Jackman: Origins
We have a problem.
Wolverine was always cool growing up and I don’t really need to explain why. While James Bond may have always been the embodiment of sophistication and coolness, Wolverine could just as easily be described as masculinity personified. Claws come out, motorcycles, cigars, side-burns, and just not caring about anything. That’s what I always thought of anyway.
Put him together with just about any other cool character and you’ve got either a good death match or at the very least, a good rivalry. Venom’s got a new comic book, we need something to happen. Wolverine. Spider-man happens to be in the Canadian wilderness, who does he run into? Wolverine. Iron Man stumbles into a Texas whorehouse, who’s their top seller? Your mother. Ohhhhhh! Just playing, I’m sure she’s a wonderful woman. In fact, I know she is.
Getting to the point, Wolverine is what every red-blooded guy wanted to be like when he grew up. Yet since Hugh Jackman has taken over, Wolverine’s character has become a tad…flawed. And not in the usual, cool, loner ways either. No, that’s the kind of flaw people go around making up stories of just so they can come off like Wolverine. The kind of flawed I’m talking about is this:
Or this-
Or…*SIGH*…this-
You could make a slideshow of those pictures and this song and you can’t tell me it wouldn’t fit. I don’t think I even need to explain my problem if you just go back and take another look.
Wolverine is not Wolverine anymore. Wolverine is Hugh Jackman.
Now, say that to any heterosexual woman, waaay too optimistic comic book fan, casual viewer, or twelve year old, and they’d all readily disagree because, hey, it’s Hugh Jackman. What’s not to like, right? I don’t blame him entirely.
These poses I’m sure, are not all his doing, while he also doesn’t write the scripts or choose the dialogue. In reality, he seems pretty likable and genuinely enjoys playing the part that put him on the map back in 2000.
That’s all great and everything and that’s not sarcasm; but when a character is so convoluted that it’s become a joke of its actual self, shouldn’t it be time to drop it? No?
Well, let’s leave money out of it for a second and how much this cash machine makes. Now is it time to drop it?
Your moral self says “Yes.” Why? You can’t deny that THESE MOVIES ALL SUCK.
The character normally wears a lot of yellow as well as blue underwear on the outside of his pants. Yet his comic incarnation still has the appeal of a vicious little underdog that won’t stay down how many times he’s put there. The movies have taken this and made him into a 1980s action movie parody.
Everything he says is the most dramatic line you’ve ever heard. Everything in his past is the saddest, most violent thing that could’ve happened to a person. The scenes in X-Men Origins: Wolverine are filled to the brim with continuity destroyers to even the other X-Men movies, but they made sure that they fit in all the melodrama that makes him who he is in X-Men. Can I show you another picture?
So many sides to choose from! There’s Wolverine and…and…
I think a big issue is that I’ve written the X-Men movies off as kids movies while Wolverine in his own films should be, mm, perhaps a tad more violent. I didn’t think this until a year or so after his solo movie came out because I was expecting this to be just another X-Men movie, which it was.
It wasn’t until I was convinced by another comic fan why Wolverine’s movie should not have been just another film in the franchise and that Wolverine’s character is much more violent by nature. I mean, c’mon. Claws rip through his flesh so that he can hack, slash, and stab people to death. Oh sure, PG-13 is good.
Here’s what Jackman said about an R-Rated Wolverine movie-
“There’s such great temptation to make an R-rated Wolverine. I’ve always felt that. I know a lot of fans would like that. I totally get it. If there was ever a superhero that was going to be R-rated, it’s Wolverine. However, in the last ten years, I’ve also met many, many 12, 13, dare I say 10, 14, 15 year-olds who, for them, Wolverine is not just cool, you see it in their eyes. He’s everything to them. So my thing is, which James Mangold (Director of the upcoming 2013 Wolverine film) and I talked about, is let’s not put it off the table. There’s even a talk of us doing two versions, as in finding a way for us to do both while you shoot it, which could be really cool. But you need to have a really good reason to exclude those fans.”
“Those” fans.
I get it. I do. Jackman’s probably got kids, and their friends and cousins and whoever else that just love Wolverine in their movie. Heck, my friend’s nephew dresses up like him whenever his parents will let him it seems. But then The Avengers rolled around. Guess who he dressed up as? Iron Man. And when The Amazing Spider-Man came out, he was dressed as Spider-Man. Oh, and he also liked Batman a lot recently and when Superman comes out next year, I can take a couple guesses on who he’ll want to dress up as.
They’re not gonna do two cuts of the movie. Chances are, they’ll release their precious “Unrated and UNCUT!” version on DVD simultaneously. Fans who like to stay up to date know that the director of The Fountain, the scariest meth PSAs you’ve ever seen, and Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, had written the script and even started prepping to shoot before he suddenly handed in a letter of resignation about not wanting to be away from his family for the time it would take to shoot the film.
Really? That’s what we’re going with? It couldn’t have possibly been that Aronofsky was the only one who wanted to take this seriously and attempt to hit certain points on the character that nobody else would touch.
Points like, say, oh I don’t know- he murders people. So far, film makers like him playing the “sullen, loner, anti-hero,” yet they don’t actually want him to do “bad” things. The entire reason for writing this article in the first place is due to three reasons:
1. I saw this picture from the new Wolverine movie-
It is literally impossible for Wolverine to pose with his claws in.
2. A friend and I were recently bashing the Origins movie.
3. I had to write something.
All of those reasons come together for this article to say that as far as Wolverine fans go, just give up and accept it all. I don’t mean watch whatever Wolverine movies that come out, and I don’t mean angrily boycott them (as in ‘getting annoyed when it’s brought up in conversation); what mean is to accept that Hollywood probably isn’t going to give you what you want as far as most of these characters are concerned. They’re going to go with their idea of the character.
In the hands of Christopher Nolan, we’ve seen that his idea of the characters is, in its own way, as epic as the Dark Knight and company’s entire 80-year career…while most are just in it for the money.
“Hey, look at this guy. He’s got claws in his hands! You’ll pay me to make this? Sure-diddly I will! I want a job!” Most directors and writers won’t care about how amazing the interpretation could’ve been, but rather that they did it, and they were, on some level, successful.
The Nolans and Aronofskys are few and far between and we’ve even seen that the Aronofskys don’t always get their way either. But as a fan, I still had to get this out. I guess I just see/hear things occasionally that have my thoughts forming sentences like “How did we go from the simple and awesome…
…to this-
It’s just so…unnatural…
It boggles the mind. I used Wolverine because he may be the most overt example of great character turned kiddy-fodder. Don’t get me started on what Fox has done to my real favorites.
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