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Logan

Started by Dev7on, March 05, 2017, 05:39:08 AM

Dev7on

I just came back home from seeing Logan and oh my god, it's a good movie! I REALLY like X-23 more than Wolverine. She is badass! The only problem I have with movie is the villain. He's weak. The violence isn't as gory like Mortal Kombat X. It's just a lot of head stabbings and decapitations. Other than that it's good.

Arcana

Just saw Logan yesterday.  Very enjoyable movie.  Makes me wonder what The Wolverine (the second movie) would have looked like if James Mangold was just left to do whatever he wanted.

No spoilers

The Good:

X-23 is great.  I liked the actor and the basic portrayal, and I liked how they manipulated comic fans' expectations in the third act.  They did a really good job of making her into a lethal presence.  No real complaints here.

Old Man Logan and Old Man Chuck.  I also liked the old man - even older man dynamic going on with Logan and Charles.  There was a bit of a father son dynamic that I think resonates with one of the few long-standing consistent characterizations in the X-Men movies of Logan's love for Charles as a father figure.  Seeing them interact as people and not as X-Men was something I liked a lot about the movie, in a way similar to how one of the few high points of the rebooted X-Men were the interactions between Charles and Erik.

Westchester.  I liked that the movie didn't shove explanations into my face about how every little thing in this future time happened.  I can figure that out for myself, but more importantly I think its the act of trying to figure out what has happened (and its not hard) gives more gravitas to this future.  Being told things happened is one thing.  But *realizing* that they happened can be so much more powerful.

The ending.  I liked how they decided to give everyone the ending they needed, and not the ending they wanted.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.


The Bad:

The end of mutants.  The idea that mutants don't exist anymore is a very, very rough echo to the Old Man Logan story but I felt it wasn't integrated enough into the Logan story.  Its sort of just there.  The fact that it adds atmosphere to the movie in the beginning is interesting, but the reveal was a bit of a let down to me.  Maybe it is meant to be; one of those things that just isn't supposed to be resolved or even cared about, just dealt with.  Like the wells gone dry and the silver's mined out and the town is now on the deep decline in a western movie, *and then* the bad stuff happens.  Incidentally, no real spoilers, but Logan is a modern superpower laced western.  If it wasn't obvious at the start, a mid-movie scene in a hotel should set you up for what this movie actually is.

No real villain.  Yes, there's a villain.  And there's another villain behind that villain.  And then there's *that*.  Logan's past literally tries to kill him in several different ways in this movie.  But if Logan the movie is a western, and Logan the person is the Man With No Name, then he really should have either a villain to confront or a scourge to overcome.  Logan *kinda* has that in the end, but the movie kind of abandons that for a different path.  I think it is good in terms of character arc, but confusingly The Man With No Name normally doesn't have that kind of arc.  It is difficult to explain without spoilers, but Logan is really two movies connected, and the ending while it makes sense for the characters isn't the payoff that works as well with the theme.  The villains have to serve two different purposes in the movie, and I don't think they pull it off well.


The Ugly:

Actually, I don't think anything in this movie qualifies.  As long as you're good with people getting spiked through the head, its all good.


Overall: 8 out of 10.  This is dark and gritty without being boring and depressing.  It is Wolverine told as an American Gothic story.  And I think it is as good of a Last Wolverine Story as we're ever likely to get.


PS: Get there early.  Don't stand in line too long waiting for your popcorn.  I mean it.

Dev7on

Quote from: Arcana on March 06, 2017, 06:47:34 PM
Overall: 8 out of 10.  This is dark and gritty without being boring and depressing.  It is Wolverine told as an American Gothic story.  And I think it is as good of a Last Wolverine Story as we're ever likely to get.

That's the same rating I give this movie also. My other con for me is the pacing. It's TOO SLOW especially a 2h 21m long movie.

MyriVerse

Definitely the best X movie, though not as "fun" as Deadpool.
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doc7924

At least it ends with a good one.

Valtyr

My City of Heroes related review of Logan:

THIS IS WHAT BRUTE-LOCK LOOKS LIKE.

Arcana

Quote from: Valtyr on March 07, 2017, 05:53:30 PM
My City of Heroes related review of Logan:

THIS IS WHAT BRUTE-LOCK LOOKS LIKE.

Also, Logan needed more than one blue.

Vee

Wasn't bad, but some pacing could have cut half an hour out. Million times better than the original Old Man Logan book thankfully. One minor quibble i have is
Spoiler for Hidden:
So they train Laura to be completely badass but don't train any of the other planeteers to use their powers beyond basic 'let's show a couple of cool powers' level? I suppose they had to go that way seeing as Richter could have made the whole chase through the woods scene last about 5 seconds, but still.

saipaman

Quote from: Dev7on on March 05, 2017, 05:39:08 AM
The violence isn't as gory like Mortal Kombat X. It's just a lot of head stabbings and decapitations.

