New Movie Round-Up: Logan vs. Power Rangers

So this week, something completely unprecedented happened to me. I saw two new movies in the theater in less than a week! I rarely see two movies in the theater in less than a quarter these days, but as my circle of friends grows, so to does their influence on my movie watching habits. Ironically, my two choices in films couldn’t have been more diametric if I had written them in a manic depressive fury myself. Last week, I saw Logan, and this week, I saw Power Rangers. Yeah, now you get it. What we’re going to examine today are the unique and vastly different experiences that I had watching each, and why I might have had those experiences. A word of fair warning, Logan has been out for two weeks, and according to the unofficial Internet rule, I only have to give one week before spoilers are no longer considered douchey. Also, if you liked Logan, I will add you to the prayer roles, as your immortal soul is probably at high risk of eternal damnation, but I’m probably going to eviscerate this movie. You’ll see why, but the point is, you have every right to your opinion, I just don’t want to hear you whining in the comments. Okay, let’s take a look at two movies that probably couldn’t be any more unlike each other!

Let’s start with Logan because we might as well get all that negativity out of the way, right? When I saw the first trailer for Logan and started hearing the jubilation over the R-rating, my first thought was, “Thank you, DEADPOOL!” Don’t get me wrong, I loved Deadpool. It was a great film that knew its identity well and that adapted its source material exceptionally well. However, all of the reasons for which Deadpool worked as an R-rated film I knew weren’t going to translate well into a movie about Wolverine. One is the “Merc with a Mouth”, and the other is a brooding, murder-y, berserk machine. No, they do seem somewhat similar on the surface, but if I wanted cookie cutter antics, I’d shout out to Martha Stewart. This is my round about way of saying that I didn’t like this movie.  I had somewhat high hopes going in. I wonder why that would be…

I already know what some of you are screaming at your device, “It’s based on (Insert appropriate comic book title here)! You need to read that comic to fully appreciate the story that the movie is trying to tell you moron!” To that, I offer my touche. I live in a world where it takes me forever to read anything. I’ve been working on the Fellowship of the Ring for ten years. On top of that, I’m in college, and we all know how college professors like to pile reading on top of all the other work they send home with you. I don’t have time to read for recreation, and the fact of the matter is, I don’t have much inclination to do so in the first place. So when someone tells me that I needed to read X novel, or Y comic in order to get the full breadth of the story, I kindly give them the finger and inform them that one of the basic defining qualities of a movie is that it tells a coherent and self-contained story. That means, for those who don’t word gud, that the movie’s story makes sense independent of novels and comics. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind when there are tie-ins that add a little to the story, or cover things that were less consequential in the movie, and when something comes out that’s based on a something that I have read, it’s usually a treat, unless it’s Eragon, then it’s not. But when a film depends on the external source to fill in crucial plot gaps, that tells me two things, one the studio was hungry to make money in anyway possible, and two, the writers were too lazy to just tell the whole dang story during the movie.

Whew! That’s been building up for like, a week. If you’re still with me, thanks for bearing with. I promise this will be just as painful as my movie-going experience was. Now the premise to Logan is that people have stopped naturally giving birth to mutants. I should point this is the same basic plot of a film called Children of Men, which came out in 2006, and did this same story much better. Watch that one instead. Anyway, I wanna say that there might have been some BS about a company bio-engineering some sciencey mumbo jumbo in order to stop it, but if that’s the case, then 25 years is hardly enough time in which to do so. However, I do know for sure that a company had taken to bioengineering artificially manipulated mutants in a bid to *surprise* create a mutant army. This is kind of the focal point of the film. Anyway, a woman approaches Logan to get her and a girl up to Montana, or some dumb crap like that (I know it was North Dakota. Spare your lungs), and, of course, Logan just wants to brood drive his limo until he can get himself and Professor X a boat upon which to live out their golden years. He hasn’t got time for your drama lady. Logan, eventually decides to help because money, and he goes to pick up the lady with the kid, only the lady is *surprise* dead. Then Logan scrambles to get the heck out of the crime scene, a sensible move, and heads back to the homestead. There’s the cybersoldier guy named Pierce who had asked Logan to keep a look out for the recently deceased woman, and he comes knocking on Logan’s door trying to start something.

