Warning: spoilers for Logan are ahead!
In terms of wrapping up the saga of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Logan delivered the goods excellently. The clawed mutant gave his life to protect his daughter and a group of fellow genetically engineered mutants so they could find safe refuge. The movie was also critically and commercially well-received over this past weekend, taking in over $247 million worldwide and ranking at 92% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes. However, one thing Logan didn't fully deliver on was answers, as there were several mysteries that remained unsolved when the story concluded. This may bother some moviegoers, but director James Mangold stands by the decision to leave some parts of the third Wolverine movie open-ended.
In an interview with Comic Book Resources, James Mangold discussed how he didn't want Logan to become too bogged down in answering every single question, especially regarding the ending, preferring to leave a few mysteries behind. As he explained:
I think we watch movies too literally. I think we want answers, contractual answers. Life never gives us these answers, and I think that --- people could ask questions about what happened to the X-Men or why do this or why. The comic books never answered every question. Somehow the movies are expected to. When you do, and there are many movies that try to answer every question, you end up with these endless scenes with people explaining stuff, ad infinitum. It may satisfy some people, but in life, I hardly understand what's going on one moment to the next. I like movies where there are mysteries.
While it's easier for superhero movies to answer questions compared to the comic books since there's not nearly as much mileage and continuity to work with, James Mangold does make a good point. Life doesn't always provide the answers we want, and Mangold intended for Logan to feel more realistic compared to most other superhero movies. Rather than address every loose end so that each viewer could leave the theater having all their questions answered, he felt it was artistically better to leave certain things up in the air so that the movie wouldn't be too heavy with exposition and such. Besides, at 137 minutes, Logan was already packed with a lot of material.
Besides the Westchester Incident, the mutant sanctuary Eden was definitely the biggest mystery Logan didn't fully delve into. Set up as a haven where the young Transigen mutants would be safe from persecution, its existence was called into question when Wolverine saw that a location of the same name was in an X-Men comic book. Eventually Wolverine and Laura found the other Transigen mutants, but even after the Reavers were defeated and Logan died, we never actually see Eden, as the movie cuts out with Laura and her friends trekking to the Canadian border. It's possible Eden may not even exist, although since one of the young mutants was communicating over the radio with someone presumably from there, that seems unlikely. Regardless, unless Fox decides to green-light an X-23 spinoff, it's doubtful we'll ever learn the full story.
Logan is now playing in theaters.
