by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a 2009 production not only starring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine,
probably the best-known character from Marvel’s X-Men comic books — he’s the one that has long,
scythe-like metal knives shoot out from his hands (not from his fingers, by the way, but from his
knuckles). The awkward title reflects the way the X-Men franchise, like a lot
of the other comic-book derived movies cluttering up the multiplexes (and the
DVD markets, and the download services) these days, has been rebooted and
fissioned into a lot of bizarre little pieces, some of which blatantly
contradict each other in terms of explaining how the characters came to be. So
far there’ve been five movies in the current X-Men cycle, of which Charles and I have seen four: the
initial X-Men from 2000, its direct
sequel X2/X-Men United from
2003, X-Men Origins: Wolverine from 2009 and the most recently released retread, X-Men: First Class, from 2011, which itself is generating a sequel to
be issued in 2014. I was never a devotée of the X-Men comics — in fact, I can’t recall ever having read
one (but then my attitude towards comic books in my youth was a pretty much
take-it-or-leave-it one; I read some of them and was entertained, particularly
by Batman and Spider-Man, but didn’t become an obsessive fan of them the way
some people did, like the ones who go to Comic-Con) — but I was quite taken
with the X-Men movies, at least in part
because the central premise of them intrigued me. The idea was that the
introduction of atomic weapons in 1945 and civilian nuclear power shortly after
that so vastly increased the amount of radioactivity in Earth’s environment
that it created super-powered mutants who were alternately hunted down and
killed by Earth’s civilian and military authorities and captured for
exploitation as super-soldiers.
The X-Men comic book was first published in 1963 and was apparently the
highest-selling debut issue of a comic magazine to that time — and it was
widely interpreted as a metaphor for the African-American civil rights
struggle, which was gripping the country at a time. But it seems to work even
better as a metaphor for the Queer-rights struggle, especially since mutants,
like Queers but unlike Blacks,
have the ability either to be closeted about their pariah status or to be “out”
and demand that society accept them on their own terms. Alas, very little of
that subtlety made it into X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and though Hugh Jackman (who’s played Wolverine
in all his appearances in the cycle) also was listed as one of the producers
and tried to bring the project some
depth, this one is pretty much an action shoot-’em-up with only the barest plot
line to connect the big action set-pieces. It also runs roughshod through the
mutant origin story as told in the first three films (and the X-Men comics before that); the film opens in northern
Canada in 1845 — that’s eighteen forty-five — and shows us two mutant brothers, James Logan (Troye
Sivan) and Victor Creed (Michael-James Olsen), being raised by a dysfunctional
couple whose biological relationship to them is unclear. They kill the
father-figure and dash off into the wilderness, and at some point they cross over
the border into the U.S. and get involved in all America’s wars, courtesy of an
artful montage sequence by director Gavin Hood. They quickly grow up to be Hugh
Jackman and Liev Schreiber, respectively, and as such fight in — and survive —
the Civil War, World War I, World War II and the Viet Nam War (apparently they
missed out on Korea) without visibly aging: apparently mutants, at least of
their class, are immortal. Since the mutants were supposed to be products of
atomic radiation, it’s difficult to tell how Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine and
Victor, a.k.a. Sabretooth, came into existence when they were born at a time
when humans didn’t even know radioactivity existed and there was no radiation
in earth’s environment other than the natural background level (which was
probably pretty low in northern Canada, not exactly known as a great spot for
mining pitchblende).
The script by David Benioff and Skip Woods tells a wild
and pretty disorganized tale in which Wolverine bails out on the secret
special-forces squad Victor has organized for the U.S. Army (or maybe they’re
free-lance; it’s hard to tell) when Victor orders him to kill children. He goes
back to his ancestral homeland in northern Canada and lives for six years with
girlfriend Kayla (Lynn Collins) until he’s traced by General Stryker, who wants
him for another top-secret mission and
kills Kayla just to prove he means business and to intimidate him into joining
his project. Stryker’s project is an attempt to remodel human beings into
super-weapons, and for this he’s used a meteorite Wolverine previously
discovered with Victor in Nigeria (this film zips around the world so fast you
really need the frequent titles to tell just where you are) that can be refined
into a metal called adamantium (well, at least it’s a better name for a
chemical MacGuffin than “unobtainium”!) which can be fused into a human body
and give the resulting person super-strength, invulnerability and all that
other good stuff — only after Wolverine gets the treatment (in a transparent
bathtub that looks like an oversized aquarium and was probably inspired by the
tank in which the Hammer version of the Frankenstein monster was created, a
prop reused in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) he rebels again and Stryker and his goons have the task of hunting
down and killing a man they’ve just made even more invulnerable than he was
before. In the meantime he’s been taken in by a farmer couple, Travis (Max
Cullen) and Heather (Julia Blake) Hudson, who find him naked in their barn
(this got a PG-13 rating for “intense sequences of action and violence, and
some partial nudity,” the latter being some choice look-sees of Hugh Jackman’s
naked body in the Hudsons’ barn even though he doesn’t get to go full-frontal)
just after they discover the spaceship with a baby inside … oops, wrong
superhero myth. Stryker’s goon squads find Wolverine with the Hudsons and kill
them in cold blood, leaving him nowhere to go.
From then the film is a long
chase scene with just a few interruptions for exposition, as Wolverine, Stryker
and Victor variously find and trace other mutants, including the telekinetic
John Wraith (Will.I.Am), oversized Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand, who starts the
movie normal-sized and then blows up to be a mutant called “Blob” — I don’t
know whether they gave him a “fat suit” or tried to do it digitally, but Blob’s
oversized body is a singularly unconvincing special effect that’s surprising
for a big-budget major-studio movie in the CGI era) and Remy LeBeau (Taylor
Kitsch), a card dealer in New Orleans (or is it Las Vegas? Key scenes take
place in both locales) who was apparently the only other person successfully to
escape from Stryker’s compound. After the big to-the-death battles take place
Wolverine learns that his girlfriend Kayla didn’t really die after all, nor was
she really his girlfriend; she was a mutant herself, sent to northern Canada to
seduce him, live with him and monitor him for … well, for whoever. Dramaturgy
is not this film’s strong suit, and neither is depth — Hugh Jackman wanted the
script to indicate clearly that Wolverine was suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder in his redoubt with Kayla in Canada (where he worked as a
lumberjack but was definitely not O.K.) but the studio vetoed it, though he and the writers were able to
sneak in the symptoms of PTSD
even though it was the condition that dared not speak its name — but
fortunately the writers and director Hood managed to make the film speedy and
action-packed enough one could just turn off the critical faculties and groove
on the intensity of the action, enjoying it as the popcorn entertainment its
makers intended even while missing the depth and emotion the other X-Men movies (especially the two directed by Bryan
Singer that kicked off the cycle) gave us. And at least this one lasted just
107 minutes, unlike so many other superhero films these days that cross the
two-hour mark and really overstay
their welcome!
