geekent’s stuff’n things

Wolverine was (if not still is) the most ubiquitous comic book character on the stands. In the 1990s, if a title was lagging in sales, you can bet ol’ Wolvie would put in an appearance to hopefully give it a boost. He would appear in so many places at once that there wasn’t a hope in hell of keeping the continuity of his appearances straight. I was never much of a Marvel fan so I didn’t really care to anyway. Read X-Men for about a year back when everyone was reading X-Men (and buying an extra copy to put away) and I’ve purchased, perhaps, two or three issues of the guy’s own title in it’s 20 years of publishing. With the exception of Barry Windsor Smith’s Weapon X I’ve rarely given Wolvie a second thought. He’s a star character for sure, and with Hugh Jackman beautifying him, straightening his posture, giving him some stature and depreciating his hirsuteness, the cinematic appeal isn’t lost.

There’s a treasure trove of backstory to wade through, as Marvel has been taking the last ten years or so to completely demystify the character. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a wacky amalgam of so many of those facets, while also trying to shoehorn it into the X-Men movie trilogy and hopefully spawn some other franchises (Deadpool is strongly insinuated and Gambit isn’t necessarily out of the works, and a new cast of mutants for a new X-Men movie is all but assured). The first act of the film involves a series of short stories and montages about Wolverine’s life, from his childhood in the Northwest Territories in Canada in 1840 (which every Canadian should recognize immediately as B.S. since Canada wasn’t officially Canada until 1867, and the NWT were coined as such until a few years afterwards) to his participation in the Civil War (despite not being American) and pretty much every war the US was involved in for the next 100 years. He then joined a mercenary team where he did bad things and got tired of it and retired to being a lumberjack, settling down only to have his life upturned and shoehorned into established X-Men movie franchise canon, handled with all the subtlety of an elephant in an outhouse.

Origins is not a good movie. It is fairly passable popcorn fun. It’s effects vary between acceptable and atrocious (the cartoon claws in some scenes were particularly heinous) and the violence is bloodless by and large so that a preteen audience to embrace the cool anti-hero. It’s focus seems less on truly telling Wolverine’s origin story (it breezes quickly through the meaty Weapon X in favor of its comic-booky plot) instead on introducing mutant after mutant, which is kind of fun for the fans but also thoroughly distracting, and at times blatant to the point of annoyance.

I didn’t hate Origins like I did X-Men 3, but it’s hardly following the Watchmen, Iron Man or Dark Knight route of character driven superhero cinema.