by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the DVD edition of the latest X-Men
movie, The Wolverine — a flawed but
surprisingly interesting and almost tragic superhero movie which was released
earlier this year as a summer blockbuster but didn’t do well at the box office.
One can readily see why; it’s true that Marvel Comics, which introduced the
X-Men characters in 1963 (I hadn’t realized it was that early until I saw the
recent PBS documentary on the history of superheroes), really began the whole
idea of the angst-ridden
superhero — the being with superpowers who also longed for a normal life, to
the point of thinking and sometimes even asking the universe to take this cup
from their lips. But they’ve rarely taken it so far as they did here, or been
so relentless about it. The premise of the X-Men movies is that a certain
number of people are born with superhero mutations — though Wolverine seems to
have acquired his via an accident
in which his body was injected with a metal called adamantium, which has made
him immortal, given him the power to heal just about any injury he suffers, and
also has allowed him to grow three fearsome metal blades that sprout from his
knuckles (not his fingernails)
and make him an incredibly effective combat weapon, since the super-strong
metal can slice through walls and other metal objects as well as the bodies of
his attackers.
The group X-Men movies have centered around the uncertain
affiliations between these mutants — some of whom have reacted by becoming
antisocial villains and others by becoming good guys who try to fight them —
but Wolverine’s solo movies (of which this is at least the second — the first
was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a
clunky title but also quite a good film) have cast him as an angst-ridden version of the Lone Ranger who travels the
world over looking for a place where he can feel at home and a woman he can
love. Of course, despite his success in fighting evil he never really
accomplishes either of those tasks. The Wolverine is set mostly in Japan, and casts Logan (Hugh
Jackman in his sixth appearance in the role), Wolverine’s non-hero alternate
identity, as a U.S. servicemember in World War II who’s taken prisoner by the
enemy and held in a prison camp in Nagasaki. When the city is bombarded by an
atomic attack — the genuine one that took place August 9, 1945, three days
after the better-known one on Hiroshima — three junior Japanese officers in
charge of the camp commit suicide rather than face dishonor, but the
commandant, Yashida (Ken Yamamura), is rescued by Logan. The two survive the
attack by hiding at the bottom of a long pipe in the ground that apparently
serves as the only entrance and egress to Logan’s cell — and then the film
flashes forward from 1945 to 2013, where Logan is wandering aimlessly around
Alaska following the death of his girlfriend, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) — an
event depicted in the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand, so far the only one in the cycle Charles and I
haven’t seen. He’s met by Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a red-haired female martial
artist and an emissary of Yashida’s company — since the war he’s become a
billionaire and owns a high-tech corporation — who tells him that Yashida
(played in the modern footage by Haruhiko Yamanouchi) is about to die of natural
causes and wants to say goodbye to his old friend Logan before he croaks. Only
what he really wants is to steal
Logan’s superpowers and make himself immortal.
He’s got help in doing that from
another mutant, Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), whose superpower is being able
to absorb every poisonous substance in the world into her own body and then
breathe or otherwise transfer them out again to anyone else, thereby either
killing or incapacitating them. He’s also got the assistance of Shingen
(Hiroyuki Sanada) and Noburo (Brian Tee) — the latter is Japan’s attorney
general but, like a lot of real-life politicians, is looking to be in the good
graces of a 1-percenter so he’ll have a lucrative career when he leaves (or
gets thrown out of) office. What Yashida doesn’t reckon with is his own
granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto), who inherits the company when Yashida dies
and falls in love with Logan. It turns out, this being a superhero movie, that
Yashida isn’t dead; his body has
been kept alive artificially, partly by the share of Logan’s superpowers that
Viper has been able to extract from him and insert into Yashida’s corpse to
revive him, and partly due to the Silver Samurai, a huge robot made of
adamantium which Yashida operates from inside, and which since it’s made of the
same stuff that gave Logan his powers can off him once and for all. The plot
leaves a lot of room for the typical, highly baroque and elaborate action
scenes you expect in a comic-book movie — all of which are set in high-tech
environments looking nothing like anything you or I are likely to encounter in
our own lives — but there’s also some real emotional conflict here. Logan
begins the movie in full death-wish mode, lamenting the curse of his own
immortality and sounding an awful lot like a cross between Jesus Christ and
Wagner’s Wotan, but no sooner has he realized that Yashida wants to take over
his immortality than Logan decides he wants to live after all, even if that
means that at the end of the film he abandons Mariko and hits the road again,
Lone Ranger-style — and in one of the post-credits sequences Marvel movies have
become famous for, he’s greeted at the airport by Professor X (Anthony Hopkins)
and Magneto (Ian McKellen), setting up a couple of upcoming new entries in the
group version of the X-Men cycle, Days of Future Past (2014) and Apocalypse (2016).
I’m not sure stretching the cycle that far
is all that good an idea, and I’m not sure including Wolverine in the group
movies is that good an idea either — he’s really much more powerful as a solo
character — but The Wolverine, as
much as it sometimes seems on the verge of collapsing from its weight and
darkness, is really a surprisingly intense and moving film, especially for a genre that really doesn’t truck much with sophisticated
human emotions. It probably helps that the script was written by only two
people (Mark Bomback and Scott Frank) and also that the director, James
Mangold, is not a superhero
specialist; his best-known previous credits are Girl, Interrupted (about a mentally ill teenager), the Johnny Cash
biopic Walk the Line and the
recent remake of the 1950’s Western 3:10 to Yuma — which means he isn’t burned out on the genre and instead could look at it with fresh eyes
(literally and figuratively).
Though the relentless past-is-brown, present-is-brown, everything-is-brown cinematography of Ross Emery makes the film
wearing at times, and a few of the action set-pieces (including an otherwise
exciting fight-to-the-finish on top of a speeding bullet train) suffer from the
obvious digitization of the images, The Wolverine is actually a quite impressive superhero movie and a
worthy entry in a cycle whose central premise (mutants living in the “normal”
world and having to cope with the often deadly prejudices against them) has
been analogized to both the African-American and Queer civil-rights struggles;
apparently much of the original fan base for the X-Men comic magazine was 1960’s and 1970’s Queer people
identifying with the mutants’ dilemma: stay in the closet or come out?
