When is Logan set?

Film Just returned from seeing Logan. I don't quite have a coherent opinion about it yet, although my suspicion is less impressed than some, but it'll be interesting to know how that changes after a second viewing when I'm more prepared for the tone and the surprises are anything but.

With everything which happens, it's probably worth returning to the X-Men chronology questions which this blog has been wrestling with in recent years and exactly which order in which the Fox MARVEL films are supposed to be viewed.

As such this will necessitate spoilers, so here's the Deadpool mini-feature, which oddly enough didn't appear in front of the screening I attended. Perhaps it was just a US thing. Anyway ... enjoy this gap for glancing away ...



Brutal. Not as brutal as Logan though.

Anyway, previously we discussed although it seems like the best way to watch the films is by following Logan's consciousness as it bounces around time:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men
X-Men 2
X-Men 3 (or whatever it's called in your end of the world)
The Wolverine
First Class
X-Men: Days of Future Past
X-Men: Apocalypse
Fan4stic
Deadpool

Although as I later discovered after actually watching the films in this order parts of the rebooted films negate Origins even though it's set before them.  Shrug.

Incidentally, this guy at Cinefix pretty much follows this template then makes the mistake of assuming the Logan who turns up at the end of DoFP has lived through all the years again, when in fact its some other version of him, the one who's a berserker in Apocalypse, who then has his brain wiped over by the original Logan when his consciousness returns from the past into the altered future.

So where does this leave the film Logan?

[Brief sidebar.  In the original timeline, Logan was perfectly healthy right into the future whereas here he's noticeably older and dying of adamantium poisoning.  Is it possible that because he was freed in Apocalypse in a different way and possibly earlier to that established in the other films it was before the end of his treatment and not given the necessary ability to counteract the cumulative effects of having the metal in his body?]

As the Cinefix guy notices if the end of DoFP is set in 2023 and Logan is set in 2029, that means that within six years everything goes to shit for the mutants, Richard E Grant's doctor has done for them through the food supply in a way which the sentinels didn't quite manage in the original.  Plus there's a suspicion that Xavier's accidentally destroyed the school and killed the X-Men through his mental earthquake shock thingy.

Oh fuck is this a depressing film.

But there's nothing in here to say that any rewatch of the series shouldn't end on Logan.  Various bits of film mythology are mentioned but interestingly everything is suggested.  Nothing is specific.  None of the other X-Men are named.  Not even Jean.  Or the events which led this Logan to being in this body with Xavier aware of the change.

Oh fuck this is a depressing film.

Because that means that whatever happens in the next X-film and anything else in this 'verse, we know that none of it matters.  However much Brian Singer or whoever wants to guide the story towards the epilogue of DoFP, six years after that Xavier's going to be murdered by X-24 and Logan will die defending his daughter.  I did warn you.

Some have suggested that it's set in the original timeline which doesn't make much sense given that everyone was going to die anyway until Wolverine succeeded.  Plus the information in here doesn't tally with what's in there.

The other possibility is that it's a What If? type story or that its set in a kind of "real" timeline in which the other films have the same veracity as the comic books which are mentioned.  But that's not really satisfactory either.

Fox has effectively murdered one of its major franchises just as it was getting going again.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't be interested in seeing another film set afterwards with all of these genetically engineered mutants on the run in Canada.

On Deadpool.

Film Under usual circumstance I only produce these enthusiastic post-film reactoposts for productions of the MARVEL cinematic universe but now The X-Men cinematic universe has finally found its feet (give or take a four stick) and with Deadpool being what it is I thought I'd apply some random thoughts to a computer screen. This is not a review, especially since it's going to include spoilers of the kind you really wouldn't want to read before seeing the film. So if you the person I was this morning still planning on waiting for the shiny-disc release for various reasons before intoning "oh fuck it" very loudly and going anyway, keep this bookmarked for six months. Or add it to your Google Calendar as an alert because you will have forgotten I've written by then. Hell, I will have forgotten I've written by then.

