Movie Review: RoboCop (2014)
So. They remade RoboCop (1987). And while I’ve been looking forward to it for months, it wasn’t until some of my friends said “it was surprisingly good” that I decided, “alright, I’ll see it in theaters.” Unfortunately, my friends are liars (love you guys). If you’ve seen the original RoboCop, then you already know the basic story. The 2014 reboot, directed by Jose Padilha, alters the original concept as follows: in 2028, OmniCorp, a high-tech military contractor, has teamed up with the military to combat crime and terrorism abroad, using robotic enforcers. OmniCorp’s CEO, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), wants to bring this technology to the United States, but the public and Congress fear the absence of the human component. In steps Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), an overzealous Detroit police officer who is seriously injured in an assassination attempt after discovering dirty cops within the DPD. In order to sway public opinion, OmniCorp repairs Murphy’s body to create RoboCop, a cyborg which will, we’re told, end crime for good. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the human component almost always gets in the way… Honestly, that description is pretty crap. Trying to explain what this movie is about without simply saying “a guy becomes a robot and fights crime; things don’t go according to plan” reveals a lot of what’s wrong with this film. How do I describe the massive disappointment that is the remake of RoboCop? I could say that this film is a testament to the fact that good things from the past are better off left alone. We would have been better off receiving some kind of Final Director’s Cut version of the 1987 classic. The studios could have given us a cool box set with documentary material and a remastered film — maybe they could have shoved an mp3 download for the soundtrack and a RoboCop figurine in there, too…or the box could have sung to us as if it were an advertisement for that spoof Robocop musical from Funny or Die. Or maybe the box could have been a mini-RoboCop that actually walks to you when you call it. All of these would have been better uses of the studio’s money. Alas, what we’ve been given here is little more than a sad, bloated, confused little “update” of a film. Sure, the writers tried to add some more stuff about downloading data and memory overloads and other techno mumbo jumbo, but in the end, it’s just a mess of a film that wishes it could capture the feeling of the original. A mess. That’s what I’m calling it. RoboCop is not unlike the first Hobbit film in that it tries to do so many different things at the same time, but without any clear tie between them all. In the first half hour of the movie, we’re presented with a satire of FOX News or Glenn Beck (seems like both), a commentary on the use of military drones and robots in the Middle East, questions about the use of said machines in the U.S., police corruption and rampant crime, a buddy-cop drama, the shock of prosthesis, what it means to be human, how memories are not easily controlled, human autonomy, and a whole bunch of other minor threads I won’t talk about here. There’s so much going on in the beginning of this film that I’m left with a series of questions: What exactly is this movie about? Is it a commentary on drones? Is it a commentary on the human condition through the use of cyborg tech? Is it about the police? Is it about corporate greed and the desperate push for technology? Is it about human relationships? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE ABOUT? I ask these questions because I think it’s obvious from the start that this film is about something. It has a message or a point. It wants us to follow that point to its logical conclusion and ask ourselves to consider the possibilities. But the film asks so many fucking questions that I can’t fathom how we are supposed to go from Point A to Point B to Point C without jumping from Question #2 to Question #13154. The end of the film seems to suggest that question we should have been asking is the one about corporate greed and human autonomy, with a side of human relationships, but the beginning of the film and the middle are all over the place, jumping from a narrative about politics to one about technology to one about the police to one about family relationships to one about X and Z and Y and Q. There’s no narrative cohesion here. RoboCop is a film that tries to do so much at once that it loses sight of what made the original so good: it set up its major concerns right from the start and did its best to keep those in sight. In the reboot, the main “issue” of the original (the idea of one’s memories clouding one’s programming) is saved until more than halfway through. Sure, the original takes a while to get to that point too, but the reboot goes about it by showing us normal Murphy-as-RoboCop (combating all of his “I’m a robot” worries and family problems), reverting him to the RoboCop we remember from the original (the corporate greed is coming!), and then proceeding with the “but his memories will take over” bit. It’s a mistake of order — too much back and forth. If the structure of the narrative doesn’t provide a sense of cohesion, then the tone of the film doesn’t help either. RoboCop cannot decide if it’s a blistering satire or a serious thinking flick. From the start, we’re presented with Samuel L. Jackson’s patently absurd Pat Novak, modeling himself, I assume, after FOX News and Glenn Beck. Novak provides our introduction to OmniCorp’s involvement with the military, but all of that is funneled through an insanely biased mockery of cable news. Unlike in the original, which was itself a withdrawn satire,