Logan tries to get him gone, but the he’s not having any of it so there’s an action scene, and people die horribly, and we find out that the little girl can do claw things just like Logan. Eventually, Logan gets the girl, and Prof X into his limo and then make a narrow escape. This was kind of a cool sequence, and I liked it, but I would have enjoyed it more if it didn’t remind me so darn much of Mad Max. Oh well… So now the group is on the lamb, but it’s an exercise in futility because they left behind the guy who can track mutants. You’d think that even under duress, someone would have said, “You know what, maybe we should save that guy so that the baddies can’t follow us.” Nope, just leave him. It was,like, so intense guys. I’m sure Logan didn’t feel like it was safe to pull a second rescue mission, but as soon as this guy gets left behind, you just immediately know he’s going to die.

Anyhow, what ensues is a game of cat and mouse with some badly utilized exposition along the way. The lady that died had a cell phone and she used said phone to video record some of the shadier things going on at Big Bad Evil Corp, which from how it was presented, I feel would have been noticed easily. She takes video at face level right in front of the the boss for crying out loud! No cover, it’s in front of a tank with clear liquid and a leg in it. Are these people blind?! That’s the only plausible explanation. But since we’re on the subject, I don’t know what kind of video editing software is available for smartphones in 2029, but dang! This lady takes tons of footage at different times, splices it all together, and then narrates over it. I can’t even make a thing in Photoshop. This lady must have been some sort of wizard. But the video downloads what little backstory the plot thinks we need, and we move on.

They make a stop at a gas station, where Logan tries to impart life lessons on the girl, which I think is supposed to be funny, but because the content made it so that green band trailers could only show, like, 20 seconds of the film, I’d seen the clip so many times that it lost all of its impact. Then there’s a hotel in “Not Las Vegas”, even though it’s a casino hotel situated in the middle of a bunch of other casinos. Here, Prof X has a seizure and everyone does a freeze frame. I really feel like this scene would have benefited from copious usage of the J. Geils Band, but that would involve the director using some creativity, and he apparently just couldn’t be bothered. Our team escape, narrowly, which will become a running theme throughout, and they hit the road in something that’s not a beat up limo. Apparently, there are self-driving semi-trucks twelve years from now because America has given up on humanity by this point, and they go berserk causing an accident. No vehicles are mangled because that’s not the point of this movie, but some horses get loose from a trailer and start playing roulette with semi-trucks. Prof X convinces Logan to help, and uses his telepathy to herd the horses back to the truck. The family driving the truck off the gang dinner as thanks, and to Logan’s merit, he initially turns them down. I guess he’s aware that people have a way of dying whenever he enters a room, but Xavier countermands him and they go to dinner. Honestly, we could have just skipped all of the build up, and gone straight to the entire family getting murdered, and I really don’t think that it would have made much of a difference.

There’s some chit chat, the water starts acting up, and we get some BS about water rights, and big corn trying to squeeze this family out of their farm by periodically shutting off the water. Seriously, do we just not care about capitalism anymore? So Logan goes to help fix the water, and drives off some thugs. But they show up at the house just in time for all hell to break loose. Charles is laying in bed explaining how he’s had a great day that he doesn’t deserve, and then the iconic triple claws impale him in the chest and we see Hugh Jackman circa 2009! That’s right, the leg we saw in the video from the phone that told us about the ultimate unfeeling monster weapon was a clone of Logan. Let’s stop here for a moment as I walk you through an enlightening flow chart.

In really generic terms, our Big Bad Evil Guy works for a Big Bad Evil Corp, and has and Evil Lieutenant. After the promise of global armageddon via weapons of mass destruction falls through, BBEG uses DNA from the protagonist to artificially engineer the ultimate protagonist stomping super weapon. If I may direct you back to the convenient flow chart, you’ll see that the basic story that I’ve just described was the same basic story of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace! Er, Logan. Wait, what?! Yeah, when you break it all the way down, Logan straight ripped off the basic story of one of the worst movies ever made! I’ll let that sink in for a moment…

