logan

Last week ‘Logan‘ was released to give us the perfect ending to Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and director James Mangold now can weigh in on the end of the film. Critics and fans alike have given high praise to this film, and the R-Rated nature of it has fit the style and story being told. It certainly gave us an emotional conclusion to the years that the actor has put into portraying the most iconic of the X-Men.

Since we’re talking about the ending of the movie it should be noted that there are spoilers below. Chances are, fans who read this site have already seen the film, but these things have to be said.

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At the end of ‘Logan’, we saw Wolverine die. Jackman has always said that he was done with the character after the film and this has certainly seemed to put the final nail in the coffin of his return. Of course, as it takes place so far into the future he has plenty of opportunities to change his mind and star in a film which takes before these events.

I don’t see that happening, though. Mangold has a few key talking points which you might be interested in, and the first of those is why Wolverine died at the hands and claws of X-24:

“Well it seemed to me that it had to in some way be a battle with something other than just one of the array of supervillains. What I liked about the idea on a thematic level of battling X-24 and even dying at his hands was that effectively there’s a kind of radian analysis you can make of it all, which is really interesting, which is that he’s effectively a guy who’s gone through 200 years with this burden of shame and guilt and regret, remorse, anger about the violence he’s been forced to and willingly committed in his life, about feeling that he’s been cursed that he can never feel love or sell it because those he connects to die. To put his last fight against his own self in a sense, a mirror, a kind of dark mirror—in a way, X-24 in my mind was designed to be a vision of Weapon X, that he’s essentially battling his worst self, and younger, more capable, more savage, and without any sense of conscience or morality. There were several different interesting aspects to me, one is when that part of him, if you look at it for a moment from a psychological point of view, when that mirror image of him dies, it’s very interesting how that becomes in the last minute of the film that he’s alive, the moment where it’s almost like something’s been lifted from him. And of the many things I’m proud about the movie, I’m really proud about the way—I don’t expect you to intellectually engage that, but I expect you to feel it. I do think you feel that in the wake of that battle when he turns and Laura kneels beside him, that he is suddenly capable and something has gone away inside him and he’s capable of connecting with her and saying things that the guy who has run through the previous 121 minutes of this movie could not have said, until this point.”

That is a very valid point. Not only do we see Logan being able to come to terms with his dark side at the end but also it leads right into the following moment where Mangold talks about the line “So this is what it feels like.”:

“Scott Frank [wrote that line]. We were trading the script back and forth between NY and LA, and he wrote that line and sent it to me. Oh my God, I loved it, I knew those were the final words the second I read it, and to me it has two wonderful meanings and Hugh brilliantly plays both of them, one being for a man who has died 450 times in movies, let alone in his career, and yet never dies because of his healing factor, he has no idea, it’s like a tunnel he goes into and never comes out the other side, so there was that very literal meaning in relation to death. But there was also this moment of him holding his daughter’s hand and seeing utter emotion in her eyes and feeling the purest kind of love which is family love, and letting it in for the first time in his life.”

While watching the life fade out of Wolverine’s eyes in that final scene, I was trying to decide which of these two meaning he meant by his final words, so it is fitting that even Mangold felt that it was both.

Were you happy with how ‘Logan’ finish off Jackman as Wolverine for the X-Men cinematic universe? How long will it be until they recast the actor? Share your thoughts below True Believers!

Source: Collider

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Stuart Conover is an author, blogger, and all around geek. When not busy being a father and husband he tries to spend as much time as possible immersed in comic books, science fiction, and horror! Would you like to know more? Follow him on Twitter!