X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
Directed by Gavin Hood
Produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, Ralph Winter, Hugh Jackman, and John Palermo
Screenplay by David Benioff and Skip Woods
Box office $373.1 million
In 2008, Fox must have realized they had a problem. Marvel had now begun producing their own superhero films, and their first two releases, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, had succeeded in raising the bar for comic book storytelling a notch higher than even Sam Rami's first two Spider-Man films. Meanwhile, the X-Men franchise was essentially dead in its tracks after reception to X-Men: The Last Stand had proven so thoroughly negative. Whether the goal was to get what money they could out of the franchise while they still had it or (I suspect) to raise the value of the franchise for when Marvel came knocking to buy the rights back, Fox made the decision to go backward in time and tell a series of origin stories that could effectively avoid the embarrassment of the previous film. X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men Origins: Magneto were both announced (though we'll discuss what happened to the Magneto project when we get around to the next film), and the first of them saw release in 2009.
On some level, I think this film is hyper aware of all that Marvel is doing in 2008/9. Marvel's releasing a series of origin stories for their characters before assembling the team? Sweet; let's do the same. I also can't help but feel a competitive nod to those films when Stryker informs Wolverine and Sabretooth that he's building a special team...and he wants them on it.
Of course, this film did nowhere near as well as those did, performing strong in its opening weekend and, like the film before it, pretty much tanking once word was out on the street. It's not a
terrible film. Unlike Last Stand, the plot holes are relatively minor and the acting is more committed. But this film struggles more with its decisions than its execution: is that really the Gambit fans wanted to see, or Deadpool, or Blob? How do you introduce a love interest in the beginning named "Miss Silverfox" and not expect audiences to know she's coming back later in the film? And really....Will I. Am???
The weirdest part is how the film seemed to get progressively worse as it went. I was unimpressed by the beginning but generally found the film tolerable (if over the top) as all "James" and Victor seemed to do was show up for American wars throughout history, always in the key places like storming Normandy beach. A little silly, and the director seemed a little too inspired by Zack Snyder's
300, but it was all palatable. Then, suddenly, we're supposed to buy that Logan voluntarily signed up for the Weapon X program, no questions asked, because he believed the man he trusted least that permanently changing his body would somehow empower him to kill Victor, never once asking for specifics. Please also note that, later in the film, after he's been "weaponized," he still has no idea whether lopping off Victor's head will even be enough to kill him. The whole motivation is thus contrived and not particularly convincing. Then a moment later, we see that having adamantium injected into his body has somehow given him
razor sharp spring-loaded adamantium claws in place of his slow-extending bone claws. Heck, why didn't his joints fuse together? It just wasn't well considered.
Okay, I figured. I can deal with this. A little silly, a little cliche, but still a decent story.
Then Logan is boxing with The Blob and the film hits a whole new level of hurt. Add to this the excessively melodramatic stylized action scenes and this film just becomes hard to stomach. Gambit was one of the last straws for me, and, when we get to Three Mile Island, every single one of the plot twists they throw at us were obvious from (ahem) three miles away. It's clear that neither director Gavin Hood nor script writers David Benoiff and Skip Woods have any idea how to surprise (let alone entertain) us. And, with Silverfox not actually dead, you have to wonder what Logan's investment in this story is, after all. He's never taken the time to be suitably upset by his transformation, the operation somehow managed to look
less traumatic than in flashback in X-Men and X2 (probably because we watched the whole thing from Stryker's perspective, for some reason), and the death Logan came to avenge never actually happened, so what's this revenge plot actually about?
And then Stryker becomes obsessed (for the second time) with making Wolverine forget his memories for no particular reason beyond providing an explanation to audiences of how Wolverine lost his memories. And the solution? Bullet to the brain. Sure, it's not like Stryker had stunning aim, so he just correctly gambles that a wildly shot bullet will pierce his brain and create exactly the right damage to cause near-total memory loss but keep his memory of speech, language, and motor functions entirely intact. It's not like Wolverine wakes up with the mind of an infant or anything.
It just seemed like the film kept getting worse and sillier as it progressed, descending from a tolerably interesting film entry to one that was arguably more ridiculous than Last Stand by the close.
Continuity Issues
- First, let's work out the timeline. James and Victor are fighting in Vietnam and are then recruited by Stryker. This could have happened as late as 1975. They then spend an undefined amount of time on Team X before James quits. The bulk of the film then takes place six years later, and sometime after the Three Mile Island fiasco (which occurred in 1979). Based upon Magneto's question at the beginning of the previous film as to whether or not he and Xavier would be personally visiting the homes of every potential student, we can assume that he picks up the Three Mile Island escapees at the end of this film AFTER having already recruiting Jean Grey twenty years prior to the events of Last Stand (which was made in 2006 but takes place in the near future). Ballpark that this is then around 24 years prior to 2006 (1982), which jibes with every chronological reference made in this film, and that makes Cyclops (who appears to be around 16 here) in his mid 30s by the time of the first X-Men film. If you try to stretch the numbers (Last Stand took place in 2007, Jean was therefore about 12 in 1987, and Scott is about the same age), that means that this film took place around 1991 (as, again, Scott seems about 16), and Logan quit Team X six years earlier (1985) meaning he spent at least ten years on Team X (Vietnam ended in 1975). The film just doesn't seem to support that idea, even though this second explanation better jibes with the references in X-Men and X2 to Logan last seeing Stryker around 15 years prior to the first film (X-Men was released in 2000 but takes place in the near future, so this film would then take place in 1985 or later). Timeline is screwy either way.
- The film is really really careful never to call Victor Sabretooth or to suggest he's the same guy we saw in the first X-Men film.
- This film reconciles poorly with that key flashback in X2 where Weapon X walks out the door of Alkali base and into the snow. X-Men Days of Future Past and Apocalypse further contradicted major aspects of Stryker's past and the Weapon X project respectively. The adamantium bullet reference in
Logan aside, this seems like another film that's pretty much ignored by later continuity.
- Clearly, this film doesn't reconcile with
Deadpool either.
- Is Silverfox's sister supposed to be Emma Frost? In that case, even X-men: First Class contradicts this film, as she's older two decades earlier in that film.
- Am I crazy, or was the whole adamantium as a meteor that fell on some tribal nation's land and became treated as holy a setup for Black Panther? I mean, Fox didn't have the rights and had absolutely no reason to believe they'd get them, but that sure sounds a lot like Wakanda and its vibranium.
Adaptation Issues:
- I've purposefully never read Wolverine: Origin nor Wolverine: Origins. I know the basic origin story before the credits borrows heavily from Origin but cannot comment on the rest. I've also never read the original Weapon X storyline. If it ain't Claremont, it ain't canon as far as I'm concerned.
- Not only did they throw a lot more characters at us again in this film, but most of them were odd choices from long after the better known glory days of the franchise. Agent Zero? Kestrel? Chris Bradley? I had to look all three of these guys up, and I was a serious X-Men fan during their maximum exposure era between 1991 and 1994, as well as a sincere fan of the Claremont run. How many folks in the audience actually knew who these guys were? Come to think of it, if the film is going to play to comic book fans, don't expect us NOT to know who James Howlett or Kayla Silverfox are. The film seemed to depend upon us being surprised by both.
At no point was this film painful to watch. It just seemed to get more and more ridiculous as it progressed. I have to admit, I enjoyed the first real fight scene with Team X, but it was all sort of downhill from there.
Grade: D+