Movie Review: Monsters (2010) (A SFF Film Odyssey Selection)
I didn’t realize until pulling up the IMDB page for Monsters (2010) that its writer and director, Gareth Edwards, is also the director of the upcoming Godzilla (2014). And that makes a ton of sense. While Monsters is hardly Godzilla-ish in form, it does take what is a painfully small budget for a kaiju film (supposedly $500k) and put it to good use, providing a measured and sometimes look into humanity’s interaction with nature and with himself. In short, where Cloverfield fell into all the wrong traps, Monsters simply avoids them in favor of what should have mattered in Abrams’ viral-media monstrosity: the characters. The plot of Monsters is fairly straight forward. Six years ago, enormous alien creatures arrived on Earth. Everyone believes this is an invasion and quarantines the “infected zones” in hopes of keeping the aliens from taking more territory. Jump ahead to the present: a photojournalist in search of the perfect shot of the enormous creatures is forced by his boss to escort Samantha, the boss’ daughter, out of Mexico to the American border before the next cycle of aggression threatens the quarantine borders. In their struggle to escape, Samantha and Andrew learn about one another’s past: what they’re running from, what they’re running towards, and who they really are in a world that wants them to conform to contradictory identities. I’d like to take a moment to focus on the last line of my description, because I think one of the points of this film is to question the nature of the title. What does it mean to be a monster? One of the things I had expected from this film, particularly given the locale and the ways in which places south of the American border are typically portrayed, was a sea of humans doing horrifically violent things to one another. In many respects, I think that was a narrative this needed, if not in a direct allegory about “the third world,” then certainly as a commentary on what desperation does to people. But the film never goes there. Instead, it opts for humans betraying one another on a relatively mundane level while the “monsters” are shown to be, as I expected, misunderstood. It also tried to convey a message about the interaction of man and nature, particularly when a group of armed escorts tell Samantha and Andrew how these enormous aliens fit into the new ecosystem — they likewise convince us that we really don’t know what to think about the creatures; thus, we shouldn’t come to any hard conclusions on the matter. When we finally see the creatures, that narrative is already apparent, and the film handles that revelatory moment with a deliberate minimalism: the only ones who seem to have any significant dialogue are the aliens (albeit, it is animalistic and unintelligible to Samantha and Andrew, as well as to us). That said, I don’t think the narrative about humanity’s “monsters” is given the attention it deserves. While Samantha and Andrew do get screwed over a number of times in this movie, the threat this poses always seems muted by the fact that there’s really no reason for Samantha and Andrew to enter the quarantine zone to escape when they could simply head south (maps in the film suggest this is a possibility). The monstrosity of man, then, is hardly monstrous. It is mundane and largely uninspired. A corrupt ferry worker? A thieving “prostitute”? A thieving and corrupt armed transport system? All here, and all are resolved with uncharacteristic simplicity (or sort of ignored). In effect, the dread these situations should have produced never came to fruition. This isn’t a terribly suspenseful film, even though it needs to be. It’s a numbed film, one which opts for an almost extreme minimalism by the standards of the kaiju format that I think something really does get lost in the translation. Part of the flaw of the film’s minimalistic approach likewise limits the performances of the lead actors: Scoot McNairy (Andrew) and Whitney Able (Samantha). Overall, their performances are serviceable, but not as emotional as one might expect given a) the situations they’re in throughout the film (the verge of death), and b) the situations they were in before everything went to hell (Samantha and her broken relationship with her fiance; Andrew with his “I’m the father, but I can’t tell him because it would confuse him” scenario). In a weird way, I thought I was watching an anime along the lines of, say, Makoto Shinkai, with minimal, limited performances (The Place Promised in Our Early Days, for example), but what differentiates Shinkai from Monsters is a kind of Hemingway-an iceberg effect, in which the larger plot concerns are made almost secondary to the internal conflicts of the characters and their struggle with how to express it; even with that minimalism, a film like The Place Promised in Our Early Days gives