X-Men Origins: Wolverine first look (boxed spoilers)

Cafe Society
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Just back from a midnight West Coast showing of Wolverine and liked it a great deal. There are lots of fine touches, particularly the casting. Schreiber and Jackman have a complex interactions.

Taylor Kitsch is a perfect Gambit. Wish there’d been a few more scenes with the character, because he was first class. Will.i.am holds his own as John Wraith, and Danny Huston is a spectacularly slimy Stryker.

Special effects and camerawork were particularly sharp and, in a couple of scenes, breathtaking. Lots of action on a grand scale

In several places, the crowd had a good laugh at some of the dialogue.

Couple of mild spoilers:

Patrick Stewart has a short cameo near the end as Professor X

and

There is a short scene at the end of the credits, but it’s a total throwaway and not worth waiting for

All in all, an excellent time.

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Thanks! Guess we’ll see it this weekend.

In Roger Ebert’s review, he says this:

Is that a fair assessment? I haven’t read enough comics to make a judgement. Is Wolverine sort of a one-note character?

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Well, I’m old enough to have purchased the first X-Men comic when it came out (And don’t I wish I still had it now!) but stopped being an active reader in the mid-80s, so I can’t speak to later character developments. But, yeah, he was pretty much the personification of anger back in the day.

But I thought of him more as the equivalent of the laconic hero of a thousand westerns. Sometimes you just need an action hero.

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To me he’ll always be the Canadian guy in the goofy yellow costume playing 2nd string in Hulk stories.

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I was into the X-Men and Wolverine back in the 80s and I would disagree with Ebert. The reason I liked Wolverine was because he was a much more complex character than most. However, I am willing to concede that it may not translate well on film, the difference being like Superfriends Batman compared to Miller’s “Dark Knight” graphic novel Batman.

He may just be growling and snarling his way through the movie, but in the 1980s comic mini-series, you see many more levels of his psyche.

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No! He’s the most morally-ambiguous superhero I can think of, one who makes perfect sense in almost any setting (Western, spy, space opera, samurai, hockey, whatever).

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I just read that there are several different endings depending on which version you watch.

Caution, may contain some spoilers.

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I was a little dissapointed in the film. Overall, enjoyable, but it was awfully choppy. I felt like ti rushed in some spots and just had too many characters. The opening scene was just fantastic, but I felt the film just couldn’t decide what it wanted to be after that: a drama with action (fairly normal for superhero flicks) or a slam-bam action film.

Edit: Oh, I SO want a Deapool movie. It ought to be a total action-comedy, and perhaps leave the character a little lighter than in the comics (where he was pretty bloodily dark). What makes it great is that you can use Deadpool to spoof the superhero genre, but still do a good superheroic movie with it. We need Loki to show up from the Thor movie so he and Deadpool can go to the bar, while they chat about whether the audience enjoyed the movie - but do this right in the middle of the movie, while they issue (completely false) spoilers about the endings of this and other Marvel films.

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Just FTR, I saw the ending listed first in the above link, with

Stryker walking down the road in response to the command from the dying lady and being stopped by an army vehicle and wanted in connection with the death of the general - at about 30 seconds in and

The bar scene at the very, very end after the last credits, where an Asian lady tending bar asks him if he’s drinking to forget and he says he’s drinking to remember. The lamest thing in the whole movie, IMH)

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I just came back from watching Wolverine with a bunch of kids.

Having heard online from all the fanboys who watched the pirated download online and just how awful it was, I went in with very low expectations, combined with just how much Hugh Jackman is EVERYWHERE right now pushing his baby, i figured it was a guaranteed FAIL CRAPTACULAR SPECTACLE.

I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t the greatest thing ever. Every character did a good to pretty decent job at their job. Setting, special effects and continuity were all good.

Mind you, I know ZERO about the characters going into it, other than Wolverine’s back story, but I thought it was a good story line with a decent arc, some good lines, nice if quick fight scenes.

