves us with Gambit. As his background is in shadows (not unlike Wolverine potential but not digged around that much) and has disastrous secrets (see Bishop) and a mysterious connection to Mr Sinister, there were so many many ways to flesh out his character, but it’s a mystery to me how so many writers didn’t tackle him or did it bad? Such potential wasted I don’t get it.
While it’s certainly possible for period pieces to drown themselves in over-fetishizing of the time period they’re set in (and at times the next few X-men films flirt with that), this movie has the opposite problem: it just really, really doesn’t feel like the 70’s. At all.
Thank God we had a whole set piece on Canadian Ma and Pa Kent’s farm so that we could discover the Origin of Wolverine’s jacket from the first film.
Which is partly because film’s based on several different Wolverine flashback stories — giving partial explanations of his past and teasing that each may be an important key to his character works when they’re scattered through ongoing X-Men and Wolverine stories, but connecting them up as a complete story of Wolverine’s past needs a much stronger idea about how they relate than the film provides.
So never saw this movie so can’t comment on it – but I am interested in the Obi Wan “lie” that is mentioned in the comments. Did I miss something in the prequels between the over fetishization of effects, the ridiculous innocence of young Anikin in the first movie, and the incredibly bad romance writing?
Thanks!
@48/dwcole: It’s actually a reference to the original trilogy. In Star Wars (aka A New Hope), Obi-Wan told Luke that Darth Vader killed his father. That was retconned in The Empire Strikes Back to Vader being Luke’s father. So Luke confronted Obi-Wan about it in Return of the Jedi:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Jedi
Quoth Schwartz while asking me why I don’t like Gambit: “Most X-men characters are teenagers who grew up in school and jump when Charles says jump and have no own life expirences which molded their character and values beyond Xavier’s point of view.”
The original X-Men maybe, but not “most X-Men characters” by any stretch. That definition applies to the founding five, and to Shadowcat and Colossus, and doesn’t apply to Wolverine, Bishop, and Gambit, as you say, but nor does it apply to Storm, Nightcrawler, Banshee, Forge, Rogue, Dazzler, Longshot, Havok, Polaris, Jubilee, or Rachel Summers, just to name a few off the top of my head.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Jubilee was to young to mold into anything until she got to school… still I find it intersting why Gambit was never developed enough
Schwartz: Yeah, but Jubilee came to the X-Men after gallivanting around with Wolverine for a while during the period when the X-Men were believed dead and scattered to the nine winds.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
““Because by the same logic, episodes 4-6 are now prequels to episodes 7-9.”
That’s not how the prequels work!
(I’ll show myself out…)
Regarding this movie, I’ve seen it exactly once (at a friend’s house), and despite my general love for all of the other X-Men movies, even the corniest ones, probably will never see it again. I suppose in a way it’s a relief to know that this was not intended to be Sabertooth (or Emma Frost – because I remember being kind of confused when she showed up again in First Class) because as others have pointed out, this just doesn’t seem to gel with the other movies. Stryker especially seemed to make no sense.
Also, I loved Gambit from the cartoon and hated his portrayal here, so that was pretty much enough to turn me off from this movie.
@53/Lisamarie: Oh, they were meant to be Sabertooth and Emma Frost. It’s just that they weren’t called by those names onscreen, so it’s easy enough to ignore the intention and reconcile them with the contradictory versions of those characters in other films.
@46. They set that up for the sequel to this movie, the title being: The Search for Wolverine’s Jacket! Seeing as how he left it in the plane and ran away without it at the end.
OK, that’s a lie.
Regarding the disparity between Tyler Mane’s and Liev Schreiber’s Sabretooth. Maybe Tyler Mane is the Mr Sinister Sabretooth from the late 80’s-90’s and Schreiber’s Sabretooth is the Iron Fist one. Although, no, that doesn’t really make any sense either.
A Hugh Jackman quote from the 2015 Comic Con regarding the X-Men fanbase : “You are the greatest fans any actor could ever dream of having. You are the most loyal, the most passionate. You are definitely the most honest. Sometimes brutally honest, yes. When we haven’t always got it right you’ve told us.”
Always makes me laugh somehow.
Oh, about the movie. Wolverine’s hair is great I guess.
I’m lucky I have no memory of this film, even though I watched it. Screwing up Deadpool so badly has got to be some kind of record in superhero movies. Regardless of how bad Catwoman and how stupid an idea was to change the character into something so far from the comics character, even that Catwoman bears some passing resemblance to the original character. But a mute Deadpool?
@11 – krad: Yes, Gambit showed up to help Storm and only met Rogue later, but their romantic pairing still happened and is still one of the three major romances in X-Men lore.
@17 – LazerWulf: I think Rogue and Gambit were mostly put together because he is the ultimate cad, the suave womanizer, etc, hipersexualized, while she is the untouchable woman; forcing him to pursue a non-physical relationship with her (although they’ve occasionally managed to be physical for brief periods of time).
@29 – Daniel: The Adamantium bullet in Logan can kill him because his healing factor has been failing for years.