Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Logan.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.
Welcome back to the first annual NOT THE HUGO Awards. I’m your host, Michael Isenberg, Editor-in-Chief of Nerds who Read.
Congratulations to the “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard),” winner of the award for Best Short Story.
Our final category is Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, which is Hugo-speak for movies.
Their own thing is a tale of superheroes confronting old age. The year is 2029 and Logan (Hugh Jackman) is a shell of his former self. Sure, he can still kick ass, as he shows us in the opening scene: He takes down a gang of hoodlums who attempted to strip his car (with him napping inside) and then shot him when he told them not to strip the chrome plating off the lug nuts. Three dead, one with a severed hand, another missing a leg. But afterwards, Logan feels the aches and pains of the fight a lot more acutely than he used to. The bullets don’t pop out as easily, the wounds don’t heal as fast, he’s alcoholic, he needs reading glasses, and, in what Cinema Sins calls “the most brutal ED joke ever,” he struggles to fully extend his trademark adamantium claws. “Seeing you like this just breaks my damn heart,” one of the villains tells him, not entirely facetiously.
And yet, Logan is in pretty good shape compared to Charles Xavier—Professor X (Sir Patrick Stewart). Weak and senile, constantly complaining that no one listens to him, and chronically in need of a shave for the sparse white bristles that stubble his chin, the ninety year old Charles is suffering, in the words of another of the villains, “a degenerative brain disease in the world’s most dangerous brain. What a combo.”
A fatal combo. Charles is prone to uncontrollable seizures in which he radiates waves of telepathic energy. Those who are merely immobilized by it are the lucky ones. Many are killed. The movie begins about a year after the “Westchester Incident,” in which one such seizure injured six hundred people and killed seven mutants, bringing the X-Men and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters to an ignominious end. Not that there was much need for the school anymore. No mutants had been born for a quarter of a century.
Now Charles and Logan are on the lam. Charles is hidden away in a fallen water tower on an abandoned Mexican industrial site. Logan is driving a limo for asshole conventioneers and exhibitionist bachelorettes, trying to earn enough money to maintain the supply of black market drugs Charles needs to control his seizures. Not that Charles shows any gratitude. “I guess you prefer me pharmaceutically castrated, rambling like a lunatic,” he tells Logan. “So much easier for you.”
“I know, Pop,” Logan replies. “I’m such a giant disappointment.”
Into this sad existence, Laura (Dafne Keen) tears in like a whirlwind. An eleven year old Logan clone—his daughter, if you will—Laura was created unbeknownst to him in a laboratory run by the evil Alkali-Transigen Corporation. (Must it always be an evil corporation?) And lest you wonder how a man’s clone can be a girl, well, see the comic books—it's explained there. Laura has escaped from the lab and now needs Logan’s help to drive her to North Dakota where she is supposed to rendezvous with the other escapees and cross over to Canada and safety. Or at least that’s the plan the nurse who helped her escape “read about,” apparently in an X-Men comic book. Logan is skeptical. But, following in the tradition of reluctant heroes that runs from Hamlet to Casablanca and beyond—he piles into the limo with Laura and Charles, and they start their drive north, an army of heavily armed, generously funded, and well-connected Alkali-Transigen henchmen hot on their trail.
Laura first appeared in Marvel Comics in 2004 as X-23. “Old Man Logan” made his pen and ink debut four years later. As in the movie, comic book Old Man Logan lives in a future dystopia where most of his friends and loved ones have died. Tired of being a hero, he travels the country with a sidekick (albeit it’s the blind Hawkeye rather than the senile Charles). But that’s where the resemblance ends and we must look beyond the comics for the movie’s inspiration.
Director James Mangold reportedly acknowledged creative debts to other road movies set in the American West, specifically Little Miss Sunshine and The Gauntlet. The Western, in general, is also an obvious influence, what with the wide open desert and mountain vistas seen throughout Logan, and the Spaghetti Western, in particular, with it gritty reality, which manifests in 2029 as dust, rust, and truck stops. The Western influence is explicit in a scene where Charles and Laura watch 1953’s Shane. This being a movie, the words uttered on the TV are improbably apropos to Logan’s struggle to leave his days of hurting people behind him—even when the hurt is in the name of heroism:
A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can't break the mold. I tried it and it didn't work for me…There's no living with...with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. There's no going back. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her...tell her everything's all right. And there aren't any more guns in the valley.
The old man taking one last road trip is another well-worn trope that also clearly influenced Logan. As with the protagonists of Harry and Tonto, About Schmidt, and The Straight Story, the open road teaches Logan, as he approaches his end, what it was all about. The twist here, of course, is that the old man is a superhero.
