I ended my 2017 review by saying Logan might be the best film in the entire X-Men universe, and that time would tell after repeated viewings. Well, time told. It’s a five out of five, and it’s one of the best comic book films anybody has made, and I’ve stopped hedging about it. That’s the rare case where going back to something confirms the high estimate instead of quietly sanding it down, which almost never happens with films I loved on the first pass. Usually you rewatch the thing you raved about and find the seams. This one has fewer seams than I remembered, not more, and the bits I thought were merely good in 2017 turn out to be the bits holding the whole thing up.
What’s strange about coming back to it now is that both of its goodbyes have since been cancelled. I wrote at the time that it was bittersweet watching Hugh Jackman pop the claws one last time, and that this was Patrick Stewart’s last ride on the X-Men train as well. Two farewells, both treated as final, both written about as final by everyone including me. Neither of them held. Jackman came back for Deadpool & Wolverine, and Stewart’s Xavier is walking into Avengers: Doomsday in December. The most definitive ending this genre ever produced turned out to be a pause, and I expected to be far angrier about that than I actually am.
Why the returns don’t bother me as much as they should
The reason, I think, is that Deadpool & Wolverine was genuinely careful with it. It didn’t resurrect this Logan. It went and found a different one, from somewhere else entirely, and built its whole premise on the fact that the Logan who died in Texas is still dead and his absence broke his world. That film treats this ending as something that mattered rather than something inconvenient to work around, and whatever else you think of it, and I’ve always had time for what that character does to the genre, it didn’t reach into this film and take anything out. The grave still counts. Laura still turned the cross sideways. Nothing that happens later is watching over this film’s shoulder, which is more restraint than I would have predicted from a franchise that has spent five years undoing its own endings.
Stewart’s return in December is the one I’m less settled about, and I’ll come back to that, because it’s the only thing in this whole rewatch project I’d genuinely rather not get wrong.
The Reavers were always going to get me
Small confession that explains a chunk of my enthusiasm. The Reavers are personal. They’re one of my favourites from the comics, from the run where they fought the X-Men out in the Australian desert, and I’m fairly sure I still have those issues in a box somewhere. So seeing them turn up on screen at all was going to land for me regardless of what the film did with them.
In 2017 I said this was where I’d have liked the film to stick closer to the source, that Pierce and his people were sadistic and effective but that I wanted more of what the comics did with them, and that the film simply wasn’t interested in building a big imposing enemy. I stand by the observation and I’ve stopped counting it against the film, because the more I watch it the clearer it is that the villain was never the Reavers. The villain is the adamantium. It’s the thing killing him, it’s what Transigen made more of, and X-24 is that idea given a face and set loose. A bigger, better-explored antagonist would have pulled focus away from a film that knew exactly where its focus belonged, and I say that as someone who wanted more Reavers. The film was right not to give them to me.
My other 2017 note was that the story dots the i’s and crosses the t’s without ever surprising you, and that’s still true. Get the girl north, get chased, lose people, reach the border. It’s a hundred westerns and the film is completely open about being one, right down to quoting Shane at you. What it does instead of plot is character, and it does that better than anything else in this genre, which is why the “unremarkable” complaint has aged into something closer to a compliment. The plot is a road for the performances to walk down. Complicate it and you lose the quiet motel scenes, and the quiet motel scenes are the entire film.
Stewart and Keen are doing the heavy lifting
Heartfelt and poignant is what I called Patrick Stewart’s work in 2017, and reading that back it seems far too polite. Charles in this film is the most powerful mind on the planet losing custody of it, in a body that can’t get to the bathroom on its own, apologising for something terrible he can’t quite remember doing. The seizures aren’t a superpower set piece, they’re a symptom, and the film has the nerve to make the most frightening thing in it a very old man having a medical episode. That scene in the motel where he thanks Logan for a night that was almost nice is the best thing Stewart has done across twenty-six years of playing this character, and it’s also close to unbearable. I don’t put it on casually.
Dafne Keen was the standout in 2017 and nothing since has displaced her. She’s silent for most of the film, fights exactly like him, and has to build an entire person out of physicality and a handful of lines right at the end. I said at the time she may have had the hardest job in the movie, and having watched it several more times I’d cut that hedge as well. She did have the hardest job. Calling her his daughter isn’t quite right and it’s close enough. However you want to classify what Transigen made, the film knows precisely what it is, which is a man who has spent seventeen years refusing to be responsible for anyone being handed someone who is unavoidably his. The critical consensus has only hardened in its favour in the years since, and for once I think the consensus and I are looking at the same thing.
One genuine nag I’ll put out there rather than pretend I’ve solved: why is the adamantium poisoning him now? He’s had it for decades across this whole franchise and been perfectly fine. The film’s implication is that the healing factor was always holding it at bay and the healing factor is failing, which works if you don’t push on it, but it does raise the question of what started first. If the metal is degrading the healing, and the healing is the only thing surviving the metal, something has to have kicked that off. I should read up on it properly instead of hand-waving every time. If there’s a clean answer in the comics this film borrows from I’d like to know it. It doesn’t dent the film at all, it’s just the one bit of machinery I’ve never been able to make click.
What December could take away from it
Nothing has displaced this as the best of them, and Apocalypse the year before is the useful contrast — everything this film refuses to be, enormous and weightless, an ancient god and a collapsing city and no reason to care about any of it. Then this arrives twelve months later with a limo, a water tank and three people, and buries it. The acting, the underlying story, the way every death in it is earned rather than shocking, all of it is really, really well done. When someone tells me a comic book film can’t be serious drama, this is what I point at, and it’s the one I singled out looking back at that year.
Which brings me to the worry. Charles Xavier dies in this film, badly, in a motel in Oklahoma, and it means something. Stewart is now back. If Doomsday treats that as a door that was never really shut, if the multiverse becomes the excuse by which no ending sticks, then something does get taken from this film after all. Deadpool & Wolverine showed it can be done respectfully by going and finding a different version rather than undoing this one, and I’d like December to follow the same rule. Let this grave stay dug. I don’t really believe a film this good can be damaged by what other films do around it, but I’ve been wrong before, and this is the one I’d least like to be wrong about.
Next in the rewatch is Thor: Ragnarok, which is about as far from this film’s mood as the MCU has ever travelled.
