Semantic nitpick: a psychopath is someone who kills for no reason/the enjoyment of it. A murderer is someone who kills without legal sanction. If I kill you for the contents of your wallet, I’m a murderer, even though I had a “reason” (money). As for wether this makes Wolverine a murderer, the answer depends largely on how law enforcement reacts to his actions. If they arrest, convict, and punish him: he’s a murderer. If they decide not to press charges for Wolvie’s act (as was implied by the end of the film) then he is not a murderer.
Logan really walked the line in the movie. I suspect that if someone arrested him and put him on trial he’d be acquitted but it’s a close thing.
The basic question is from a legal and moral standpoint is did he feel that his own life or the lives of others were in immediate jeopardy. The answer to that for most of the raid is an “absolutely”.
Armed men have broken into the house he was watching over and begun firing on children. He had no clue who these men were, what they were doing, why they were doing it, or even after he was aware that they were just knocking the children out instead of killing them what they were going to do to the children. He was certainly justified in using deadly force against most of those attackers.
Now there are a couple of kills that are close things where he wouldn’t have necessarily needed to use deadly force to subdue them but I don’t recall any where the person was explicitly helpless and Wolverine cut them down.
And yes, I was thinking about all of this as I watched the movie. I don’t like it when the “hero” murders innocent people and doesn’t have to deal with any of the consequences of those actions because all it was to the filmmakers was a big action sequence. If Wolverine has cut down the police officers in the later scene while just walking out of the house I would have been a lot more bothered by what he had done.
An observation:
What makes wolverine different from Pyro, who fireballed innocent cops? nitpick on the movie:
Those cops later stood up all burnt like in a looney toons cartoon but why was that any different from Wolverines berzerker episode?
When that cop stood up as wolverine walked by to get on the x-jet, i found that so unbelievable that any person (without mutant healing powers) can be swallowed in flames, thrown backwards violently and not have even a second degree burn on them. If that fire effect shown in the movie had been real, there would be nothing left of that cop but his boots and charred stumps.
YAY! that was my first spoiler box!! 
He was hiding. The dude came in and pointed a gun at Bobby’s back. Remember that Bobby is a 15 year old kid in his underwear. Facing away from the soldier. Wolvie attacked him and he sprayed bullets everywhere. No, I’m not disturbed that he killed him.
They didn’t come anywhere close to following the President’s orders. What happened was a full-on invasion and kidnapping. There’s no way you can interpret what he said such that he was sanctioning that kind of action. And look at it from the soldiers’ point of view – they’re invading a school, tranquilizing and stealing sleeping children. And they responded to the defense of the mansion with lethal force.
XSlayer: “Fire” doesn’t necessarily mean “really, really hot.” Rubbing alcohol, for example, burns at a low enough temperature that you can hold it in your hand with nothing more than a mild irritation. Basically, the temperature of a fire is dicated by what it’s fuel source is, and Pyro’s fire’s fuel source is his mutant ability. Which, I assume, means that he can decide how hot to make it.
And yes, I know that the “source” of the flame was originally his lighter, but those giant fireballs weren’t being powered by an ounce or two of butane.
Hunh? How so? He was kind of a smarmy creep but he was basically a correctional officer doing his job, wasn’t he? I guess he does thwack Magneto over the head, which he shouldna oughta, even if Mag is The Bad Guy, but still… he hardly to deserved to die for that, much less in such a nasty, if imaginative, way.
As to Wolverine’s situation, did any of those guys identify themselves as govenment officers? I’m pretty sure they didn’t say anything remotely resembling “This is the cops, come out with yer hands up.” Did they have “Property of the United States Govement” tatooed on the back of their neck or something? It didn’t give the appearance of being legal. All Logan knew is that “his” kids were being attacked. My claws would come out, too, and I’d ask questions later.
Miller, don’t mean to appear to be picking on you to argue with. Not feeling confrontational here, just curious. If Pyro’s “fuel source” is his mutant ability, couldn’t he make fire without the lighter? But he needs the lighter, so I assumed he needed something to burn. Once he gets it going, he can pull whatever he needs out the environment, like feeding sticks into a campfire. Do you mean he can decide how much or what kind of elements to pull into his fireball? That would sort of make sense. Is it possible to make a fireball of that magnitude with a source that would have that kind of result? How else could he decide how hot to make it?