in to the necessity for emotional displays in scenarios where the internal explodes over the external. Monsters, however, contains so few of these bursting moments that the emotional connection to the world is sometimes lost. Andrew has one incredibly tense scene in which he engages in a phone call with the boy we now know is his son (but who himself thinks Andrew is just a family friend); McNairy loses composure and struggles to keep his voice straight as his body and face contort in agony — the intensity of this scene is notable because it is so separate from the film’s previous performances. Samantha has a similar moment at the sight of several dead bodies, including that of a young child. But everywhere else, it’s as if these characters haven’t entered a certain kind of hell; they seem detached, but without a clear reason for it. Though I’ve largely criticized the film for many of its important aspects, I will say that in terms of the portrayal of characters over spectacle, Monsters succeeds. These are characters, not caricatures. They have real motivations
A SFF Film Odyssey (2010): The Official List
The following is a list of every film I’m going to watch and discuss/review this year. These titles will eventually link to posts here or on The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Keep an eye out as I fill this whole thing up! Note: if something is missing from the list, please let me know in the comments; I’ve tried to include every sf/f “feature” film released in 2010, but I could have missed something. I’m also going to go back to some of these films if I have already reviewed them in the past. The full announcement about this project can be found here. Here goes: (“F” denotes a film that did not originate in the U.S.) Alice in Wonderland Alien vs. Ninja (F) Altitude (F) Arctic Blast (F) Arietty (F) Arthur 3: The War of the Two Worlds (F) Arthur and the Minimoys (F)(Filler) Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard (F)(Filler) Avalon High Beyond the Black Rainbow (F) Clash of the Titans Daybreakers Denizen Despicable Me Die kommenden Tage (F) Downstream Enthiran (F) Future X-Cops (F) Growth Gulliver’s Travels Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 FIN Hot Tub Time Machine FIN How to Train Your Dragon FIN Hunter Prey Inception (review; post on emotion; post on emotion) FIN Iron Man (filler) Iron Man 2 FIN Kaboom (F) Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole Mardock Scramble: The First Compression (F) Megamind Monsters (F) FIN Mutant Girls Squad (F) FIN Nanny McPhee (Filler) Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang Never Let Me Go (F) Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief Predators Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (F) Repo Men Resident Evil: Afterlife Shank (F) FIN Shrek (Filler) Shrek 2 (Filler) Shrek Forever After Shrek the Third (Filler) Skyline Sleeping Beauty (F) Space Battleship Yamato (F) Tangled The Book of Eli The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Filler) The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader The Chronicles of Narnia: The Witch, the Lion, and the Wardrobe (Filler) FIN The Crazies The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (F) The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (F) The Last Airbender The Nutcracker in 3D (F) The Sorcerer’s Apprentice FIN The Strange Case of Angelica (F) The Tempest The Twilight Saga: Eclipse The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Filler) Tooth Fairy Toy Story (Filler) Toy Story 2 (Filler) Toy Story 3 Trollhunter (F) FIN Tron: Legacy (Strange Horizons review; mini review) (F) FIN Twilight (Filler) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (F) Universal Soldier: Regeneration When in Rome Womb (F)
Movie Review Rant : Catching Fire (2013)
As I write this sentence, Catching Fire (2013), the sequel to The Hunger Games (2012), is encroaching upon the $700mil box office mark. It’s a huge film, and there are a lot of things to love about it. Before I get to my rant/review, here are a couple quick notes: I hadn’t read the book when I saw the movie, so the reactions below will jump back and forth between placing the film in relation to the book and treating the film on its own terms. There are spoilers. Nothing is in any sort of order here. Like my post on Riddick (2013), I’ll cover everything I feel like talking about as they come to me. I’ve discussed some of these things in the Shoot the WISB episode on Catching Fire over at The Skiffy and Fanty Show. The World and POV Shifts In the first film, there were a handful of cuts away from the central action to the characters involved behind the scenes: the gamekeepers, the president, Haymitch, the folks at home, etc. These served to give us a sense of the world in which these games are a centerpiece. The problem with The Hunger Games was its inability to rationalize the system of oppression that made the games possible. There were certainly attempts, but in the end you either had to accept the status quo or give up any possibility of immersion. Catching Fire does a decent job rectifying this problem. For one, it centralizes President Snow as the actual and real villain. In the first film, the Capitol and the other players in the game were all potential villains, but