Venue

As ever my original plan was to see Deadpool at Picturehouse at FACT in Liverpool, but having skipped the release week because of half term, being a 15 certificate and all, then checking on waking this morning I discovered it had been supplanted from a lunchtime screening this week to late afternoon when I'm usually half asleep due to hunger and replaced on the biggest screen by Triple 9 which has wait for the Amazon Prime UK stream in six months written all over it thanks to its 56% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  The only other alternative in central Liverpool is the Odeon and given that pretty much every previous visit to the Odeon has been a rotten shame, I decided that I'd wait for the dvd or blu-ray just as I have for every X-Men related film film The Last Stand (and pretty much every other film released in the past ten years to be fair).

Then after eating my breakfast of porridge whilst watching Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and before sitting to check my emails, I made the previously mentioned audible expletive and decided to take the train to the Vue cinema at Birkenhead to sample its charms.  It was perfectly fine.  Tickets cost an old school £4.99 in the afternoon, half the price of the FACT and Odeon.  The auditorium was adequate although the seats are amazing close to the screen and the safety lights directly above the first three rows were on all the way through the film which meant the dark scenes had a slightly beige hue.  Otherwise it was well projected and the sound was loud enough to make the chairs vibrate.  There were about ten of us in the screen including a group of youngsters (!) who talks loudly through the preamble adverts and trailers but sushed for the film apart from the moments when they weren't supposed to.

Wade Whimsey

One of the key elements of the pre-publicity for the Deadpool, the viral marketing, the press interviews all of that, has been about the extent to which the meta-fictional post-modern elements would be reproduced on the big screen with some worrying that it would become blunted too much by the needs of being a film within a much larger franchise and also being inclusive for as wide an audience as possible.  Despite not having read Deadpool comic from cover to cover in my life (something which will now change as the graphic novels section of Liverpool Central Library embraces me again), I understood that this is what made the character unique and liking that element a lot in other films because of its theatricality, I was keen to see just how far Reynold et al would stretch things.

As far as they could, I think is the answer, to an extraordinary degree actually given that for all its budget and certification this is a relatively wide release.  His revealed level of awareness seems to stretch to knowing that he's a comic book character in a film adaptation within a franchise which has taken a few continuity knocks over the years with enough in-verse jokes about the treatment of the character in the past to be satisfied enough that the spirit of the very first trailer of Deadpool sat in the chair making jokes has been carried into the film.  To a large extent much of the heavy lifting is done by the opening "credits" sequence which masterfully points out all of the tropes of the kinds of things you'd expect to find in one of these films.  That's about as close as Deadpool gets to having Randy from Scream show up to explain everything while it's happening.

But there is a sense of film pulling back slightly on the more avant-garde elements, this isn't A Cock and Bull Story with superheroes, Deadpool doesn't stop the action in the middle in order to address the audience perhaps through an insert within an insert and it doesn't address within itself the fact that it's presenting yet another origin story perhaps because Kick Ass and its ilk have staked out that territory.  Plus it has to modulate itself: too "inside", too many jokes and you risk alienating the large percentage of the audience who haven't read the comics and there was certainly a potential version of this film which would have had Deadpool winking at the comics fans in particular at the expense of the people who'd wandered in because of the superb viral marketing campaign.  I think it walked the line beautifully, the post-credit sequence being the perfect example.  Wow.

Ryan Reynolds

Glancing backwards through his back catalogue about the only two films in which Ryan Reynolds is physically on screen for any length of time that aren't Blade:Trinity I've enjoyed have been Definitely, Maybe and The Proposal and it's entirely possibly it was because of his co-stars.  He's not an actor I've particularly understood, and in the case of Fireflies in the Garden, I stopped watching precisely because he was so expressively bad.  Perhaps I needed to see more of his earlier work, the Van Wilders, his eighty-one episodes of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place to understand what he was trying to do.  But he persists in appearing in films which I'd actively avoid in the past.

