The super-hero genre of story-telling is often used to explore viewpoints that are otherwise difficult to establish in a plausible manner, such as the consequences of having an all-powerful dude in charge of the defense of your planet, but, while issues of aging are often explored in more mainstream genres, the same issue is hardly ever explored in the super-hero genre. After all, it’s easy enough to explore without the super-hero duds and powers, right? I am not a super-hero aficionado, so I am no doubt deficient in the list department, but the only aging super-heroes who weren’t treated superfluously which I recall were The Comedian and The Owl (the first one) in The Watchmen movie (I have not read the graphic novels).
She should use those on her school art project.
I can now add to that list two from another series, the X-Men, from the movie Logan (2017). Logan was Wolverine’s given name, dating back to his birth in the mid-19th century. This explores the end-game of Wolverine’s life, his assumed burden of caring for Dr. Charles Xavier, who I thought had died in an earlier installment, but here is an aging man, afflicted by a dementia which manifests not only as delusions, but as a psychically broadcast delirium which shakes the people around him. Worse yet, he has a terrible tragedy in his past with which he cannot cope.
Into their orbit, near the Mexican border, comes a young girl, Laura, maybe ten years old, who has few morals or even social manners, but lots of claws, reminiscent of Wolverine’s own, and, as he often did, a group of dedicated hunters looking for her. As Charles directs, Wolverine takes her and Charles north towards Canada, hoping for sanctuary. When the hunters close in on them, both Charles and Wolverine demonstrate their powers, if degraded, still function, but when Charles is taken unaware, we lose him to the death that he sorely wanted.
Wolverine and Laura continue north, but Wolverine’s body, sorely abused for more than a century, is failing him, and they do not quite achieve the border – but they stumble on a nest of surviving mutants. With the hunters hot on their trail, they make a break for Canada, and Wolverine proves he has one last killing rage in him even as the wretched ghosts of his past, brought to life by the faceless corporation who hunts him, prove that the soulless killing machine is indeed a wretched creature, a lost and destructive creature with no concept of mercy.
This is an ultra-violent movie, perhaps too much so, even if fans demand it. It suggests that extraordinary powers come with extraordinary responsibilities, and this is something Logan cannot avoid, no matter how much it endangers those around him, because technology is bringing those same extraordinary powers to people hardly equipped to properly manage them, and even stripped of the most vestigial moral capabilities. In the end, the sacrifice of the individual for the next generation, an ageless tenet of Western Civ, rings true even for those who are arguably not human.
A technically competent, well-acted movie, the violence may be a turn-off for the sensitive. Moreover, seeing it out of sequence may lessen its emotional impact, as it depends on the contrast of earlier depictions of Wolverine’s ability to recover from otherwise fatal wounds to accomplish his moral requirements, grumpy as he may be about them, in order to magnify the importance of his sacrifice.
It’s a good, if not great, movie.