here, Snow is never anything but. From his first interactions with Katniss to the cut scenes showing him planning her torture and eventual defeat, Snow is the adversary the film has always needed: he’s the face of all that is wrong with the Capitol. For me, Snow provided the rationalization for the world that I needed. His interest in oppression is partly about power, but it is also about his own myths about what revolution entails, such that preserving those myths and power structures becomes more important than considering the implications of one’s actions. Snow, as such, continues to exert his authority — a largely dictatorial and malignant one — to preserve the system and to make sure nobody has the means or the will to challenge it. The Hunger Games are simply a means to an end: they’re a reminder of the past and a reminder of the power Snow/the Capitol wields. A lot of the scenes that best express Snow’s justifications for his brutality are in his interactions with his granddaughter, who appears to become entranced by the symbolic rebellion of Katniss. Presumably, she doesn’t understand what is happening in Panem, but the threat is there for Snow nonetheless: if his own family can be turned against him, his ability to maintain order will be permanently compromised. It’s a nice touch, as it would be too easy just to make Snow a vile, disgusting bag of skin, as he appears to be in the books. Here, there are little hints of humanity in play, and so he becomes even more horrifying as a villain the more we realize how human he really is. Likewise, the POV shifts are generally a good thing. They give us an impression of the world, its logic, etc. They also show us things we otherwise don’t get to see in the book, which helps the film avoid the problem of having no viable method to display Katniss’ internal struggles. The problem with these shifts, however, is in their unnecessary ability to trick us as viewers, which I’ll get into in the next section. WANTED: Clues That Logically Lead to X There are two main issues with the structure of the film. The second of these I’ll discuss in the section below on endings; the first I’ll cover here. One of the new central characters is gamekeeper Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman). At the end of Catching Fire, it is revealed to us that he, Haymitch, and several of the tributes have been conspiring to extricate Katniss from the games so she can remain the symbol for the upcoming revolution. But unlike the book, which leaves a great number of clues as to Plutarch’s true allegiances, the film simply discards most of those clues for a shocking reveal. This works in the book for one reason: we’re in Katniss’ head the whole time. But the book gives us plenty of clues. It makes it clear that there’s something fishy going on, even if Katniss hasn’t quite figured it out yet. The shock in the book, as such, is measured by revelation: so that’s what all those clues are about. In the film, most of those clues are gone. For all intents and purposes, we’re supposed to believe Plutarch is just like everyone else in the Capitol, albeit perhaps more macabre than the average flashy Capitol-ite. But almost every scene involving Plutarch doesn’t give us the impression that he’s actually one of the good guys, as he spends most of his time trying to convince President Snow that X method is the best way to destroy Katniss as person and revolutionary image. His ideas are, in retrospect, not terribly good, but they are, in the moment, convincing in their brutality. The shocking reveal, however, doesn’t have the benefit of proper foreshadowing or retrospective revelation, despite a good chunk of the film taking place outside of Katniss’ perspective. And without that benefit, Plutarch’s apparent heroism is incomprehensible as a consequence of the plot, and, thus, neutered. Were we supposed to hate Plutarch in the end as Katniss does, or find something redeemable in him? Thankfully, this issue doesn’t affect the allied tributes. There are enough moments where Finnick and Johanna hint that something else is going on, giving Katniss and the audience a moment to consider what that something might be. If only the
Movie Review: Riddick (2013) (or, I’m Going to Mega Rant Now)
Spoiler alert: Technically, I’m going to spoil this movie for you. Not all of it, mind, but enough of it that you’ll know the major plot elements and what not. I say “technically” because nothing in this movie is all that surprising, except that it’s horribly disappointing for any Riddick fan. You already know the basic story; you just don’t know the new characters. What follows is not a review in the traditional sense. There’s no “structure” here. I have so much to say about this movie that I’ve decided to rant my way through many of the things that I either enjoyed or hated with a passion. So what you’ll see below is a collection of thoughts, organized by titled sections. You don’t have to read it all if you don’t want to — pick and choose as you see fit. OK. Let’s get to it. —————————————————————– I’ve seen quite a few films this year, but Riddick (2013) is the only one I’d give a Prometheus Award to. What’s a Prometheus Award? Basically, this award should be given to every sequel or prodigal return which does everything wrong despite having every opportunity to get it very right. