I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine last night, and I really don't understand all the people who say it's bad. In fact, it is far better in many respects than any of the previous X-Men movies for one simple reason - it doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, a fun, action-packed movie with a lot of people beating up other people, some funny one-liners ("It's OK! There are dead people in here!"), without the phony final victory that really isn't final because the sequel is coming (Stryker should have been made to eat that bullet, but that's just me).
Part of the problem, to my non-comic-fan mind, is that all these comic book fans actually believe there is something deep about the genre. No. Whether it's X-Men or Spiderman, or Batman, they are nothing more than ways for teenage boys to feel a vicarious thrill of identity, a way to take solace in their own sense of difference, and silently celebrate their own superiority over their "normal" peers. Like science fiction, comics return to the same themes again and again in ways that are destined to appeal to their primary target audience - adolescent males who feel estranged in one way or another from their peer groups.
The Wolverine film has the added benefit of an actual adult theme. Unlike the heavy-handed and repetitive "war between mutants and humans" of the first three movies (and why is it the humans always seem to need mutants to protect them from other mutants? Shouldn't this be a clue as to what is really going on?), the theme here is really quite simple - identity, including moral identity, is not identical with genetic predisposition. Unlike his half-brother Victor Creed, James Logan learns that, at some point, killing for the sake of killing is not who he is. His first taste comes in Vietnam, where he simultaneously fights his brother, and defends him against others. In Nigeria, the order to destroy a village becomes the breaking point.
Now, the nice thing about this theme - about the possibility of moral growth - is that, while it is there, you can leave it and just enjoy the movie for its good, old-fashioned fun. Yet, the line that is the title of this post comes as Logan is seeking revenge for what he believes is the murder of his lover. He sees revenge as unredemptive; yet, in the end, his revenge is both thwarted and voluntarily rejected, and so there is, in fact, redemption of a curiously Christian kind. In the Psalms, it is said that when God forgives, sin is removed from both us and God as far as east is from the west, and God no longer brings it to mind. Wolverine's inflicted amnesia is redemptive in that sense; as he starts down the road that will lead him to Charles Xavier, he is a tabula rasa, yet the morally complex character we meet in the first X-Men movie is already established. He has absorbed the lessons so deeply in to his psyche that no amount of amnesia can remove them.
So, I enjoyed the movie. I thought it did what it was supposed to do quite well. Unlike Yglesias, I think establishing Logan's backstory is important, and this cinematic version isn't the same as the comic version because, well, it isn't a comic book, but a film.
Virtual Tin Cup