The opening story line telling his youth story revealing that his real father was actually someone else ( which didn’t make sense to me as the Dad looked like a different version of Jackman.) and merging it with all the wars he fought was a good visual blending, I thought.

The introduction of him working with Stryker was a bit rushed and there were some gaps from when Wolverine and Victor signed up to working together with a motley crew of mutants. Maybe it was left out in editing, but it looked as if after the first job they were working on that Wolverine had had enough of the senseless killing and walked away from it all.
Because I was busy with kids, I missed a bit in the boxing arena. The black guy who can travel like that…who is he?

My only meh character, to me, was whomever played Gambit. The minute he came on screen, all I could think of was Johnny Depp would have knocked the role out of the park with such little effort and screen time.

The Kayla character was fine, but the girl that was suppose to be her sister was…ummm…WHAT. One looks like a native american. The other looks like a stereo typical surfer-california girl w ith blonde hair and blue eyes. Unless the comics have more on this, that was some odd casting.

There did seem to be a bit of a gap between this and the Xmen movie-verse that we know when Wolverine frees up all the mutants that are held captive by Stryker. There were many that made appearances in all one of the Xmen flicks, where they never recognize/acknowledge each other. Cyclops would have remembered him.

Jackman did just fine through out and I never thought he bit off more than he could chew or over did anything. He settled nicely into the roll.

Liev Schreiber, I think, had just as much screen time as Jackman. He seemed to really enjoy this part and it was a good casting choice.

Whomever played Stryker did a bang up job, too.

Kayla was a bit wooden.

Professor Xavier makes an appearance looking 25 years younger due to the wonders of FXr and a little blurred, or something.

The only part that really was " Oh.that’s kinda stupid." for me was Stryker mentioning that an adamantium bullet was what was needed to erase Wolverine’s memory. It was too much like a silver bullet to kill a werewolf bit, but it was needed to give us the memory loss issue that Wolverine has in the rest of the movies and ties it all together.

Sets: A
Acting: B
Casting: B
Script:B
Action: A
Special Effects: A
Hugh Jackman clothed: A+
Hugh Jackman naked: A+
Hugh Jackman overall: A+

Nudity: briefly with Wolverine running over the countryside.
Sex: none.
Violence: Galore, but no blood.
Language: Very brief. Maybe two or three swear words, total.

Overall: A

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Sorry, Shirley:

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Threads merged.

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Even better: A Cable and Deadpool movie!

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Does Deadpool break the fourth wall?

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Constantly. Well, frequently.

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Really? I don’t remember that. What does he say/do?

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Not in the movie. But he does in the comics by referring to the fact that it’s a comic or such notes.

[Spoiler]No Deadpool ending for me, but I loved the first 20 mins of the movie, though DP stole the show there, and I really liked the opening credit sequence with the different wars and all.

Also, at the very end throwaway clip- was that Asian lady the same lady from X-men 2? Lady Deathstrike or something like that? The lady with the fingernail claws? [/spoiler]

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Well, considering the source material is reams & reams of disposal stories, yeah, most of the time.

Overall? Not one-note in the hands of Chris Claremont. But pretty much a standard semi-feral tough guy in the hands of almost anyone else.

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When exactly did Professor X lose the use of his legs? It seems a bit late in the character’s history for him to still be using them. Unless there was a “radical surgery that later fails” storyline going on at the time.

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I liked it well enough. It was on par with the other X-Men movies. I’m not sure what the point of having an entire thread full of spoiler boxes is but here goes:

I wasn’t sure what the point of the childhood stuff was. Why did their Dad kill Logan’s stepdad? Why did they have two different fathers? It seemed like an overly complicated plot for the first two minutes and didn’t seem to matter to the later plot except perhaps to give it a little ‘me and you against the world’ thing. I didn’t think the whole Sabretooth going bad thing was well developed. He just randomly decides to break rank and rape some girl one day and go apeshit on his company. I also didn’t get how they could have Scott Summers not remember him, or why his girlfriend’s powers didn’t work on him or his brother. I didn’t think Dead Pool looked like Ryan Renolds either.