Superhero movies are a dime a dozen these days, and they often rely on similar ideas to attract audiences. Between all of the CGI chaos and big budget grandstanding, it can become hard for a comic book film to set itself apart with something genuinely emotional and thought-provoking -- and yet that's precisely what Logan intends to do. Director James Mangold has just released a brand new clip from the upcoming X-Men solo movie on Twitter, and it provides a bleak look into Wolverine's everyday life. Check it out below.
In all honesty, I approached the trailers for Logan with a certain degree of cautious optimism, but James Mangold's newly released black and white clip seems to indicate that the film will reach the same level of emotional depth that the previews have suggested. Logan (now going by his birth name James Howlett) has seen better days. He spends his time driving around bachelorette parties, drinking, and trying to buy a boat advertised in the Pennysaver. There's no action, no carnage, and this clip has more in common with Steven Knight's Locke than it does with any previous X-Men film. In short: it's something very new for this genre, and that's incredibly exciting.
Wolverine's insistence on buying a boat seems like it's going to be a very prominent aspect of the movie. He states in the voicemail that he leaves for the man selling the watercraft that it's a retirement gift for his father, and that reads like a thinly veiled reference to Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier -- whose health and powers have started to fade. There are a couple of different ways to interpret this situation. Either Logan wants to get the boat so that Professor X can live out his last days peacefully on the water (free from persecution by the Reavers), or he wants to isolate Charles somewhere safe so that the aging mutant's powers cannot hurt anyone as he continues to deteriorate. Considering the gravity of this movie, neither of these options (or something else entirely) would surprise us.
For longtime fans of the X-Men franchise, Logan doesn't just promise something new and exciting; it promises a strong conclusion to a character arc that is almost two full decades in the making. The Wolverine we see in this clip is so fundamentally different from the one that we met in Bryan Singer's X-Men in 2000, and yet the core DNA of Hugh Jackman's portrayal has remained unchanged for the last 17 years. That's an unprecedented accomplishment in the superhero genre, and we cannot wait to see how this pans out.
Logan will hit theaters on March 3, 2017.
Check out a full trailer for Logan on the next page for an even closer look at Hugh Jackman's final outing as the badass X-Man!
