Gregarious

I have been anticipating the Wolverine movie for THREE YEARS.  While filming, there had been dozens of rumors about issues between Fox Studios and director Gavin Hood.  While reading about them I simply (maybe ignorantly) kept the faith that the right people behind the scenes would make sure that one of Marvel’s most popular characters would be adapted faithfully to his own movie.  I was wrong.

What makes Wolverine’s character so intriguing is his constant struggle between his urge to do what’s right and his mutant, animalistic instinct.  The movie did a terrible job of translating this struggle to the big screen.  The only way it was addressed the whole movie was with characters just talking about it:  “I’m not an animal!”  “Yes you are.”  What also makes Wolverine so great is his complex and fragmented past, which was completely glazed over in the film.  The movie simply seemed like an excuse to cram as many “popular” mutants (Gambit?! What a lame character!  He doesn’t even do anything in the movie!) into a film that simply had Wolverine moving the plot (if you can call it that) forward.

I should give credit where it is due; Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, and Danny Huston all portrayed their characters superbly.  Even Ryan Reynolds was PERFECT for Wade Wilson/Deadpool but he only had maybe 3 minutes on screen to shine in a role that he was born for!

The most glaring issue I had with the film were the comically awful special effects.  For the first “summer blockbuster” of the year, it seemed clear that Fox tried to cut costs in post production.  The effects are so poor that they are distracting from the plot in a few scenes specifically: the scene when Wolverine is first getting used to his metal claws in a bathroom, when wolverine is fighting the Blob, and then any scene taking place in a moving vehicle.

I place all the blame on Fox Studios.  According to the rumors I referred to before, Fox is one of the most difficult film studios to work for and it must be true.  I know it is a little cliche to say this in our “post Batman Begins era” but the movie should have been darker.  Wolverine is very similar to Batman in his moral ambiguity (ignoring the means to achieve an end) but the Wolverine movie looks like a Saturday morning cartoon compared to the recent Batman movies.

I can only hope that if Wolverine SOMEHOW makes enough money to warrant a sequel, they take a drastically different approach before more movies like this are made and kill the current streak of quality comic book movies.