Following a Part Three that was then the most expensive film ever made, overstuffed with characters and complications and grotesquely dangling plot threads, Part Four was conceived as a pared down simplification, ditching ongoing escalation for a contained story focusing more wholly on the breakout character, in hope of recapturing part of the original’s charm.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides thus makes Wolverine front and center, ditching the rest of the mutant cast that – My mistake, this movie is actually called X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
To Fox’s credit, they realized that what X-Men: The Last Stand did couldn’t be sustained further. To their fault, they insisted upon continuing this cinematic X-Men tradition nonetheless – not that the “X-Men” cannot yield assorted worthwhile adventures borrowed from their storied comic run, but the motion picture universe is more specifically Bryan Singer’s. Asking a newbie director to continue on in that style, minus legitimate passion for the endeavor (or possibly even the larger genre), hinders much of what could otherwise be done. No longer, by 2009, was the X-Men franchise predicting the path of future superhero movies. Now, with Batman Begins having legitimized the idea of multiple filmic incarnations of one hero, maintaining fidelity to the trumped-up continuity Brett Ratner largely queefed out seems a self-defeating act.
In concept (cooked up by producers, then tossed over to creative types to make something – anything – of it), X-Men Origins was to be a new pseudo-series spun-off from the “central” X-Men backbone. Thus X4 might still come to be, if executives meet Halle Berry’s latest unrealistic requests for a satin-lined castle of gold filled with acolytes. Rather than weather that storm, the Origins label would cut through the chaff of inflating X-Men rosters by focusing solely upon individual mutants, whomever deserves a solo outing as a proper, name-recognition superhero.
Really, this is a roundabout way of admitting that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was undoubtedly the fan favorite, so why limit him to a single scene of animalistic slashing? Plus, with reputable storylines like Wolverine in Japan – No, wait, they’re just making it a prequel. How…redundant. It’s all there in the Origins label – The one thing that the X-Men movies didn’t do, among the clichés of the 21st century superhero movie, was tell an origin story. And all the better for those movies! As the nominal lead of three movies, Wolverine’s past is sufficiently filled in – his creation as Weapon X under William Stryker, and subsequent amnesia. That amnesia really seals the deal, since this new Wolverine – directed as if at gunpoint by Gavin Hood – is contractually fated to lead in to 2000’s X-Men. Prequels are challenging enough, when filmmakers fail to advantage of prior knowledge about inevitabilities. Making an entire movie of introductory character development, only to reset it at the very end – this is contemptible, the clearest sign that there was no point in making this beyond the financial.
Still, a prequel has the potential (one I’ve rarely seen acted upon) to use inevitability in the form of a Greek tragedy, maybe highlighting the pointlessness of Wolverine’s pre-Weapon X-istence to fashion an X-istentialist X-amination. Nolan could do it! If Hood could, Fox doesn’t want to know, because they’d rather willingly antagonize their new director – Wolverine has so many willfully perverse X-amples of X-ecutive meddling (when it works in other movies, we don’t even notice it), one truly gets a sense that the old ‘90s fashion of comics contempt has returned. Treading lightly for now, there’s no reason to introduce brand new beloved mutants, then completely misrepresent them all simultaneously.
With so many handicaps against Wolverine from the get go, it can only manage to entertain on the most superficial of levels, as an actioner. With a whole film to bask in, it’s a shame Wolverine isn’t allowed to rampage anywhere near X2’s glorious army assault, still the character’s grandest moment in film. The PG-13 rating is partly to blame, as is Wolverine’s inclination to be as generic an action movie as possible, serving up CGI-assisted throw downs with little sense of character. It even has Wolverine walk casually away from an explosion, done with a sense of obligation, not playfulness. Sorry, but though I do love that action cliché, it isn’t an end in itself.
So for the second time, there is an X-Men movie with many glaring fundamental issues, yet made (by certain team members, at least) as if at least trying to be good. Hood is a big question mark, who perhaps meant well enough, though his utter apathy towards superhero stories prior cannot be to Wolverine’s benefit. The MVP is, with a complete lack of surprise, Hugh Jackman himself, even if – with completely no justification – Wolverine is less ferocious than ever in this, his creation myth, where ferocity is to be most expected. Even so, Jackman knows the character almost too well, and brings in just the slightest hint of a young Clint Eastwood in his performance. Honestly, if someone were to pointlessly remake Dirty Harry, or any early Clint, Jackman would be perfect for it.