And yet, the superhero movie is one genre that didn’t influence Logan.
Today’s superhero movies are painted big on the canvas: Gargantuan budgets in the $300 million range. Massive crossover events in which dozens of characters team up, for evil, or for good. Technology so advanced that the characters themselves argue over whether it’s science or magic. Extra-formidable villains with godlike powers. Some are even actual gods like Loki. All have ambitious plans to rule—or destroy—the universe, or at least vast swaths of it. Wagnerian soundtracks. And CGI. Lots and lots of CGI. CGI stunts that defy physics. CGI planetscapes with brilliant colors and more suns than you can shake a stick at. CGI characters who barely resemble anything human. CGI ‘splosions in which the CGI White House or the CGI Palace of Westminster is vaporized in a blaze of CGI firepower. And, in the case of last year’s Justice League, even a CGI upper lip to erase the mustache that Superman actor Henry Cavill was unwilling to shave.
I’ve long contended that CGI has ruined movies by substituting spectacular special effects for boring old fundamentals like plot, character, and dialog. Logan proves me right, by showing what a movie can be if it dials down the CGI a notch or ten. Logan is more of a small canvas, with a budget of “only” $97 million. It bucks all the other superhero movie trends as well. The technology of 2029 is little advanced over 2017, the only significant development being the widespread deployment of self-driving trailer trucks. The villains are just men who want the mutants under their control. One or two have cybernetic enhancements, but that’s the extent of their powers. None can fold time or wipe out half of human life with a snap of his fingers. The background music is subdued, often little more than mournful chords that evoke rain sliding down window panes. Long stretches of the film have no background music at all, which, incidentally, makes it a lot easier to hear the dialog.
The result is so incredible that the professional trolls on YouTube were at a loss as to how to make fun of it. Pitch Meeting hasn't even tried yet. Jeremy on the “Everything Wrong with Logan” video deducted eight sins, half of them for girl-Wolverine’s awesomeness and bad-assery. Don’t know if that’s a record, but it’s got to be up there. How it Should Have Ended had to pad its runtime with a nearly five minute X-Men musical number in the style of Les Miserables, an homage to another Hugh Jackman role. “Damn, this movie’s hard to make fun of,” Honest Trailers’ Epic Voice Guy lamented. “I got to call in some help.” He tries to enlist Deadpool, but the King of Snark refuses to play along: “Are you high? I’m not going to s—t on Logan. That film is a f—king masterpiece.”
It really is. Just the fact that they managed to put a kid in an adult franchise without having her be annoying (“Now this is pod racing”) is an accomplishment. As for the father-son relationship between Logan and the Professor, it’s an emotional wallop. This scene in which Logan carries Charles to his bed and tries to give the resistant professor his pills, is simultaneously funny and heartrending:
Logan: How about you blow on them to make them safe. Charles: F--k off, Logan.
Logan: So you remember who I am now.
Charles: I always know who you are. It’s just sometimes I don’t recognize you.
Logan: Take the pills.
As it happened, I first saw Logan during my own father’s final months. And although dad was never as dependent as Charles, the movie hit home hard. Writing this review has gotten me choked up more times than I care to admit.
I freely acknowledge that I may be biased by those personal circumstances, but I really think that Logan was not only the best science fiction movie of 2017, it was the best 2017 movie of any genre. Mr. Jackman and Sir Patrick’s performances were Oscar-worthy, a fitting curtain call for their seventeen year run as Wolverine and Professor X. Sir Patrick was so committed to his part in Logan that he lost twenty pounds to prepare for it. "I wanted to look sick and undernourished and stressed and frail and vulnerable," he told Variety. Alas, the hidebound Academy couldn’t see past Logan’s comic book origins. The movie garnered only a single B-list nomination, Best Adapted Screenplay and it didn’t even win that. I expected the Hugo Award voters, rooted in science fiction, to be more receptive, but they too gave Logan the snub. (I'll say it again: The Last Jedi? Are you serious?!) No doubt Logan didn't have enough about global warming.
But to redress these injustices is why I started NOT THE HUGOS, and I’m delighted to present the final award, Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, to Hugh Jackman, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Logan.
Tune in tomorrow to Nerds who Read, when Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna will review another of the actual Hugo nominees, Rebecca Roanhorse’s short story, “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” And join us next week, when we’ll look at the outcome of the Hugos and review some of the winners.
| Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com |
Come to think of it, the record holder for most sins removed on Cinema Sins is probably Troll 2, with 10,000. But that was an April Fools joke, Troll 2 quite possibly being the worst movie ever made.
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