BY CHRIS VOLZKE (’17)

In case you couldn’t tell by the title, this is a spoiler review, which means that if you have yet to see Hugh Jackman’s latest film “Logan” then my review may not be for you. I will be discussing key plot details and my own personal theories about the film, you have been warned.

First thing we need to discuss is the content of this movie. Wow, this is one brutal movie. Adding the violence on top of the already depressing and somber tone of the film just creates a sad story that is extremely entertaining. The acting is good, the story is good, and the visuals are good. This movie is the best of the Wolverine trilogy by far. Incredible send off to the wonderfully talented Hugh Jackman, who unfortunately will no longer be playing the edgy, confused super hero.

“Logan” takes place in the year 2029, where mutant kind has almost been completely wiped out. Logan is old now and he is slowly dying because the adamantium inside of him is poisoning him and his healing powers don’t work the right way. We first see him and one of his claws doesn’t come out as much as the rest of them, and since his healing powers don’t work as well anymore, all his injuries end up leaving ugly scars all over his body. He walks with a limp as well and is generally weaker than we have ever seen him before. It is really depressing and at times, hard to watch.

First thing to question is what exactly happened in Westchester before this movie takes place. We can hear on the radio that Professor X had a seizure at the school due to his disease that is slowly destroying his mind. Several people were injured and killed, including some of the X-Men. But unfortunately, we don’t get the hear the details of what happened exactly because Logan decides to shut the radio off. We may never know what exactly happened but it did a great job of telling us why Logan is constantly medicating the Professor to keep him from having his seizures. Eventually he does have another one in a casino and that leads to an awesome sequence of Logan slowly stabbing a group of paralyzed bad buys in the face.

Maybe the most interesting character of the story, X-23, or as she is more often called in the movie Laura, is full of secrets. As we find out quickly in the movie, she is Logan’s daughter. But she isn’t directly his daughter. She was constructed from Logan’s genes in a lab and was carried by an unknown Mexican woman whom we can at this point assume is dead, due to the lab killing off any woman that carries one of their mutant children. She has the same powers as Wolverine with a few differences, she only has two instead of three claws that come out of her hands, but she does have one that comes out of each of her feet. At times in this movie, she is even more brutal than Wolverine. For about 75% of the movie she doesn’t say anything, she speaks more with her actions and facial expressions. We first see her in action when three men come and try to take her from the hide out that Logan, Professor X, and Caliban (a mutant that can track other mutants over long distances) are living in. The only thing left of those three men is a head, which Laura decides to give back to the main antagonist of the film, Donald Piece, a man who spends the whole film trying to find and kill all the mutant children that escaped the lab in Mexico City. This starts a whole long fight scene in which Logan and Laura kill a lot of bad guys and escape, however Caliban is captured and tortured into helping the bad guys track Logan, Laura, and Charles.

From beginning to end, this movie is sad and filled with tragedy. After the whole incident in the casino, Logan and the gang get into a car accident with a poor family struggling to make ends meet on a farm. The family invites Logan, Laura, and Charles to spend the night. While spending the night Laura seems to connect a little with the family’s teenage son and Logan goes out with the father to deal with the bigger corporate farm neighbors who are bullying the family. It’s a nice moment but unfortunately it comes to a bitter end. The men who have been chasing Logan and the gang the whole movie release their latest experiment, X-24, which is a younger version of Logan himself. Young Logan goes into the house and Professor X mistakes him for the real Logan and begins to share his feeling about the Westchester incident, but at the end of this sad story, young Logan stabs Charles in the chest, fatally wounding him. He then goes about killing the family’s teenage son, followed by his mother and then the father. He then chains up Laura and begins to take her away. At this point the real Logan discovers and dying Charles and takes him out to the truck and lays him down. At this point he tells Logan that all he wants it to live on the ocean in the boat Logan was saving up for so he can’t hurt anyone and he can die in peace. After telling Logan that all he wants to live out the rest of his life in peace, he dies. This sends Logan into a rage and he attacks Young Logan. However, Young Logan is younger and his healing powers still work. So, he quickly overtakes the real Logan and it leads to Logan betting brutally injured. But the father of the family, whom we thought was dead, comes out and rams Younger Logan with a truck into some kind of spiked machinery and pins him there. He then falls out of the truck and finally dies from his wounds. In this same sequence, Caliban takes his own life by blowing up the vehicle that Pierce is keeping him in. This incapacitates Pierce and allows Logan to escape with Laura and continue their journey.

I could go on and on about this movie but I think I should go ahead and wrap this article up by talking about the ending. To be blunt, everyone except X-23 and some of the child mutants die at the end of this movie. Logan ends up taking Laura to meet up with the rest of the mutant children from the lab in Mexico City. However, as they all go to cross the border into Canada, Pierce and his crew catch up. There is a big fight in which Wolverine and Laura kill a lot more bad guys, but once again they release Younger Logan and he rips apart the real Logan. He ends up pinning the real Logan and impaling him onto the limb of a fallen tree. This fatally wounds Logan but before Young Logan can finish him off, Laura shoots him with an adamantium bullet, the only thing that can kill Young Logan. The bullet was originally kept by the real Logan, because he was considering taking his own life, however when he revealed this to Laura she stole it from him in his sleep. While young Logan was being killed by Logan, the rest of the children kill off Pierce in a grand fashion. To finish off the movie Laura sits with Logan as he slowly dies from his wounds. As he passes they share a moment where she finally calls him “daddy” and he passes in his daughter’s arms. The movie ends with all the children, including Laura burying Logan and crossing the border.

“Logan” was one of those movies that was so good that it was incredibly hard to watch. From the violence to just the pure tragedy of events. “Logan” is possibly the best movie that I have had the opportunity so far to see and I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes sad stories. Whether you are a fan of super hero movies or not, “Logan” is a movie you should see because it will go down as one of the greatest hero films ever made.