Welp, looks like I’m going to have to get around to seeing those first two Wolverine standalone movies as prep, because this latest – and final – installment with Hugh Jackman looks like it could be really good.
The title is Logan, which is derived from Wolverine’s actual last name, and it finds the X-Man superhero at an uncharacteristically advanced age. Set in the year 2024, Logan’s healing/regenerative superpowers – that have worked like a DNA fountain of youth – are fading.
What’s particularly fascinating about the prospect of this movie (as defined by this first trailer, above) is that it looks primarily to be not an action film but, rather, a two-fold character study: first and foremost Logan/Wolverine, but also an aging Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Directed by James Mangold (Cop Land, Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma), this swan song for Jackman as Wolverine – in the role that made and defined his entire career – has the potential of being the closest thing to an indie movie that a superhero tentpole blockbuster will ever get.
Logan opens next spring on March 3, 2017.
I would be very, very surprised if you needed to see the first two Wolverine films. The second one, maybe, since it was directed by James Mangold, who also directed the new one. But the first two films took place on a timeline that doesn’t exist any more (except for the World War II and earlier flashbacks), and the first film in particular is one of those movies that everyone involved seems eager to forget (except for the supremely self-aware Deadpool, of course).
Good to know, and I can’t say I’m surprised you’d say that (the trailers for that first one looked ridiculous).
Still, given that I’ll review Logan, I’d still want to see the first two in order to be able to compare the three movies, to have a cinematic context for Logan as a movie, what it’s doing, how it’s doing it, etc., not out of any desire to be up on the “mythology”.