Ok, finally got to see Logan. For the sake of my in-box, here are some thoughts:

Overall Opinion:

Unlike some folks, I wouldn’t say it’s the best superhero movie ever made, although it’s certainly one of the best. It’s definitely the best Wolverine movie ever made by a long margin, and arguably the best X-Men movie ever made, far better than anything that Bryan Singer ever touched. 

At the same time, it’s not the model for all superhero movies to come: it’s a very idiosyncratic, small-scale action film that works primarily because the audience has a long-term relationship with Hugh Jackman as this role. It’s not the hard R violence that makes it work, it’s not even the avoidance of 90% of superheroisms that makes it work – it’s that this movie is particularly suited to this particular character, and what makes movies good is when movies are grounded in character.

About the Movie and Its Inspirations:

I’ve heard it described as a “post-apocalyptic western,” but that’s not quite accurate. Things have gone really bad for the people we care about, but modern society (i.e, the post-industrial capitalist U.S) is very much present and ticking along just fine, having rolled over and ground down mutantkind like everyone else who isn’t wanted by the powers-that-be, whether that’s the poor Mexican women and children exploited by the evil corporation with shadowy ties to the U.S government, or black farmers trying to make a living in the shadow of automated agro-business conglomerates and self-driving trucks, or immigrants trying to make it to some sort of safety in Canada one step ahead of ICE. More on those themes in a bit. 

That’s not to say it’s not a Western (just that it’s not post-apocalyptic). while the action and the cinematography don’t really evoke Westerns, the landscapes – from the flat Mexican deserts to the rugged mountain forests of the Canadian border – definitely do. As does a rather beautiful sequence halfway through the movie where Logan, Laura, and Xavier stop to help a farming family corral some loose horses before staying the night. 

Moreover, the film’s thematics lean heavily on one Western in particular: early on in the movie, Laura and Professor X watch Shane on the TV, especially the final scene in which Shane (one of the most archetypal lone gunslingers ever) explains why he has to leave rather than settle down. This gets recapitulated at the end when Logan dies, as Laura repurposes his monologue as a eulogy, having few other words to explain what Logan’s life meant. It’s not hard to draw parallels here: like Shane, Logan is an initially reluctant combatant who eventually gets drawn into a conflict not of his own making, there’s also a strong theme of eras passing (just as the mutants are no more, Shane points out to the villain that the farm rather than the cattle ranch is the future of the West), and of course, much like Shane Logan is someone whose life has been indelibly marked by violence who finds a final meaning in ridding a community  of men of violence before removing himself so that there “are no guns in the valley.” 

I’ve also heard Logan described as inspired by Old Man Logan. That is not the case (thank god), and the movie is better for it: the only things the two have in common is that Logan is old, there’s no superheroes anymore (although the supervillains have NOT taken over) and there’s a road-trip. It is much, much closer to Death of Wolverine and X-23: the central plot is an Wolverine whose healing factor is failing him finding meaning by putting an end to one more attempt to recreate Weapon X (with the main difference being that he kills the son of the head scientist rather than the man himself) and the way that his relationship with Laura Kinney allows him to find some measure of fulfillment and create a legacy that will carry on after his death. 

That Logan ends the movie buried under rocks with a cross turned to the side to indicate that he died in the faith of Xavier after all rather than mummified in an adamantium shell is not much of a difference: what matters is the Beautiful Death seemingly set down by destiny for Logan, that he will die in victorious battle protecting mutant children from the evil men who would exploit them. 

Incidentally, for a film that otherwise eschews continuity like the devil, one of the unmistakable callbacks in the film (and arguably the core image around which the film was built) is to the mansion fight sequence in X2 – aka the main reason why Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has such a grip on the memory of X-Men fans. Once again, it’s Wolverine against military baddies, although here we have a double chase sequence as Wolverine hunts Donald Pierce’s Reavers (yes, it’s that Donald Pierce, X-Men’s most fabulous anti-mutant bigot cyborg) as they hunt mutant children trying to make it to the Canadian border. 

Themes and Politics:

So as many people have pointed out, there are a lot of political resonances in Logan that probably weren’t intended as a statement on Trump’s America (since the film was written between 2013 and 2015) but it’s not like one couldn’t hear the rumblings and see the signs if one was paying attention. 

Logan takes a clear, thematic, but not didactic stance on issues of immigration: it starts from the very beginning of the film where we see Logan crossing a highly-militarized border as part of his daily commute or dealing with drunken teenagers standing up through his skylight shouting “USA! USA! USA!” as they pass by a border checkpoint, and it moves to center stage when Gabriella, a whistleblowing nurse who used to work for Transigen, tries to get him to help an undocumented child cross the border – not into the U.S, because the U.S is clearly no longer a place of opportunity or refuge, but into Canada. 

Through Gabriella’s story, we learn about the broader political situation, that begins to link in more and more issues. In an act of globalized regulatory arbitrage that’s straight out of my colleague’s book pictured above, Transigen located itself in the Mexican border region so that it could take advantage of laxer regulations, paramilitary support from the government (thanks in no small part to Transigen’s connections to the U.S military-industrial coalition because they’re really Weapon X), and it is darkly implied, a steady source of disposable bodies of women of color to use as incubators for genetically engineered mutant babies thanks to the ongoing crisis of murders and disappearances in Ciudad Juárez.

From Gabriella’s whistleblowing camera footage, we find that Transigen followed a policy of deliberately dehumanizing its creations – considering them nothing more than patents and copyrights – as both a way to justify human experimentation, abuse, and the creation of child soldiers. And this attitude flows through directly to Doctor Zander Rice’s reveal that they’ve been spreading genetic weapons through the mass market food chain in order to quietly sterilize mutantkind and make the X-gene once more a controllable part of the government’s arsenal, the way Weapon X always wanted it to be. 

Arguably, the political story of Logan is one of global intersectionality: the same corrupt, violent corporate/government forces working against poor women and children in Mexico are the same forces working against African-American farmers in the heartland are the same forces who’ve been working to dehumanize mutants from the beginning, and the only way to preserve hope for the next generation is for everyone to get together at Eden and fight back.