STACK #152 Jun 2017

FEATURE DVD&BD

I wanted to make an adult movie – this is not a movie for nine-year- old children

universe. As moody as its title character, Logan is an X-Men film played as a gritty Western noir. “The superhero aspect and the mutant powers are not the focus of attention as much as they were in the other movies,” Patrick Stewart explains. “The sense of people, of individuals, of relationships, I think is stronger in Logan than it has been before. James has created a world which is recognisable and familiar and everyday, and in its way, commonplace, yet wrapped in a maelstrom of fear and excitement and danger and the need to escape.” Logan also moves the superhero film in a darker and more violent direction than its predecessors, reflecting the Wolverine’s own berserker instincts. Jackman notes that while he and Mangold were concerned about “taking off the seatbelt” at first, a more adult approach allowed Mangold to fully explore themes of human frailty, mortality, and family ties. “I didn’t just want to make a more violent, sexier, more explicit, more obscene movie,” says Mangold. “I wanted to make an adult movie – this is not a movie for nine-year-old children. When your movie is rated R [in the US], you suddenly are making a movie about more grown up themes. You’re not under the pressure to make a movie for everybody.” Adds Jackman: “This is far more realistic than we’ve done before in the X-Men Franchise, maybe any of the other comic book movies. It’s far more human.”

radically different, believing that the Wolverine’s humanity, not his superpower, is the character’s real strength. “In exploring this character for the last time, I wanted to get to the heart of who that human was, more than what his claws can do,” he explains. Logan is in hiding in Mexico with the elderly Professor X (Patrick Stewart) when his world is rocked by the arrival of a young

girl named Laura (Dafne Keen), who has her own set of adamantium blades and the attitude to match. Having escaped from a secret facility and found her way into Logan's care, the Wolverine becomes a surrogate father to this temperamental little mutant, whom he must protect from the sinister geneticist Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and his cyborg Reavers.

bang, but the thing is – once cities and planets have been destroyed – you have to earn your bang as opposed to just getting louder.” Indeed, Logan is the most atypical film in the comic book genre to date, with Mangold taking the creative risk of transplanting the Wolverine into a brutal and intense milieu devoid

“I had this kind of strange vision in my head that I wanted to make a road movie with these characters, in a way almost trapping myself as a filmmaker,” says Mangold. “Putting them in a car and trapping them on a highway would tie my hands. We couldn’t do something about worlds colliding or an alien invasion – the movie would essentially force itself to operate on a more intimate level. “It’s a movie about family,” he adds. “It’s a movie about loyalty and love

of the grandiose threats and visual effects onslaughts synonymous with the X-Men

MEET THE REAL WOLVERINE

Don't think wolves, think wolverines. That's the mistake Hugh Jackman made when researching his character for the first X-Men film back in 2000, before being told by director Bryan Singer that he wasn't a wolf at all and to go to a zoo and check out a real wolverine. While as hairy and bad

and specifically a character, Logan, who has been stubbornly avoiding intimacy throughout his long life, finally letting it in. “We wanted to go out with a

tempered as its onscreen namesake, a wolverine doesn't have retractable claws and is more like a hybrid of badger, bear, raccoon and weasel. But this powerfully built carnivore, who favours mountainous alpine and arctic regions, does have a habit of watching its back when competing with other predators for a tasty carcass.

• Logan is out on June 7

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