Now, to be fair, a few of the details are different, but like a disturbing image, once you make this connection, you’ll never unmake it. To finish out the film, Logan and the girl get to the rendezvous place in NOrth Dakota only to find some of the other experiments that escaped Big Bad Evil Corp with the girl, I’ll just call her X-23 because that’s easier. There’s some lollygagging, and then the kids all leave. Logan is super hurt and his healing abilities don’t work gud because the metal on his skeleton acts like a cancer so the kids leave him a vial of green serum that enhances mutant abilities. We saw Dr. Rice use this serum on X-24 after the first fight with Logan. That’s important. Logan decides to take one last stroll around the camp for old time sake before he leaves to do whatever it is he was going to do, but he spots *gasp* drones pursuing the kids! So he takes off after the children. He gets shot up, takes the serum, and we get to see actual Wolverine in prime form one last time. There’s a lot of gore, the Big Bad Evil Guy gets killed, the Evil Lieutenant gets killed, and there’s a final showdown between Logan and X-24. X-23 finishes off the genetic abomination, but Logan is impaled by a tree root, and can’t heal. At this point, there’s supposed to be a touching final moment between Logan, and as was revealed earlier, his daughter, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that magic green serum and how the tank that X-24 was in had to have some. I couldn’t help but wonder why the kids didn’t just get some of that stuff and save Logan. But they don’t, selfish jerks, and Logan dies. There are some lines exchanged that I really needed some more context for because I didn’t quite get what Logan was trying to say, and then post-mortem, there’s a makeshift funeral, and then the kids go off to Canada.

We’ve already looked at the heavy hitting issue I have with this movie, now let me briefly touch on a few other things. First, the theme: I really wasn’t sure what the theme was supposed to be in this movie. Logan is old, he’s grizzled, and he generally hates life, but those aren’t themes. The one thing that stuck out to me was Logan’s general sense of shame regarding who he is. He even tells X-23 not to be what her creators made her. If we look at this in context of Bryan Singer’s X-Men films, which said very much the opposite, and specifically as pertains metaphorically to homosexuality, then this movie makes absolutely no sense thematically. On one side, Bryan Singer is using X-men films to say, “Don’t be ashamed of what you are”, and on the other James Mangold is saying, “No, do.” Next issue, the adamantium bullet. If I’m wrong on this one someone please set me straight, but if I remember correctly, Logan took the bullet at the end of Origins: Wolverine. That means that Mangold was calling directly back to that film. Also, Logan, as the protagonist, alludes that he sees this journey as one of redemption, and there’s some ‘philosophical’ discussion about the type of lifestyle that the few people like Logan lead. Basically, it boils down to killing being bad. But at least in the films, Logan has only ever killed others who were trying to either do him harm, or do harm to the innocent. I hardly see that as something from which one needs redemption. So then I got to thinking, just considering the films, what kill would Logan actually regret. Naturally, I came back to Jean Gray in Last Stand. With that and the bullet in mind, let us remember that the trainwreck that was Days of Future Past was done by Bryan Singer specifically to write those films out of the film mythology. Therefore, in essence, Mangold was waving two giant middle fingers at Singer, but more importantly, this begs the question, “Where does this movie fit in the franchise mythology? Is it even designed to fit there?” I have no idea. All I know is Mangold went and completely undid an entire film worth of story. And unfortunately, that’s the only context I have because the movie didn’t give me any context to work from.

The last thing that I want to discuss is the rating. This was an issue with me from the get go, not because I don’t like R-rated films. Everyone has the right to tell whatever story they want to tell in whatever way they want to tell it. If I think it’s worth my time, I'll watch it, or I won’t. However, as soon as I heard it was going to be R-rated, I just knew that some studio big wig had caught wind of Deadpool’s success, and had seen dollar signs in shoehorning everything that Deadpool did into a Wolverine film. And I wasn’t wrong. The film uses the f-bomb 48 times. That’s eight more times that the Merc with the Mouth! I get that Logan is grizzled, and jaded, and just done with life, and he’s taking it out on his vocabulary. Fine, but it was waaaaay overkill. Then there’s the violence. I don’t particularly mind excessive violence in my movies. I’m an adult. I know it’s not real. I even know how they do it. But it just didn’t work for me in this movie. It’s so prevalent, and it’s so recklessly abandoned that to me it just felt lazy. But I think that these issues really speak to the heart of why I didn’t enjoy this movie. I’ll gladly admit to never having actually read a Wolverine stand alone comic. Also, I haven’t read an X-Men comic since 2006. The bulk of my familiarity with X-Men and Wolverine stems from early to mid-90s comics, and the 90s cartoon. As a result, the Logan on screen was not the Logan that I was expecting going into the movie. I will allow for the notion that that colored my opinion, but the evidence still speaks for itself. Contrary to what the Internet has been saying, this was objectively a celluloid turd.