Jackman is equaled by Liev Schreiber, bulking up to play Victor Creed, aka Sabretooth (the mutant names are, fittingly, not the focus in this prequel). This character is needed; Sabretooth is another of the supersoldiers turned out by the Weapon X program, and Wolverine’s longtime comics nemesis. He represents what Wolverine could be: his purely animal side…conceptually, at least. It’s a little lost in film, as though they were afraid to commit to these concepts. And for as well as Schreiber counters Jackman, the fact remains that he’s being asked to play the earlier version of pro-wrestler Tyler Mane. Asking De Niro to channel Brando in The Godfather: Part II was a meaty challenge; asking a studied thespian to mimic the future Michael Myers is not.
The half-brother duo hales from the 1840s, with mutation so assumed now in Part Four that their incredibly early emergence isn’t even commented upon. It barely matters anyway, because it takes X-Men Origins: Wolverine all of eight minutes to gloss over more than a century of storyline. So desperate to get right to Weapon X, are we? The credits chronicle this passage of time, rushing Wolverine and Sabretooth (or, I should say, Logan and Creed) though every major war. This is the best part of the movie, taking advantage of the canvas it’s given, even if it accidentally recalls something Zack Snyder had already done better with Watchmen (d’oh!).
The movie is indeed impatient to get to Weapon X, so we can all act surprised when Wolverine (er, Logan) volunteers for Stryker’s (Danny Huston, no Brian Cox) adamantium skeletal graft. This creates a weird structural dilemma, because logic dictates that Wolverine’s present story ends when he becomes Weapon X, simultaneously gets amnesia, then runs off only to eventually discover Rogue, and we’re back at Part One. There’s one problem: No one cares about that Wolverine.
I don’t mean just that this story is thankless (it is), but that fans want berserker Wolverine, gifted with his iconic adamantium claws, and otherwise exuding all those powers of omnipotence and immortality which make for such compelling drama (sarcasm). There isn’t enough material in a pre-clawed Wolverine to sustain an entire movie.
The movie “resolves” this problem in a couple of ways. First of all, Logan, on top of being a super-healer (recall, his only original God-given strength), already possesses retractable bone claws. This is asinine on the surface of it, and embarrassing to boot. No such thing happens in the comics, to my knowledge, and altering a character’s biology is a pretty fundamental change. I suspect Spider-Man’s switch to organic web-slingers goes a way towards legitimizing this move, in Fox’s collective hive mind; it’s hard to argue for what’s wrong with claw-bones, though there is something wrong with it. Forced decisions like this should be the first sign that this isn’t a story worth telling.
But claw-bones must’ve seemed pretty stupid even to those who invented them, because they’re traded out with all due haste for the classic adamantium deal. Actually, the movie’s barely half over by the time Wolverine as we know him emerges indestructibly from Stryker’s sci-fi glass coffin – and escapes. No amnesia, though, not yet, though Stryker already promises such things in Logan’s (er, Wolverine’s, now) future.
The rest of the movie is living on borrowed time, squeezing in a few mediocre fight scenes until inevitable amnesia – courtesy, incongruously, of an adamantium bullet. (In a deleted scene, Stryker wipes away C3P0’s memory.) And the movie takes on a strange metamorphosis. Previously, Logan sought Stryker’s experiment on the promise it would help him overcome Creed – because Logan seeks revenge (how novel!) over the murder of a loved one (Lynn Collins). (The quarter hour devoted to this chintzily lovey-dovey romance is time wasted, because it highlights most egregiously the tragedy that might have been made of Wolverine’s past, here rendered generic instead.)
So, Wolverine wants to kill Sabretooth…until Stryker gives him the means to do so, then promptly (and with an utter lack of foresight) betrays Wolverine. Now Stryker is the designated bad guy, and Wolverine’s new target. Even when half-brothers meet up again in the interim for more fights (where one grows truly tired of their unvaried scrapping tactics), it feels desultory, as though Wolverine has forgotten all about his revenge ahead of schedule. Could be brotherly love – that could be another promising emotional avenue, so naturally it’s addressed in the broadest possible terms. And regardless of whatever conflict the movie is concerned with now, it’s inevitable (by continuity) that Wolverine, Sabretooth and Stryker all must survive. Because Wolverine’s functional immortality doesn’t already put the stakes precipitously low, there’s that narrative immortality to go with it.