Now here he in Deadpool, in a passion project and he's blood brilliant.  We all know the story of his disappoint about not being able to do the character justice in the Wolverine film (see above) and I do love that like Russell T Davies in relation to Doctor Who, it took someone with a certain notoriety to turn a much loved pop culture icon finally into the thing it's supposed to be.  Initially the expressive line-readings feel a bit Ross, but eventually you realise that he's speaking in comic speech bubbles, that there's an imaginary exclamation mark at the end of most of the dialogue and that he quite specifically dials it down whenever he's out of the mask so it's very much part of Deadpool's act.

Morena Baccarin

Morena Baccarin is extraordinary.  It's often said that film actors and actresses aren't what they once were, but it's also forgotten that many of them, especially in the studio system, appeared in many more different types of roles and films across their careers.  Katherine Hepburn or Rosalind Russell would appear in three or even four projects; some worked in quality terms, some didn't, but both of those actresses turned out enough classics for them to be well thought of all these years later.  Plus there was an even greater amount of product which meant that there were more actors working and even more of those were considered "stars".  As films have become more expensive and there are less of them, there are less opportunities for what could be well thought of actors to be given the opportunity to appear in more places as the same actors tend to appear.

Meet Morena Baccarin, who as Deadpool demonstrates has all the makings of a major actor, notably comic actor but tends to spend her time on television playing either frosty villain types or as per Homeland the grieving wife figure.  Whilst it's true that's somewhat where she is in Deadpool, the canvas is much larger and for whole sections she's able to demonstrate the comic timing I don't think she's been allowed to since Firefly (though I notice now she was in Spy last year which I'm waiting to see).  Her comic instincts here are really special and is more than able to hold screen on the few occasions when Deadpool isn't there and I'd argue is the reason so many of those earlier romcom scenes are so watchable.  In an ideal world she would have headline Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman as well has appeared in a string of thrillers and romcoms.  As it is I'm now considering returning to Gotham.

Feminist Film Theory

Best break this out separately.  For all that said, Morena's is the girlfriend role and is dressed very fashionably in a great many scenes often in leather.  But I'd argue that the amount of skin on display is balanced between both of the leads at least in that middle portion with Reynolds looking pumped.  Um.  In the riotously meta-fictional version of the film, Deadpool himself would possibly have addressed the inevitable damseling of Vanessa, but ultimately she does break out of her captivity, albeit with the help of Deadpool's sword, which is then she ultimately uses to save him, as far that goes when he's practically unkillable.  It is notable that Vanessa is herself a mutant in the comics though given everything else happening in the film, that might have been considered overkill.  Plus she's a shapeshifter as per Mystique and a power borrower like Rogue so that's another reason why they wouldn't have pursued it.

The Cinematic X-Verse

Remarkably, ignoring Fan4stic in a way I think we must do (despite Deadpool's likeness appearing therein), apart from epilogue to Days of Future Past, this is the first new film set in the rebooted X-verse although that's somewhat complicated by having what amounts to a totally different Colossus walking around, Daniel Cudmore having been replaced after all these years by a figure who's visually and audibly closer to the comics if not necessarily in temperament, a directorial decision which the rights owners went with.  Cudmore was apparently offered the role but turned it down because he was going to be dubbed anyway which is understandable given that he's such a busy actor capable of opening films (buuurrrnnnn) but makes a hash of things a bit.

Are we now supposed to assume they're the same bloke?  Is he seeing Kitty now?  The business is slightly complicated by the fact that the DoFP epilogue is supposed to be set at the same point in the future as the stuff in the past (as per the holographic alarm clock) which makes Deadpool a prequel to that.  As a Who fan, I'm all for working for the needs of the story rather than having to deal with creative choices of someone else when creating your own work, and this version of Colossus does at least have a personality but you sort of do feel that if the X-verse is going to be a thing moving forward, a Kevin Feige figure has to step in, even on projects like Deadpool, just as they do with Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man and make it cohere now.