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (from which the award would derive its name) is the epitome of failing to meet expectations. You can find out why I think that here and here. The premise of Riddick is this: At some point after becoming Lord Marshall of the Necromongers, a reluctant-leader Riddick decides to hunt down his homeworld, Furya, which only Vaako knows about because the previous Lord Marshall deleted all the maps (except there were maps in The Chronicles of Riddick, so whatevs). After convincing Vaako that he can have the throne all to himself if he’ll just take Riddick to what remains of Furya, they head off into the night. Riddick is betrayed by Vaako’s men and left to die on a sulfur tomb planet (not Furya). But it’s Riddick, so he survives. While trying to survive on this hostile world (full of aliens and things), Riddick steals a strange dog-like creature puppy, raises it as his own, and then heads off to better pastures, where he discovers a mercenary supply outpost. And then things fall apart. Some super rainstorm is coming, and Riddick, for some reason, knows it means trouble (alien monsters!) and decides to trigger the emergency beacon at the outpost, set some traps, and then get off world. Murder ensues. There you go. Now for my thoughts: Logical Gap #1: Riddick is Two Different People Inside His Own Head Early in the film, Riddick tells us that he’s been stuck on this sulfur tomb planet from hell because he essentially lost his animalistic instinct (or, in normal people terms, he got soft). So he resolves himself, via internal monologue, to rediscover his animal instinct so he won’t get stabbed in the back again. OK. Good so far. Sounds fine to me. Oh, wait, no. So what Riddick’s mind actually meant when he said that was this: I want to get my animal instinct back, but really I’m just going to do what I’ve done since the end of Pitch Black and make attachments to other living things even though I just said doing so will get me killed. Basically, Twohy sets up this perfectly acceptable narrative about Riddick’s desire to return to his old ways, but then ignores it completely. We never expected the character to keep his power as Lord Marshall anyway, so having Riddick return to his roots as a slick-shit killer (Toombs!) make total sense. Only that’s not what actually happens. Instead, Riddick’s first act is capturing a crazy-ear dog puppy to use as a guinea pig, but since the thing is so damned cute, he just has to raise it as his own. And so begins Riddick’s version of A Boy and His Dog. None of this would be a problem, except that Riddick’s internal monologue tells us that’s exactly what he won’t do. So is it that Riddick is confused about his own terminology, or are we supposed to assume that Riddick’s own mind is an unreliable narrator? This is one of many logical inconsistencies in the film… Emotional Buttons Not Pushed Properly On the subject of A Boy and His Dog, it became clear to me that the dog critter thing was destined to die, and the film gives its mercenary characters numerous opportunities to do so. We’re supposed to feel suspense as the dog gets closer and closer to what is obviously set to be his death, but not because we feel for the dog (the only character worth caring about, honestly), but because it’s supposed to do something to Riddick. The problem? Riddick has his little 15-second “I is sad about dead friend” moment, but afterwards he returns to his old self. When he threatens Santana with death, we’re supposed to think it has something to do with the fact that Santana shot the dog in the head, but the dialogue is so stilted that there’s no way for us to separate “this moment” from any other moment in Riddick’s life. He always threatens death and then kills some character we’re all not supposed to like anyway, but the reason we don’t like Santana is the same reason everyone else doesn’t like him: he’s a piece of shit. Riddick knows this before Santana kills his dog, so what should have been a great opportunity for Riddick to go a little off the rails with crazy “you killed my dog, so I’m going to cut off half your face before I kill you” talk, he just says “you die in the first 5 seconds,” giving other characters the opportunity to say “that was 5 seconds” after Riddick does kill Santana. Basically, what we know about Riddick from the previous two films disappears in these moments. We know he’s not just a slick-shit killer (Toombs!). He also has a kind of heart buried in all that
Movie Review: The Wolverine (2013)