Man, we’re only just getting to Power Rangers! This is going to be a long ride. So I went into this movie with much different expectations than with Logan. Perhaps you can see why:

This movie has not garnered much praise or buzz, but I think it’s an underdog kind of film. I’ve been a fan of MMPR since day one, and so I know what to expect from a Power Rangers experience, and this movie challenged those expectations in all the right ways. This one hasn’t been out for a week so I’ll go light on the spoilers, but in a nutshell, this movie added intertwined background to Zordon and Rita in a way that was poignant, and refreshing. It really took its time during the first act to develop the ranger characters. It’s a slow first act, but the movie builds up these characters and their relationships really effectively, but more importantly, in a way that helped me to connect to those characters, and to feel invested in those characters. And those characters all had meaningful arcs within the progression of the narrative. Was there action? A little bit here and there until the climax. The climax was all action, but the preceding action wasn’t just there to satisfy the fanboys who wanted extreme martial arts action. It served a purpose, and it helped the story. There was a lot of humor, and surprisingly, it wasn’t just the type of cheesy humor that one would expect from Power Rangers. It was surprisingly witty and funny. There were callbacks to the original show, but they were so few. There was a musical queue when they use the Zords for the first time, Rita says, “Make my monster grow,” Alpha says, “Aye Yi Yi,” Jason says, “It’s morphin’ time,” there are cameos from Amy Jo Johnson and Jason David Frank from the original MMPR, and there’s a remake of the song “The Power”, which was used in the original MMPR film. That’s it out of a two plus hour film. They could have gone the opposite direction and tried to please fanboys, but they didn’t. They focused on what they knew needed to be done to make a satisfying films for fans that would also attract a younger generation. They tied up the movie with actual resolution, but they still managed to leave things open for another outing. And most importantly, you could tell that everyone involved was having fun. Contrary to Logan, which felt like a cinematic durge the entire time, Power Rangers was fun to watch. The actors appeared to have fun in front of the camera, the people holding the cameras used a few shooting techniques that implied they were having fun, and Bryan Tyler, who’s done a lot of forgettable Marvel music lately, composed a score that’s fun to listen to.

Look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t go see Logan. If that’s your thing, good for you. However, from as objective a point of view as I can muster, Power Rangers was the more enjoyable film out of the two. You’ll leave satisfied by the story, the acting, the music, and the resolution. If you’re like me, you’ll want more. At the end of the day, Power Rangers was the film that knew its identity the best and that did what it was doing with purpose. Logan just meandered aimlessly from gore fest to gore fest until Wolverine finally performed an act of seppuku out of guilt. Here’s hoping we get more movies like Power Rangers this year! In the meantime, stick around for next week. I have some very big planned!

Our First Book Review... Kind of...: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

I’ve covered a somewhat varied amount of media types in my own limited way since starting this little blog. We’ve enjoyed movie reviews, TV show reviews, videogame reviews, and even a video game console review. However, we haven’t yet jumped in the book review pool, and those who know me will know exactly why that hasn’t happened yet. I’m a pretty slow reader so in order to do a book review, I’d have to devote months to reading the book, take copious notes so that I don’t forget my thoughts along the way, and worst of all, dog ear multiple pages of said book. I know there are a few who will consider that an positively revolting prospect, #booklivesmatter. I’m sorry, that’s just the way things are when I read a book for maximum comprehension and retention. I will tease this, there are a few fine book reviews already in the pipeline, I just haven’t quite gotten them polished yet. Anyway, faced with the prospect of keeping good on my word to review all types of media, and also to bring big changes this year, we’re going to look at a book, or rather a series of books that also happen to form the basis for one of the most renowned RPG systems of all time. See, I found a loophole. I could either spend months reading a book, take copious notes, and dog ear multiple pages of said book, or I could dip my toe in this pool by reviewing books that I’ve already read several times. See? Loophole. So why RPGs? Those who know me, even just a little know that there are a few things that rank really high in my echelon of hobbies. First, is Star Trek. And second is RPGs. In fact, I love them so much that this year I’ll be running my group through each iteration of Dungeons & Dragons and I figured that it would be a missed opportunity if I didn’t provide some commentary as I experienced some of these systems for myself. There, now that we have all of the formalities out of the way, it’s time to roll up those pants legs because we are about to take the giant plunge into the giant world of literary criticism… only on the shallow end so you don’t need to roll up your pants legs too far.