Success, My Lord.

What are we to draw from the film's success.  For a start it's another example of the audience proving that it's desperate for clever entertainment and is entirely capable of watching something which doesn't head towards the lowest common denominator.  As expected said studios have interpreted this success the audience wanting more R-rated comic book films rather than realising that the sex and violence and swearing aren't the only motivation for people turning up, it's the intellectual stimulation amid the sex and violence and swearing.  Expect the next Wolverine film to be R-rated.  Still don't expect any of the MCU too, with the Netflix material quite happily covering the mature end of that universe with SHIELD as the more mainstream family orientated counterbalance (sort of).

Irrelevant sidebar:  that's not true in any way of course and I still wishes that MARVEL would produce the MCU equivalent of The Sarah Jane Adventures of The Clone Wars perhaps starring Squirrel Girl or Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (even if that books in its early days) or ideally Power Pack.  A series of half hour live action episodes, twenty-minutes with commercials, produced for Disney XD.  They do make all of those cartoons of course, but the difference here would be that there'd be the potential for the show to crossover and reference the rest of that universe and narratively interact with it as per SHIELD and the rest.  Logistical nightmare to be sure, but it would be an excellent way of including these younger characters who don't quite fit elsewhere.

Back at the X-verse, the upshot of Deadpool's success is that Fox can happily move forward with projects which don't have X and the name of a particular gender in the title opening up access to the range of characters like Negasonic Teenage Warhead who don't otherwise fit those other kinds of films, at least in a form which fits.  The other implication is that they're also unlikely to do a Sony and lease the mutants back to the MCU so they'll be moving on with The Inhumans as the methadone like substitute, which is fine because with the X-Men in the MCU there'd be no particular reason to create a film which features LockJaw.  If you'd told me in my mid-teens that by the time I was in my mid-forties that would actually exist, I would not have believed you.

The End

So yes, I enjoyed it to bits and so much so I considered going to see it again straight afterwards, especially at that price but decided to let it marinate during the months wait until the BD release.  I've seen a couple of people online argue that without the Deadpool schtick that it's an otherwise quite average comic book film, but just as classic musicals often have weak stories supporting brilliant songs and people watch murder mysteries because they want to enjoy the deductive process even though it's really just the same process of collecting clue and asking secondary characters questions, so Deadpool is about giving a stand-up comic in spandex material to work with, setting up those pretty genric situations but having someone who's aware of just how pretty generic those situations are and poking fun at them.

#xwatch

Film With a couple of X-Men related films in release this year I've decided to rewatch the previous releases in the only potentially sane way which is Wolverine consciousness order as explained in this earlier post.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men
X-Men 2
X-Men 3 (or whatever it's called in your end of the world)
The Wolverine
X-Men: Days of Future Past

As I said at the time, this leaves out X-Men: First Class and which I'd decided to tuck in after Origins.

Having entirely forgotten about the Xavier cameo and the business with Emma Frost in Origins and that it's set in the 70s, I really should have begun with First Class.

Except of course that this means that the cliffhangers from the end of that film don't get resolved until Days of Future Past. Except that you can't watch that before X-Men because it's both prequel, sequel and wipes out that continuity anyway and also reconfigures some of the continuity from the earlier X-Men films itself anyway.

So the ideal place for First Class is probably between The Wolverine and DoFP.

Except, when exactly are the younger Wolverine sections supposed to be set in relation to the continuity in Origins?

This does offer a decent chronological attempt to deal with the timelines, although its deliberately short on detail.  Essentially its meant to suggest that the Wolverine in DoFP has just left Stryker's team and is presumably on the run.  Except Stryker's now being played by a much younger actor which is probably why in the character's biog the two events are switched around.