;D

Tenzhi

It was a solid movie overall.  I was most impressed by two things:

1.  Destroying the action movie cliche of a car easily crashing through a fence.

2.  The actress playing X23 crying complete with snot running out of her nose... talk about selling the moment.
When you insult someone by calling them a "pig" or a "dog" you aren't maligning pigs and dogs everywhere.  The same is true of any term used as an insult.

Arcana

Quote from: Vee on March 14, 2017, 02:18:19 AM
Spoiler for Hidden:
So they train Laura to be completely badass but don't train any of the other planeteers to use their powers beyond basic 'let's show a couple of cool powers' level? I suppose they had to go that way seeing as Richter could have made the whole chase through the woods scene last about 5 seconds, but still.

There is an explanation hinted at in the movie itself:

Spoiler for Hidden:
It is implied that the researchers had difficulty training the children to be effective with their powers because it was difficult to give them a killer instinct to use those powers without restraint.  It is entirely possible that X-23 just happened to be the child most pliable to that kind of training because she's Logan's clone and already has a lot of that animal instinct intrinsically.  The X-24 program was explicitly stated in the movie to be the answer to this problem, which is why they were about to destroy all the other children subjects when X-23 and a few others escaped.

Vee

Spoiler for Hidden:
I'll buy that i suppose. Though a couple of them did seem to relish killing the soldiers. I was fine with letting it slide just based on plot furthering anyway.

healix

I don't know about anyone else, but I couldn't help but cry at the end.
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eabrace

Quote from: healix on March 15, 2017, 01:50:17 PM
I don't know about anyone else, but I couldn't help but cry at the end.
I'm lobbying for the addition of Logan to the list of movies in which it is OK for a grown man to cry.  Old Yeller.  Saving Private Ryan.  The Transformers:  The Movie.  Toy Story 3.  And now, Logan.
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HalcyonS

I have to admit I went in worried as one of my friends didn't like the movie but I ended up liking it a lot. There were a lot of nice little touches in the movie and I thought they handled making him look sick and worn out and his and Xavier's relationship was just amazingly well done. As to the actress playing Laura, she was just amazing in the film having to convey so much without talking at all for the first half of the movie and I hope we get to see her again sometime soon.

Arcana

Fridge logic, but spoilery:

What it is about:

Spoiler for Hidden:
Logan is dying, because his healing factor is diminishing and his adamantium skeleton is poisoning him to death

What I just realized:

Spoiler for Hidden:
Logan's healing factor may be getting weaker with age, but it cannot be responsible for his dying because in the Days of Future Past timeline his healing factor was still obviously strong enough to keep him going.  What's different?  The cure.  The US government has been flooding the food supply with GMO corn (among other things) that has a mutant gene cure which doesn't kill mutants, it just edits them out of the gene pool.  No more mutant children, no more mutants.

*However* Logan's healing factor may have caused the cure to interact with him differently.  Because of his healing factor, and equally important his *using* his healing factor constantly because of fighting and also dealing with the adamantium on his bones, in effect Logan is constantly replacing his body's cells at an accelerated rate.  The cure probably weakens mutations over time, but just not enough to really be noticeable in normal mutants: it just does what they said it does: it eliminates mutation from successive generations.  Logan's entire body is, in a sense, many generations distant from his previous self.  So it is really the cure that is ultimately killing him.

That conjecture is bolstered by the fact that the scientist in charge of the X-23 project freaked out when they had a birthday party for one of the X23 kids.  I realized that while it is consistent with them not wanting the staff to socialize with the kids and humanize them, he could also be freaking out about the fact they made a cake for the kids.  If the mutant cure is in the GMO corn, it is possible that corn syrup based sweeteners have a chance to contaminate the children and ruin their experiments.  Because the cure is probably classified, he couldn't say he was concerned about that fact directly.  But it might have explained his anger in that situation.

Tenzhi

So... X23's bones are apparently fused with adamantium... unbreakable, ungrowing adamantium.  Theoretically, she'd always be stuck with the frame of a child.
When you insult someone by calling them a "pig" or a "dog" you aren't maligning pigs and dogs everywhere.  The same is true of any term used as an insult.

Kaos Arcanna

Quote from: Tenzhi on March 30, 2017, 10:26:32 PM
So... X23's bones are apparently fused with adamantium... unbreakable, ungrowing adamantium.  Theoretically, she'd always be stuck with the frame of a child.

In the comics only her claws are coated with Adamantium, so she was able to grow to her adult size.