Some Thoughts On "Logan"

So, I just got back from seeing Logan (literally, I walked in the door and sat down at the computer) and we’re going to talk about it. Given the title of the article I feel like this shouldn’t have to be said, but if you don’t want the film spoiled you should probably skip this one. Alright, due diligence achieved.

I loved this movie. I thought it was a really beautiful send-off for the character, and even though I know they’re gonna re-cast him and he’s gonna appear in a bunch more movies, I think this was really the pinnacle of Jackman as Wolverine. The Wolverine saga is probably the only movie series in cinematic history that gets progressively better with each film. I don’t know what the cause is, but it feels like with each new iteration the series was handed to an increasingly competent person, so props to director James Mangold and every single person that made this movie possible. There wasn’t a bad performance from anybody, and I genuinely mean that.

Okay, let’s do that thing where I’m funny.
So, on the way back from the film something occurred to me—Laura, according to her file, is 132 months old. That’s exactly eleven, if you’re like me and you don’t feel like doing math (Happy birthday, Laura!). What’s more, the girl looks like she’s somewhere in the middle of four feet tall. If anybody tries to tell me that cinematic Wolverine is the 5’3 he’s listed in the comics I will fight you.
Sure hope Laura likes being short.

X-23 is, effectively, tiny female Wolverine. That’s how she’s always been and the film didn’t differentiate from that at all. That means that our heroine here has adamantium-covered bones. What’s more, based on the flashback stuff that they show throughout the film, she’s had the metal in her body for a year, maybe a year and a half minimum. Do you suppose that you were done fully growing at 9? I know girls tend to hit puberty faster than boys, but I was probably 4’10 at 9 years old and I’m 6’1 now. I bet bones trying to grow and not being able to really hurts.On top of that, is her brain okay? Like, I’m not a doctor, but I get the feeling that the brain would keep growing in spite of the fact that her skull can’t. Is her brain just going to swell up and press against the inside of her skull? Because that’s super bad for you. Are all her baby teeth out? Will her adult teeth grow in? I don’t know. What if she has wisdom teeth? What happens when those try to come in and run up against solid metal?

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I’ll tell you what happens: She’ll be in a ton of pain until she dies before she’s 55.
See, here’s the other thing wrong with encasing an eleven-year-old girl in unbreakable metal. Yes, there are only two things wrong with that. So, Logan was just shy of about two hundred years old when he died, which speaks volumes for how well Laura’s gonna do. EXCEPT. Logan dies in this film because the adamantium in his body is poisoning him so badly that it’s negating his healing factor. The adamantium in his body. Which Laura now also has.
After a quick bit of Google-fu I found this timeline of events for Logan’s life: He lives as-is until the Vietnam War where he meets William Stryker and joins Team X, which he spends “a few years” in with Sabretooth until Logan bails and spends six years in Canada as a lumberjack. Almost immediately after that he fights Sabretooth, loses, and then agrees to join the Weapon X program (the thing that gave him adamantium bones). This eventually takes us out of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and into the first X-Men film.
Let’s give Logan the benefit of the doubt: Let’s say he was only in Vietnam for ten minutes at the very start of the war. That would mean that he joined Team X in 1955 and spent “a few years” there. So now we’re at like, 1960, at which point he spends six years—’66—as a Canadian lumberjack. So, in ’66 he joins the Weapon X program and gets his adamantium. Logan takes place in 2029, 63 years later, at which point the poison in his body is so overwhelming that it kills him. Considering that Laura got her adamantium at 9 or 10, she’ll be right around 72 when it gets her.
In actuality, the aesthetic of X-Men Origins is such that Logan was probably fighting until the end of the Vietnam War, which would mean that after spending a total of eleven years fucking around we’re at ’86 instead of ’66, bringing Laura’s life down to a respectable 52 years old. That’s not great even if you’re not immortal.
So even if we don’t count the fact that she watched her father get killed by an errant tree stump our new tiny Wolverine has some problems in her future. I’ll be curious to see if they maybe continue with her as a character, I think it would be neat to explore the issues that she faces as a creature having been specially bred to be a weapon. Somehow I get the feeling that none of these nitpicky issues will be addressed. In the next film she’ll be taller. And that’s fine, I’m just being shitty.
Honestly, it’s hard to poke holes in a movie like Logan; at least, it’s hard to poke meaningful ones. Basically all I’ve got is “Hurr durr, superheroes are goofy.” If you’re at all invested in the genre then you know that already and don’t care, and if you’re not invested in the superhero genre you’re never going to read this so who gives a shit? Either way, given that Logan has already made upwards of $500 million domestic you probably don’t need to hear this, but if you haven’t seen the film yet you really owe it to yourself to go.