In other words, even though the Singer prequels have wiped the slate clean in terms of building the universe, thanks to Origins the whole business of watching the damn things in any kind of sensible order is still fucked.

Oh yes, I know, you could watch them in release order but with Origins released between X3 and The Wolverine, you're on a hiding to nothing.

In the end I've decided to watch First Class before DofP because ... shrugs.

A viewing order for the X-Men franchise.

Film Bryan Singer and co-screenwriter Simon Kinberg have taken some time out during the promotion for X-Men: Apocalypse to explain how time travel has fixed the X-Men universe. [link via]

I thought it was pretty well explained on the Days of Future Past Extended blu-ray but it essentially boils down to a similar approach to JJ Abrams in Star Trek except with Wolverine as the emissary between the timelines rather than Spock.

Spoiler warning for Days of Future Past.

The events of Days of Future Past have wiped out:

X-Men
X-Men 2
X-Men 3 (or whatever it's called in your end of the world)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The Wolverine

And now the official X-Men Cinematic Universe contains, in chronological order:

X-Men: First Class
X-Men: Days of Future Past
X-Men: Apocalypse
Fan4stic
Deadpool

BUT

Wolverine consciousness has passed from one timeline to the other.  So the Wolverine walking around in the future scenes in Days of Future Past is the same one who turned up at the beginning of X-Men.

Which is were it gets complicated because for him to take control of the alt.Wolverine in that future means the mind of alt.Wolverine has to be wiped over; he shows no signs of actually remembering anything that happened to this other Wolverine up until that point.

Luckily he's not apparently in Apocalypse so we won't actually see the alt.Wolverine walking around, having a life before the "real" one comes along and murders him later.

BUT it does mean that it's possible to have a chronological viewing order for the X-Men films if you want to see them from Wolverine's perspective (give or take some suspension of disbelief in regards to Sabretooth) (you could just assume them to be two different characters with the same name which does already happen a lot in comics):

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men
X-Men 2
X-Men 3 (or whatever it's called in your end of the world)
The Wolverine
X-Men: Days of Future Past

My preference is for the Extended Cut of DoFP because it nicely bookends Wolverine's friendship with Rogue.

This leaves out:

X-Men: First Class
X-Men: Apocalypse
Fan4stic
Deadpool

unless you want to sit through First Class just for his cameo.

Presumably the next Wolverine film will be set after DoFP.  As Singer says in the interview, what he's now making are prequels to the alt.future scenes in DoFP.

Of course as a result of all this, Hugh Jackman once took a break from filming DoFP to promote The Wolverine which was essentially being wiped out in franchise terms by the very film he was making.

Except if you look at the series instead from Wolverine's perspective, the closing scenes of DoFP have an even greater emotional resonance because of one of the subplots in The Wolverine.

Perfectly simple really.

Jennifer Lawrence is blue again.

Film You will have seen this already, it's the trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past. My impression? What it's been all along - that Singer has been tasked with rebooting Fox's X-verse and will be using some storyline of history having gone wrong to undo the mess that's been created since X2, with this potentially being the "war" and "things" which were being set up on X2 rather than whatever was going on in X3. It's interesting that most of the "future" X-people's footage seems to be all on the same set which could indicate that they're either only in framing footage or that the "First Class" generation still have the majority of the material, though by the looks of things Wolverine's the protagonist and his story takes precedent.

Fixing shit in the X-Men movie universe.

Film Bryan Singer has given an interview to IGN and they flat out ask him the question. Here's his response:

"IGN: One thing that’s interesting about the alternate universe/timeline in Days of Future Past is that it could potentially give you the opportunity to revisit things that happened in the third film in terms of characters and endings that you might like to see changed.

Bryan Singer: You mean, what you’re politely saying is, “fix s**t.” Is that what you’re saying? That’s what I’m hearing. [Laughing]

IGN: [Laughing] Maybe…

Singer: There’s going to be a little of that, a few things I can repair.