What can be said about Dungeons & Dragons on the whole? Well, it began in the far away times of 1971 with a little nerdy experiment called Chainmail. Chainmail was co-developed by E Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Now, Chainmail was a tabletop miniatures wargame that borrowed heavily from the fantastical elements of The Lord of the Rings, and it was only three years later that those rules were ported over in order to develop the original basic edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, the Original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D) rules intended players to already own the rules for Chainmail so that these players could reference racial abilities, and combat mechanics during game play. Why do I bring this up? ...You’ll see…

As the article title already explained, we’re looking at D&D 4e, as it is called by the hip crowd. Currently, D&D is in it’s fifth iteration, but I thought it would be fun to start my reviews in the same place that I started my lifelong obsession with RPGs, and for better or worse, I started with D&D 4e. Fourth edition was released in August of 2008, but development began about three years previous to that. A lot of what I know about the franchise previous to that has been garnered through conversation, and some research, but from what I understand, the first and second editions were difficult for new players to pick up, and heavy on rules that bogged down gameplay, and most importantly, storytelling. See, unlike other games, RPGs are cooperative games where players act out scenarios presented by a game master. These sorts of games rely heavily on the ability of that game master and the players to tell a story with as little interruption as possible. So having a bunch of rules that need to be double checked constantly can be a detriment to the overall experience and it can pull players out of the story. It’s a lot like trying to read a good book and getting incessant phone calls. Anyway, the first two editions were created under a company called Tactical Studies Rules, Inc., or TSR. In 1997, TSR was nearly bankrupt, and to save face, as well as wallets, they sold their IP to Wizards of the Coast, who make Magic: The Gathering. Wizards released a new edition in 2000, and the story goes that it was such a monumental improvement over the previous edition that many players to this very day believe that it’s been one of the best systems ever devised. But then how does that factor into this story? Well, stick with it because we’re getting there.

Remember that I said that D&D 4e was released in 2008, and that development began in 2005? That’s kind of a big deal because in 2004, World of Warcraft was released. I only bring this up because I’ve heard a lot of people over the years draw comparisons between World of Warcraft and D&D 4e. This made some of the longtime fans upset, and alienated them from the franchise, but if you think about how many people were playing WoW at its apex, you can see why D&D developers would think that this was a good idea. The previous edition of D&D, the third edition, had focused combining the basic and the advanced rules sets together as one thing, and standardizing quite a bit of the class and race specific elements. While this was good, developers felt that the rules could be streamlined even more. And that was the basic idea behind D&D 4e. Wow, this has been a lot of backstory. Like some of the movies I review, this has been a slow burn so far…

Alright, let’s do a miniature RPG 101 for a minute. What makes for a good RPG? First, it should be a system that a group can have fun playing. That’s pretty much the most important thing. It’s also the lowest standard by which you can judge a system. Believe me, I’ve played some pretty terrible systems in my day, but still managed to have fun with the group, mostly because of the group with whom I was playing. Anyway, second, good systems have rules that are easy to pick up, and intuitive to use. Third, a system shouldn’t feel like the rules get in the way of the storytelling aspects of the game. They need to be there to referee in certain situations, but players shouldn’t feel strangled by them. Optionally, a system should provide players options for playing a wide variety of character builds. I say this is optional because there are some systems that I’ve played that seem restrictive in this area, but I have found that the challenge of the situation actually helps me to build better characters.

