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!
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