If I had to choose a favorite movie, Logan would be pretty high up there. Except maybe not because I can’t decide if I love it more than I hate it. In this short rant written at 10:46 PM with a cat on my lap demanding attention, I will try and explain how I feel about Logan and fail miserably.
First of all: biases. I have them, and a lot of them, especially about movies. I’m like a film critic with shitty opinions (wait a second….). So first of all, I’m a sucker for Super Hero movies and action movies in general. The problem is, Logan is not a Super Hero movie. At best I’d call it a hero movie, with emphasis on the lowercase h. Which is not what you would expect, coming from an X-men movie. It is after all a “Hero” and “Villain” franchise (disclaimer I have only watched the movies, your comic books hold no power over me), and from such you expect a protagonist and an antagonist to feature prominently in the film. And you definitely have an antagonist, but the Hero isn’t really there. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wolverine/Logan as a character, but he’s not exactly a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. This brings me to the core of my turmoil: Logan himself.
Logan is a man who has been wronged and hurt and betrayed so many times, his gruff, aggressive behavior comes off as warranted. And as you keep watching the film, you slowly start to see that persona crack. How he cares for Xavier, even more so than he seems to care for himself. How he first only agrees to take Laura with him for the money (or so he says) but slowly starts to care for her. How the death of his mentor and friend shakes him in ways no physical blow ever has. How his disregard for his own life due to self-loathing changes into a willingness to sacrifice himself to protect the only “family” he has left. (Most of this is a personal interpretation, whether or not this is what was meant to be portrayed is up to you and your opinion)
And all of that wonderful and terrifyingly sad emotion ends in a mirror of a younger self, a facsimile of himself when he was more beast than human. A death so unsatisfactory but so bathed in emotion I cannot begin to unravel how I feel about it. The villain of this story is a man in a lab coat who doesn’t even have the decency to do the dirty work himself.
This movie breaks my heart and tramples all over it with steel-toed boots. Heartbreak after heartbreak until the curtains close and the only solace we have is that Laura is probably safe. What the fuck. So yeah, as much as I love this movie, I can’t help but hate that it makes me feel things and too many of those things, all in two hours and seventeen minutes.
Final score: 10/10 sads would cry again.
(Legally you can’t get mad at my opinion because I said so. So go take your um akshuallys elsewhere.)