Logan Presents a Refreshingly Heavy-Handed Approach to Marvel Cinema

Whilst DC have been sacrificing film after film trying to figure out exactly where the tonal sweet spot for their cinematic universe is, Marvel have remained consistent. Every film that comes out seems to follow the same grid pattern of humour, self-examination and big sweeping action and man oh man am I fucking sick of it. Films like Captain America: Civil War, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Iron Man 3 are competently written and they’re certainly fun to watch, but the pattern is so worn out that they end up feeling utterly soulless.

They’ll still pack theatres and critics will lap it all up. I’m sure that next week when Doctor Strange finally comes out the pattern will be more or less the same, but rarely do you come out of an MCU movie left to ponder over the minutiae of what you just watched. Rarely do you feel like the characters are worthy of deeper examination, what you see is pretty much what you get. This is part of the reason why the most interesting Marvel content at the moment isn’t actually coming from the MCU. On one side you’ve got the Neflix shows, which have increased in quality with each new release. Daredevil is shaky, and far too obsessed with ninjas, but enjoyable and engaging. Jessica Jones is excellent, even if the narrative becomes a bit too isolated towards the end and Luke Cage is downright masterful, both as an adaptation and a social commentary.

The reason these shows work is because they really delve not only into their characters, but the worlds they inhabit and the broader implications of those worlds. In the MCU, the characters all inhabit the same world – a kind of John Favreu by way of Joss Whedon CGI circus where people can crack wise one minute and monologue about destiny the next. If characters don’t seem to fit, they are moulded into shape, or just shoved between the cracks. Thor, for example, ends up with almost nothing to do outside of his own films except make light of the fact that he’s not from round here.

This is what makes 20th Century Fox’s approach to their little private clutch of Marvel characters so enticing. They aren’t interested in amalgamating franchises, just bringing them to life. Deadpool taught them two things – firstly that it’s far better to give directors creative autonomy, and secondly that R-rated comic book movies sell. Both of these maxims have clearly been applied to Logan and that’s probably why it looks like the best Marvel-borne film we’ve had since Guardians of the Galaxy (still the biggest risk the main franchise has taken to date, funny that).

Through a slow trickle of information on the film’s official Instagram and now the new trailer, we’ve learned that Logan is set in a bleak future where most of the mutants are gone, Logan himself is old and weary (that can happen to him, it would seem), Charles Xavier is even older and even wearier and everyone is blindly grasping for some sort of purpose. For Logan, that amounts to protecting a young girl, another casualty of the Weapon X project, from those who mean to either subdue or destroy her, it would seem. X-23 is a well known character, and she almost always presents Logan with an opportunity to look inwards and examine who he really is. Her arcs tend to be the most popular in their given mediums for this reason.

As you might have already guessed, the film is going to be an R. It’s going to be gritty, sweary (Logan’s first spoken line is ‘fuck’) and deal with death far more directly and consequentially than just about any other previous Marvel film. A few years ago, this would have been the worst idea in the world. Post-Nolan, everyone was sick to death of comic adaptations that took themselves seriously, we all wanted to go back to the lighthearted spandex days, but now we have kind of cross-pollination of the two, and it’s no better. The fact that the ailing Wolverine standalone franchise is being moved back in that direction is very encouraging.

The last X-Men film was interesting but fatally flawed. It tried to juggle too many characters and left no room for development, pathos or consequence. Despite the fact that, by the end, the entire world is literally being ripped apart, it’s hard to actually care. Compare that to Days of Future Past, in which the worst thing that could have happened in the final showdown was the death of Richard Nixon (and a bunch of mutants dying in the future). Because of the way the plot was magnified through the conflict between Xavier, Raven and Magneto, it felt far, far more significant.

To that end, Logan seems to have 3 central protagonists, one antagonist and a buttload of heavily armed soldiers, ready and waiting to be cut to ribbons. That’s a lot of room for character examination, and despite the fact that he’s been the star of 2 films and a central character in a further 4, Wolverine still has a lot to give. With an R-rated film, you can change the way the narrative is structured, and the ideas which are explored. I’m not saying that all Marvel films need to follow this trend, but it demonstrates the fact that each one is its own animal, and if your primary aim with each new instalment is to knit the universe more tightly together, the films will just end up feeling like fragments, like a means to an end. Hopefully with the increasing success of the TV shows and riskier projects like Black Panther, we’ll see an end to that mentality, but in the mean time, take note of Logan, it looks to be setting a very good example.

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