So now you know briefly the criteria by which I’m measuring my review material, let’s get to the main event. How exactly does D&D 4e stack up to this criteria? I would say if you bear in mind some of the backstory, it’s nearly an even split. Remember that D&D was originally developed off of a miniatures wargame, and 4e took it way back to those roots. The use of miniatures during gameplay was heavily marketed and encouraged by the company selling it. Miniatures were everywhere! You could by randomized packs with monster minis, and starter packs with hero minis. I’m sure that this was an attempt to ground the game and make it feel a little less abstract in order to attract World of Warcraft players. However, one of the drawbacks to this decision is that the combat rules because really unwieldy. There were so many minute rules to remember that combat could take forever. Another side effect is that once the miniatures hit the table, the game felt less like a cooperative storytelling experience and more like a miniatures wargame. Players became focused on using perfect tactics to get advantages, and keeping out of harm’s way. It took a bit of the fun out of the experience if these elements were utilized poorly because rules could get in the way of the storytelling. However, on the flip side of combat, fourth edition introduced an official rule for creatures known as minions that were hard to hit, but died once they did get hit. This allowed game masters to run fantastic cinematic large scale battles without the burden of tracking a ton of monsters, each with their own life totals. Instead, you could take a type of creature, like goblins, and make a large group of them with each individual represented by a point of health. Then by the end, all of the goblins are dead as soon as all the group health is gone. It’s a fabulous tool for game masters.

Now, if we divorce this system from its somewhat bloated combat mechanics, it’s actually a pretty good, and fun system to play. There’s a feeling of high excitement that D&D 4e captures as you’re jaunting pulling off feats of superhuman calibur. I like to tell people that it’s very swashbuckling and I think that fits. The general rules are meant to make you feel like you can do just about anything, and they do, and it’s not only fun, but I find it to be pretty relaxing as well. I get a bit of wish fulfillment in my D&D 4e games. That’s not to say that there aren’t flaws. One of the focuses with this iteration of the world’s oldest RPG was balancing character classes. In D&D a player can be a wizard, or a fighter, or any number of other classes. Usually, these classes come with different strengths and weaknesses. They’re designed to fill a specific role within an adventuring group, and the idea is that if each player plays one of these different types of classes then a party will be balanced, and able to do what they need to do in the game. With fourth edition, the developers tried to make it so that no matter the party load out, there wouldn’t be any deficiencies. A group could wander off without a healer, but still be healed, and whatnot. What this did, is it made certain things feel kind of generic. There were nuances to each race and class in the previous edition, and those were pretty much gone. This made a lot of longtime players upset. But what it also did beyond that, is it created a game system that fit with our more modern and busy culture. Let’s face it, getting a group of three to seven people together can be a herculean undertaking in and of itself. But if your game system allows for one or two people to be absent without any detriment, then it’s not as big of a deal.

Let’s talk about a little thing called powers real quick. This has got to be the biggest sticking point for critics of the D&D 4e system. In the olden days, it used to be that wizards, and sorcerers, and mages, and sometimes clerics got spells in D&D. If you played some sort of brutish fighting type, or a ranger type, or a rogue, you had specialized abilities that you would get that could enhance your capabilities, but they were rarely ever magic. In fourth edition, they introduced powers to every class. These powers could be used anywhere from whenever you wanted to once per day. They did enhance players’ capabilities, but they were magical. Suddenly, everyone was magical. This just added to the perceived blandness of the system, and it made making a character a bit clunky and burdensome. But it had a good payoff because it really helped newer players to understand what their character could do, and it guided them through the process of upgrading that character. Was it good for the more experienced players, probably not, but for the uninitiated, it was great.

Where does all this leave D&D 4e in the rating area? I’d call it a good RPG system. It does have it’s flaws, and it has some definite strengths that are unique to this system. And as with previous systems of both D&D as well as other non-D&D systems, players and game masters were encouraged to omit, and add rules that would help them to better run a smooth, story driven game. This really gives fourth edition a bit of an edge because once players understand the combat mechanics pretty well, they can easily know which rules to throw out in order to streamline the combat. This adds to the versatility of this system as a vehicle for smooth storytelling, and that’s a definite plus. I’d say this is a fun system, especially for beginners, that can be learned fairly quickly and easily, and it serves as a great jumping off point for those looking to get into the hobby. Is it the end all be all of RPGs? Certainly not, but it makes a great gateway drug!  Stay tuned to next week to see what we’ve got cooking, and expect a D&D related article about once a month starting later this spring!