IGN: Are fans going to be pleased with these things you will be repairing?

Singer: I think so, I think so, yes.

Best bit? The journalist's polite way of suggesting X3 is rubbish and Singer's near acknowledgement in indicating that s**t needs fixing.  Oh and the use of the word "fixing".  At this point, what we really want is the narrative ability to have the sequel that X2 promised rather than what we have.

Fixing the X-Men movie universe again.

Film   Following on from my outlandish pronouncements and head-scratching the other day on the state of the X-Men film universe and the repair thereof,  Bryan Singer's given an interview to Empire which encounters this very topic. He says:

"I’m taking into account every movie – I’m not just grabbing my first two movies and First Class and smashing them together. I’m taking into account the entire universe as it’s been laid out so far on the screen, and really respecting it and trying to work with that. People took things in various directions, so there’s some clean-up. But ultimately I’m not just ignoring them either.""

Key phrase italicised.  Whatever could that mean.  How do you clean up something which has already been seen on screen?  Retcon.  Retcon.

Fixing the X-Men movie universe.

Film Bryan Singer, director (pleasingly) of X-Men: Days of Future Past, has tweeted:

Very excited to welcome #annapaquin, @ellenpage & @shawnrashmore to #XMen #DaysofFuturePast - thank you @brettratner for letting them live!
— Bryan Singer (@BryanSinger) January 26, 2013

Which is terribly exciting given that Page's Kitty Pride was one of the few good things about X3, though well done to Singer for noting one of the worst elements within the same tweet.

For the purposes of future smugness, here's my theory about a story element of X-Men: Days of Future Past.

One of the problems with this stream of X-films is that beyond the first two Singer directed parts, continuity has become messy or as Rob Bricken noted in one of his first posts after he moved to i09, "irretrievably fucked".

Some of this is because of scripting of First Class which in places looks like a complete reboot, so often does it contradict what went before, or rather after. But there's also incongruities between Wolverine and the films it really is supposed to be the prequel to.

But I don't think it is "irretrievably fucked".

I think having looked at the work Disney's been doing with their corner of the Marvel Universe, part of the fun of X-Men: Days of Future Past, with its time travel element, will be in sorting out, or explaining many of these continuity errors or at least why they might exist.

Here are three potential options:

(1)  The fiddly approach.  The writers make a big long list of all the messier elements and have them be explained as temporal fall out because of attempts to fix the timeline, X-Men: Days of Future Past becoming a kind of meta-narrative which has all of the other films occurring within it, montage sequences agogo.  By the end of the film only one Sabretooth will exist.

(2)  Retcon X3.  The ideal solution would be just to retcon X3 out of continuity, explain it away as an unseen element changing the timeline and causing all the nastiness and death and that none of it was "supposed to happen".  But that seems a big step for a film studio (even if it's the sort of thing which happens in comics all the time). Singer's tweet suggests that anyone who died in X3 will stay dead. Unless it's a joke and they'll bring who they like back (which also happens in comics a lot too).*

(3)  Retcon the whole lot.  Full reboot.  Given the storyline of the original Days of Future Past comic, its possible the whole of the first film trilogy and Wolverine will become the story of the possible future and the "First Class" version will become the official version moving forward.

Anyway, having done whatever it is they're going to do, this version of the Marvel Movie Universe will be in such position that the studio can then slot in whichever other characters they have the rights to should they want to like the Fantastic Four or Deadpool.

Of course, fans would be even happier if all of these studios sat down and agreed that they were all happening in the same universe and cross-pollinate the franchises so that an Avengers film can acknowledge the existence of mutants or a Spider-man film can feature the Kingpin, which will just make more money for all of them, but that's not looking terribly likely.

*  It's also possible that First Class was indeed a reboot and all of these actors are simply coming back to play older versions of those characters not the ones we had before.  But given the audience confusion over whether The Incredible Hulk was a sequel despite having entirely been recast, that doesn't seem likely.