‘The Wolverine’ is the Most Tragically Overlooked ‘X-Men’ Movie
After the initial X-Men trilogy, a Wolverine spinoff seemed like a no-brainer. After all, the first three films had basically been Wolverine movies already, with the rest of the team filling out his supporting cast. And for the most part, X-Men Origins: Wolverine covered all of the expected ground of an origin story for the fan-favorite character. While Wolverine and Sabretooth hadn’t seemed to know each other in the original film, that classic rivalry was placed front and center for the origin movie, as was Logan’s relationship with the US government, Col. William Stryker, the experiment that gave him adamantium bones, and his eventual memory loss.
Every single question was answered, sometimes in really befuddling ways. The trouble was that while the film dealt with characters like Victor Creed, and Silver Fox who are integral to the Wolverine lore, it also loaded tons of other characters on top of that, to the point it stopped feeling like a Wolverine movie and started feeling like yet another X-Men movie that happened to star Wolverine. Wade Wilson at least makes sense (and we have to give it credit for first casting Ryan Reynolds in the role) but Gambit, Professor X, Blob, Emma Frost, Storm, and Cyclops, of all people, were just there for the sake of cramming the already overstuffed story with as many mutants as possible.
On the total opposite side of the spectrum, there’s Logan. Now that it’s nearly a decade old, that film has risen to the ranks of movies like The Dark Knight and Richard Donner’s Superman to be widely referred to as one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. And it earned that reputation almost immediately. It even garnered an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. It was a gritty, grounded, deeply emotional film about Logan at his lowest point in a world that has almost entirely moved on from mutants, facing down his own extinction and the death of his kind, and then meeting a daughter (a clone, at least) he never knew about, who teaches him to hope again, and for whom he gives his life so that she may make a better future. It’s one of the most beloved films ever produced under any banner of Marvel, and easily the most beloved X-Men adjacent movie.
And then, between the two, without a doubt the most forgotten of the solo Wolverine outings, there’s James Mangold’s 2013 epic, The Wolverine. Its only curse is not taking the world by storm in the way that Logan had, not being the masterpiece that that movie is widely considered to be, which effectively erases it from existence in the eyes of most viewers, at least when it comes to which one they want to sit and watch on streaming. But make no mistake, there’s never any Logan without Mangold’s first run at the character here, and without this movie being as good as it is. And it is great.
The Wolverine took every “what not to do” lesson from X-Men Origins to heart and told a singular story featuring only characters relevant to that story, without any extraneous cameos at all, save for the post-credits scene. Even though it takes very notable liberties, it is also to this day the X-Men film that most successfully draws from any specific source material. That is the original Wolverine miniseries written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Frank Miller, a fantastic story that finds Wolverine on his own in Japan, facing off against the Silver Samurai. Miller had never been a fan of the character until Claremont explained that Logan is, essentially, a ronin. He’s a samurai without a master, a warrior without a war, drifting without purpose, and both the original comic and the film take that to heart.
This film finds Wolverine having returned to Canada after killing Jean to save everyone at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand. He is, reasonably, still haunted by dreams, even visions, of the woman he loved, killed by his own hand. This man isn’t the Wolverine anymore. He’s barely even Logan. He’s living in the woods like an animal, but he can’t stop himself from caring, as evidenced when poachers poison a bear, leave it for dead, and Logan confronts them for what he did.
That one brief return to civilization leads to him being drafted to travel to Japan to the bedside of a wealthy old businessman named Yashida, who was saved by Logan from the Nagasaki bombing as a young man, and wishes to thank him before he dies. This kicks off a plot involving the Yakuza’s attempt to kill Yashida’s granddaughter, Mariko, and the revelation that Yashida actually wants to take Wolverine’s immortality for himself.
While it certainly has no shortage of twists and turns, it is a scaled-back and singular story, at least compared to the film that preceded it. But the thing that truly separates The Wolverine is that it explores questions about the character and his nature that no other film had ever even thought to ask. The early films gave Wolverine a meaty role by being a tortured, dangerous man who remembered absolutely nothing about his past. This goes so much further. Logan has been alive for a very long time. He has watched everyone he has ever loved die. It’s always been an accepted fact that his healing factor makes him basically immortal, but nothing ever attempted to explore that on screen before, and here it is the framework of the entire film.
Everything is about that. Logan wants to die, but can’t, and is brought to the bedside of and placed in direct opposition to an old man who is about to die, but will do absolutely anything and sacrifice anyone, even those he loves, to prevent that from happening. Logan is away from the mansion, away from people, haunted by sacrificing the person he loves most, when Yashida is doing the same thing and it barely even seems to bother him. At the beginning of the movie, Logan is as close to death as possible for a man who cannot die, and ironically, taking that immortality from him, even temporarily, and giving him a taste of death is what gives him perspective and a renewed sense of purpose.
Yashida’s entire arc was set up right at the beginning of the movie, when every soldier did not hesitate to take their own life when they saw the bomb go off, but he did. From that moment on, he wasted an entire life in fear of death, and will do anything to have his youth restored. For the themes of this film, which is not just about death, but what you make of the life that you have, it makes him a perfect foil for Wolverine.
However, I must acknowledge that the villain is the most heavily criticized aspect of this feature, because in Wolverine’s final confrontation with the Silver Samurai, it is what most people consider to be a 20ft robot. Which is not actually true, crucially, because Yashida is revealed to be inside, piloting it. That still makes it a suit, albeit a very unconventional one. It’s not a robot at that point, it’s a mecha.
I personally don’t mind it. Japan has a long and storied history of mechs in its sci-fi and fantasy entertainment, from Terror of Mechagodzilla all the way down to Gundam. It’s a culture staple of the genre, and honestly, the moment the giant Silver Samurai was revealed, feeling not too dissimilar to the opening of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, it stopped feeling like I was watching an American film about Wolverine in Japan, and started feeling (not only for the inclusion of the mech-suit, but for the absolutely unapologetic, “everything plus the kitchen sink” approach) like I was actually watching a Japanese film about Wolverine.
The wild third act swing also feels earned because we got a much more classical, traditional Silver Samurai fight before that, at the end of the second act, when Shingen (who is the actual Silver Samurai of the Wolverine comic on which the film is based) takes up the armor and has a knock-down, drag-out fight throughout Yashida’s house in one of the movie’s best sequences.
This is a movie about death and honor and legacy and how each of those things feed into one another. Logan has intentionally given up on honor, at the start of the film, attempting to distance himself as much as possible from the legacy of “The Wolverine,” and death is the thing he yearns for. By the end of the film, he’s tasted death and rejected it, and both his honor and legacy have been restored. Yashida, in direct contrast, is an old man surrounded by loved ones, who should be ready to move on, but is so terrified of death that he has sacrificed both legacy and honor to stop it from happening. By the time it finally comes for him, dead is the only thing that he is. There is nothing else.
The Wolverine is a slick, powerful movie that is the perfect solo action vehicle for Wolverine and is so, so much more than simply “the episode where he goes to Japan.” It explores heavy themes about the character while still being a blast to watch, and gives Jackman some of the strongest material he’s ever had to work with in 25 years of playing Logan. It should not be forgotten because even if it didn’t take the world by storm in the same way as Logan, it’s still good as Hell. In fact, it’s one of the very best films ever associated with the X-Men brand.
