Superhero Media: Logan

Before we get too far into this, people know that Logan is a take on the classic Western Shane right? I mean, there are clips of Shane during the hotel sequence of Logan, no one doesn't know this, surely? Go watch Shane, it's on a bunch of streaming services and is a true classic of the genre. If Days of Future Past was the ending that the best films in the X-Men series deserved, Logan is the bookend to the bad ones. I don't mean that Logan is a bad film, or even a bad X-Men film, it's easily the best solo outing, but it is the downbeat take on the ending and works best as a counterpoint to the positive finish of Days of Future Past. For all the fighting he has done, and the sacrifices he as made, Logan doesn't get a happy ending, he gets to die in the woods, a mess of blood and scars, the only positive being that he may have saved another life for another day of living. Logan is tragic, heart wrenching and full of feeling, and I never need to see this film made again with another character. 

The true magic of Logan isn't just that it's very well made, with a strong cast working a brilliant script, but that it comes at the end of a run of films stretching back over fifteen years. Logan is an epitaph, a requiem mass for the series, and only because Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart have put in the hard yards for years does it pay off as well as it does. Think about the moment just before Charles is killed, when he finally remembers that it was he who killed the other X-Men and apologizes to Logan for being a burden, it's so devastating to watch because we've watched Professor X nurture Logan, Rogue, Jean and countless others for years. That Charles has, even accidentally, been the reason that so many of his beloved charges have died, that's some Euripides level ironic divine punishment right there. Add in the metafictional element that Logan would also be the last truly great (non-Deadpool) X-Men film before the series petered out and went to the welcoming bosom of Marvel Studios, and the film is an amazing epilogue to the mixed-bag body of work that came before it. 

Originally, I was going to do my review of the comic Old Man Logan before posting this one, but as I watched Logan again, I realised that only a handful of elements of the comic made it into the film, and doing so would be about as necessary as reviewing Extremis before Iron Man 3. As I've said before, adaptation is a funny game, you can't just shoot comic panels and put them up on the screen, it doesn't work that way. The best superhero films take the iconography of the character and use that to tell a good story, which Logan does, though not using comics, but the early X-Men films instead. Logan is a dark mirror of the X-Men franchise, to be sure, but it's the woke, proto-hopepunk early films that it draws upon, which have, in-setting, been boiled down into four colour comics for youthful consumption. I almost wish I'd done more film academia, because there is so much to unpack in Logan that I could honestly do a thesis on it. For now, I'll settle for this article and maybe watching it again sooner rather than later; not leaving it three years this time.