I don’t know if it is common knowledge yet, but I pretty much hated the first stand-alone Wolverine movie. Its plot didn’t make any sense, the CG was lazy (at best), and the far-reaching story-line left much to be desired. Almost none of those problems exist here. The Wolverine is a high-octane action thriller with a fairly self-contained narrative, decent female characters, and a compelling, though limited, examination of mortality. This is one you should see on the big screen! The Wolverine begins many years after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand. A psychologically-wounded Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) lives a mostly solitary life in the woods, desperately trying to fend off his nightmarish dreams with alcohol. One of the dreams involves a Japanese soldier man named Yoshida (Ken Yamamura), who he saves from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The other dream involves none other than a mental reconstruction of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who forms the metaphorical representation of his deepest injuries: those of the soul. Eventually his past catches up with him: much older Yoshida (Hal Yamanouchi) has sent one of his agents, Yukio (Rila Fukushima), to find the Wolverine to offer the “gift” of mortality in exchange for taking Logan’s gifts for himself. But the schemes in the Yoshida household are not what they seem: Mariko (Tao Okamoto) is set to inherent “the throne,” her father, Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), wants her out of the way, and a mysterious mutant known as Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) has managed to stop the Wolverine’s regenerative abilities in the service of her own violent agenda. Trapped in the middle, Logan must protect Mariko, uncover the plots that seem ready to destroy her, and regain his abilities before his injuries finally catch up with him. Needless to say, a lot of people get stabbed. There are a lot of things I love about this movie, but due to space, I can’t cover them all in depth. What I will say is this: the film met my basic expectations. When I came to The Wolverine, I wanted the following: Decent CG (Wolverine’s claws should actually look like metal claws) A Coherent Plot (no giant plot holes) Decent Character Development (the main folks should actually change somehow) Focus (10,000 subplots do not a good movie make) Awesome Action (good choreography and bit of gritty realism) The Wolverine offers pretty much all of these, more or less. First, I have to talk about the visuals for the film. While the direction is perhaps somewhat uninspired (where’s some Bourne-style action when you need it?), the look of the film does not disappoint. Bad visuals are one of my biggest pet peeves. If I can’t believe what I’m seeing on the screen — within reason — then I cannot get into the characters whose motivations are based in part on the world in which they exist. In the case of The Wolverine, the visuals rarely fall short of reasonably realistic, and this made it possible for me to suspend disbelief and immerse myself into the film experience. For example, Wolverine’s claws, which spend as much time on screen as every other actor other than Jackman, are rendered so well that it’s hard to believe they’re not actually part of his hands. The same is true for Wolverine’s injuries, which always look (and, by extension, feel) real. Additionally, the action sequences look beautiful, most notably the bullet train fight, in which Wolverine takes on several knife-wielding thugs while trying not to get thrown off the 300 MPH vehicle or get smacked by a metal arch or a billboard. Usually fights on top of large moving vehicles are dull and repetitive. While I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness, the climactic flying dumpster battle at the end left much to be desired. Here, however, the stakes have been raised. The heroes and villains both struggle to hang on to the top of the train while trying to kill one another. This makes for good comedy, such as when Wolverine feigns jumping over a metal beam, thus smacking one of his enemies into paste, but it also makes for a fight scene that has seemingly real stakes.* Anyone can die. Death is one of the things that makes this film far better than the Origins version. The film explores two different dimensions of mortality: the pain Wolverine feels at carrying the memory of killing Jean Grey within him and how discovering the possibility of death can change people. I’ll admit that I didn’t care for the way they manifested Wolverine’s dream-sequence-Jean-Grey terrors, but I at least understand what the director/writers wanted to do. Wolverine believes he has no reason to live, and that the root of that disinterest in life stems from Jean Grey’s death/murder. But what he apparently has to discover by the end of the film is a different sort of purpose in life, one that involves using his powers for something greater than himself. I don’t think the film makes this message explicit, but the last moments of the film seem to suggest, to me, that Wolverine’s rediscovery of the value of life, in part through his relationship with Mariko, represents one of the fundamental breaks from a life of killing necessary to turn Wolverine into more than his past. The other major exploration of mortality concerns Wolverine’s apparent vulnerability. For at least half of the film, Wolverine is supposedly susceptible to the same physical pressures of any other regular Joe. With his healing factor turned off, every attack could end his life. In every other film incarnation of the character, Wolverine can take bullet after bullet without so much as blinking. He doesn’t get tired. His head never rings from a blow. He simple grimaces and moves on. Filmmakers have responded to this by creating villains that do bigger and badder things, which seems like a horrible slippery slope to me: once you start doing that, you have to keep making the villains bigger. But in The Wolverine,