LOGAN: Wolverine and fighting the Future

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON OCTOBER 22, 2016

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real.

The Logan trailer is by far the best trailer of the year so far.  It has masterfully distanced itself from the superhero movies that the film version of Wolverine came from.  This emotional trailer shows a not so distant future where Logan is living with his demons as his body doesn’t regenerate at the rate it once did.  It shows him caring for a sick Professor X in a somewhat dystopian sandy environment.

The Logan trailer looks like it draws visual inspiration from the damn near flawless film Hell or High Water and the equally flawless Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men.  It has hints of Mad Max but the world in the trailer hasn’t got that bad yet.  There was a hint of Se7en in this trailer as well with a very quick little happy moment around the dinner table, that we can tell, like in Se7en, is all the joy we’re going to get, before we dive back into the dreadful reality of not only the end of the mutants but possibly the end of the Wolverine.

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

Hugh Jackman’s performance just in the trailer is chillingly brilliant.  His ‘Old Man Logan’ is wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time.  He appears to be in the winter of his discontent, he appears to be slowly dying, and while this realization may overwhelm him, it looks like it equally frightens him.

Professor X in the first X-Men movie helped Logan not only face his current demons at the time, but also he helped him unlock parts of his past.  Logan and Professor X’s relationship in the X-Men movies were arguably the best parts of the whole franchise.  The only other complex and equally interesting relationship was the one that Professor X had with Magneto.

Logan looks like the friendship between Professor X and Logan is going to reach the palpable relationship of a father and son.  The film truly feels like a last chapter in a long journey for a character who probably should have died long ago for some of things he’s done, but in his suffering is the fact that he lives on.

I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie trailer where the music that accompanies the footage was so wonderfully married.  Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover of Hurt couldn’t have been anymore perfect.  The sorrow that permeates that song and the realization that you were responsible for so much pain, and then how much you want to off load it, just to live again, or to live in peace, but you can’t because it’s there, wallpapered on every corner of your mind.  It’s absolute brilliance to play this wonderfully sad painful song while juxtaposing it with the long life of a man that has suffered and that has made others suffer, whether it was utilitarian, vengeance or plain righteousness.

The brilliance of the trailer is it makes us ask more questions rather than a lot of trailers that just provide answers.  Why is Professor X in the state he’s in, why is Logan on the run, who is this young girl and why is he not healing at the rate he use to?  What the trailer did for me and imagine for a lot of other people is made forget that it’s even a superhero movie.  It gave me hope that the superhero genre can elevate well beyond the pages of its original source material.

If I could start again

A million miles away

I will keep myself

I would find a way.