The climax attempts to reconcile these disparate threads – Logans’ dead love, Sabretooth, Weapon X, assorted things I haven’t mentioned – into a satisfying whole. It does nothing for the bipolar film so far, and I feel bad for those tasked with trying to make something of this. Stryker thus becomes a standard supervillain, with a Weapon XI and an evil lair and whatnot. That lair is Three Mile Island, meaning…
Oh right, as a prequel this is a period piece, isn’t it?! Yeah, the 1979 core meltdown was actually caused by dueling mutants, didn’t ya know. That’s cheeky enough, no more than an udating on the old time travel joke where someone knocks off the Sphinx’s nose. Too bad period is never otherwise addressed. It’s as though, with all the claw-bones and odd characterizations and plot holes, the filmmakers were embarrassed of the past itself! Stryker’s computer technology, for instance, is made to look roughly modern, and a complete disregard for the greater historical context doesn’t help matters. That’s because X-Men Origins: Wolverine has zero, zilch, nada, bupkis to do with the “mutants-as-minorities” metaphor which Singer made his own. Boy, what could’ve been done with historical civil rights movements explored alongside mutant parallels. What says “we didn’t really care about this project” more than that? Wolverine is only a delivery system for juvenile action (and distractingly CGI metal claws, a problem even the 2000 version didn’t contend with – why?!).
Oh man, the things they focus their hard work on. Computer-rendered metal, when prosthetics worked just fine. And all these cutesy little prequel hints, not even remotely to do with Wolverine himself, just to remind everyone that, yes, this is a part of those movies you loved so much (also The Last Stand). A young Cyclops appears to get smacked around (his only movie function, seemingly), and the Three Mile Island nonsense concludes with Professor X recruiting a motley crew of anonymous mutants filling out space. This being days of 1970s yore, X possesses the undeniably creepy hovering de-aged face of Patrick Stewart – that they actually considered this technique for an entire movie is laughable. It looks worse than the CGI Arnold in Terminator Salvation!
As for that paring down which seems to be the Origins modus operandi? The piles of sideline mutants here say otherwise. Gambit, The Blob, Silverfox, John Wraith…Deadpool. At times the movie becomes a travelogue, sending Wolverine to fight/chat each new mutant, tossed in just in case someone, anyone without interest in Wolverine might spend money to see Gambit instead. After a while, this X-Men compulsion to wedge in as many extra cameos as possible just becomes tiring, and it no doubt hinders potential future continuity to some extent.
The truth is that they’re sowing the seeds for future Origins past, spinoffs of this spinoff. In that interest, any X-man or otherwise unaffiliated mutant from throughout the series is eligible for a one-off. Quick, who wants a Blob movie? Okay, more pertinently, who wants a Deadpool movie? Ah hah! And that one wouldn’t even need to be under the X-Men label! Surely, back in the enlightened days of 2003, when X2 was doing the series proud, it was Ryan Reynolds’ proud honor to headline this would-be movie (good casting). Then…nothing came of it, and I dunno why, leaving a dangling Deadpool retooled by uncool fools. Yup, Deadpool is in Wolverine, even serving as the “last boss,” in perhaps the juiciest example of producer perversity. The Merc With the Mouth, far from a motor-mouthed destroyer of fourth walls, is made wordless, and otherwise nothing like his inspiration. (Makes ya wonder why they did it at all.) It doesn’t help that Deadpool, mouth sewn shut, lumpy and bald, perfectly resembles the big bad in Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead.
They knew this one was a mistake immediately after fans proved surprisingly hostile towards the wholesale misappropriation of a beloved icon. Therefore, Reynolds is still onboard for a proper Deadpool movie (Dead Pool, that’s another Dirty Harry movie!) – it won’t be for a while, though, because against all odds DC got its shit together and put Reynolds in Green Lantern first!
As for other Origins? Merely two years later, it’s hard to pronounce this intended label dead, though the release of X-Men: First Class (being neither an X4 nor a proper Origins, but something indefinably other) suggests the idea has been abandoned. There had been talk of an X-Men Origins: Magneto, a notion with some potential, because of Magneto’s pertinent history (no amnesia for that magnetic personality). This project is now inarguably forsaken, reportedly with much of its material going towards First Class.
Boy, there are a lot of so-far nonexistent movies somehow tied in with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The brand is schisming without clear guidance. Though with multiple projects in the works, splitting apart like an inverse of the Avengers situation, there are nuggets of hope. Such as the eventual Deadpool simply ignoring this movie’s missteps altogether. Or like The Wolverine, the movie the original Origins ought to have been – Logan in Japan! Development seems pretty well along by now, with Darren Aronofsky directing. All involved, including Jackman, seem politely inclined to move as far from Origins as possible. So perhaps this seemingly purposeless movie did what it needed to – kept the franchise active. Enough that decent things may come yet – and I’m moments away from discovering what is largely reputed: That First Class is indeed the salve this franchise so desperately needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment