It was bound to get emotional, even with Logan being a superhero movie. 19 years of playing the same character will tend to do that to a person since Hugh Jackman was the one that brought the Canadian mutant to the big screen and helped him become such a massive draw for the X-Men. But filming the final scene of Logan had to be nothing short of dramatic and might have even had the main actor choking up a bit during the process. When one considers how long he’s played the role it’s not hard to see why, especially since Logan was to be his last solo movie. It’s hard to say whether we’ll see him again in a crossover or a cameo, but at this point it does feel as though Jackman is ready to commit to his words and leave the character behind for someone else to take up whenever the MCU decides they want to push the X-Men into the spotlight. From the way things have been discussed it feels like that might take a while considering how things are moving right now. But one of these days it does feel as though we’ll finally see the famed mutants back on the screen again, though it’s a toss-up to see just who’s going to fill which role since by the time it happens some of those that have stepped in might need to be replaced either because they’ve aged out or they’re no longer interested, or have taken on other projects and can’t spare the time.
But this final scene had to come with the kind of finality that sinks like a lead weight in a person’s stomach, even if there was some joy that Jackman was able to finish out this character arc in a way that made some kind of sense. Wolverine has been gracing the pages of the comics for so long that a lot of people might have felt that he was nearly immortal at some point. His healing factor has been saving him for so long that it’s hard to believe it would finally be undone by something such as age, or the very metal that gave him such incredible durability over the years. In the comics, Wolverine has been through a number of different tragedies in his life that put a lot of the other heroes, and even villains, to shame since he’s had to endure more than any one person should ever have to go through, including the loss of loved ones and friends. In a way it feels as though Logan brought far more realism to the character than a rendition of Old Man Logan could have, since the comics version had him pitted against the Hulk gang and eventually against an aged and insane Bruce Banner in a fight to the death. There was a good amount of desperation and human feeling in the comics, but at the same time it felt as though Logan was just going to keep moving on, as his age might have slowed him down but hadn’t hampered him so much that he could no longer fight. In Logan he could still fight, but the wounds were starting to pile up as his healing factor was slowing down noticeably.
It’s also interesting how Logan was scripted since in Old Man Logan, Wolverine tore off and killed the X-Men after being tricked by Mysterio into thinking that he was fighting a horde of super villains. In Logan however, Professor X is apparently the cause of the X-Men’s downfall, while the number of mutants in the world had either been halted or forcibly lowered by the Reavers, another ant-mutant group that were cybernetically enhanced and were basically thugs with special forces training. In the comics the X-Men tangled with this group more than once, but they were often found as more of an annoyance than anything, though they could be a problem. In Logan they were still kind of an annoyance since Laura ended up taking out her fair share of them as a kid while Logan took on the rest. In fact the only thing that could slow Logan down when he really got rolling was X-24, the younger clone of himself that ended up dishing out so much damage to the aging mutant. Once he was handled though the damage he’d incurred was just too much, even for Logan’s healing factor to take on. This is a guy we’ve seen walk away from a nuclear blast after being fried to a crisp, so to see him laid low because his healing factor had finally aged out was kind of hard, as well as emotional. One can only imagine if we’re going to see him again, but one thing does sound reasonable, it won’t be Jackman taking on the role.
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