Superhero Media: X-Men Origins Wolverine

Unlike X-Men The Last Stand, I really can't say very much positive about X-Men Origins Wolverine, other than it would bring us Deadpool eventually, but I remember when this film came out, and boy, is that a story. For those who don't remember, or just didn't care about superhero films at the time, Origins Wolverine was a massive hit, making a crazy amount of money and getting a follow-up announced before the theatre run was finished. Hell, a certain kind of Action Film buff, the kind that still won't shut up about Avatar, ate up Origins Wolverine, buying deluxe Blu-Rays and Special Editions in amazing quantities. Other than the aforementioned Avatar, the only films I can think of that are as bland as Origins Wolverine but sold as well are the Michael Bay Transformers outings. What does this have to do with the film as a piece of Superhero Media? Well, this is kind of barely a superhero film, and I think that's worth taking a look at. 

Some in the (surprisingly large) Superhero Miniature Gaming "community" question why I consider things like Transformers, Dragon Ball and Kaiju as part of the superhero genre, when, strictly speaking, they're not. Well, it's because considering them as part of the genre makes for interesting thought fodder. Considering the destruction wrought by a superhero fight through the lens of Shin Godzilla, for example brings up different elements than only taking Age of Ultron into account will. Now let's flip that, and consider why Origins Wolverine is barely a superhero film in any way that counts. The film is a by-the-numbers b-grade action film more in the vein of Commando than anything else, with a handful of elements cribbed from the comics and mashed into place so that they bare little resemblance to their starting points. Hell, they let Will.i.am play John Wraith, who thought that would be a good idea? Basically, Wolverine, the only character most people cared about, murders his way through a list of celebrity death matches with a threadbare plot hanging off. It's not shocking that Origins Wolverine was bad, it's shocking that it was a massive hit in spite of how bad it was. 

Probably the biggest problem I have personally with Origins Wolverine is that it received such a backlash from fans that the planned Origins Magneto was canceled and we got First Class instead, which chickened out on what would have been at least a conceptually interesting film. Look it's easy to say that Wolverine can't carry a whole film, but Logan proved that to not be true. It's easy to say that the opening credits sequence should have been the entire film, but that kind of thing is typically composited by contractors rather than the director or writers. What we're left with is a not very good film that made enough money for the studio that we ended up with another decade's worth of X-Men films, for good or ill. For all my Australian readers, you really should watch Origins Wolverine again, just to see, of all people, Asher Keddie as one of the Weapon X scientists in a few scenes, doing a passable American accent. It made re-watching this just about worth it for me and broke up the slog.