Aw, c’mon. The guy got his jollies by beating on a helpless old man with a billy club. He was a bully and a bigot, and I was happy to see him get his.
Hrm. I got the impression he was doing it because he was told to and not because it made him happy. Seeing as how the helpless old man tried to snuff everybody in the New York Metropolitan area, I can cut some slack for the guard feeling less than kindly towards him. That doesn’t excuse thwacking him; he should have more professional integrity than that. And he if doesn’t he should lose his job and be incarcerated. But not killed.
Sparrowhawk: Don’t worry about it. I love to debate this sort of crap.
The way I see it, Pyro’s ability is a sort of psychic gasoline. Gasoline can’t catch fire by itself, but burns really well when someone applies a match to it. And, of course, once you drop a match into a puddle of gasoline, the fuel source is the gas, not the match. What exactly his mutant power does to make flames bigger isn’t explained. I don’t think he creates, say, pure oxygen to feed the fire, because that power would have uses beyond blowin’ stuff up, and the movie seems to imply that the only thing he can do is manipulate fire. How does he decide how hot to make it? I don’t know. Maybe he just thinks harder at it. How does Storm decide to make a light drizzle instead of a raging hurricane? My only point is that it is possible to be hit by a giant fireball and not be burned to a crisp. As evidence, look at any action movie ever made. Some fire burn hotter than other fires, and there’s no reason why Pyro couldn’t decide to fire off some of the less lethal flames.
The old “I vas only followink orders” defence, eh? The guy wasn’t in the military, he was a glorified security guard. He could have quit the job if he had qualms about beating up helpless prisoners, but didn’t. And, as I remember the film, he seemed to really enjoy his work. Besides, who’s going to fire him? His boss, who has a secret plan to murder all mutants everywhere? Odds are, he got that job precisely because he was a violent, sadistic bigot.
It’s like in monster movies, where there’s the one know-it-all jerk who keeps insisting there’s nothing going on, and in his attempt to prove it, ends up getting eaten. Sure, he doesn’t deserve to die in a real-world sense, but in the simpler morality of comic books and Hollywood blockbusters, the guy who keeps poking the bear deserves to get his hand bitten off.
I’m not sure “action movies” qualify as a particularly reliable source of evidence. I’m willing to let mutant powers be their own explanation for things up to a point. If you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept that somebody can manipulate fire or weather, you can pretty much extend it to believing they can set the effect to low, medium or high. I will demand enough reality to agree he can’t “create” oxygen, because matter can’t be created or destroyed. If you want to say he (or Storm, for that matter) can selectively manipulate elements out of the atmosphere - carbon or oxygen or whatever - okay. That would account for degrees of violence. I just don’t know enough chemistry to imagine how doing so could control the temperature and I can’t really buy that thinking at something could in and of itself change the physical condition if the physical is a prerequisite for the effect to occur at all. Otherwise, it’s just an illusion. I suppose that’s a possibility.
As far as the guard… meh. Following orders is no defense, only a musing on motive, since I honestly can’t remember if he seemed happy about it or not. No matter. As you say, his professional integrity was nil (and he was a smarmy creep) but his death does violate my sense of comic book morality and even poetic justice, in that even by the eye-for-an-eye-tooth-for-a-tooth code, it is over the top. I wasn’t sorry to see him go, but I wouldn’t say he deserved it. Though I rather admired it, as a demonstration of Magneto’s cleverly evil imagination.
As long as we’re debating this, Magneto had no intention to kill anyone. He wanted to transform them into mutants, and was unaware that his machine killed.
Secondly, both Magneto and Pyro are villains. They kill and show little remorse about it. We are not asked to sympathize and agree with their actions. They are not the heroes, but the antagonists. That doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting characters, but that we aren’t being asked to accept their personal interpretation of morality.
Wolverine is a hero. His status in the movie demands he fulfil this role. He was left behind to guard the mansion and its occupants. When his charges were attacked, he responded with deadly force. Logan had no way of knowing what these soldier’s intentions were or that the darts wouldn’t kill the children – he was acting to defend himself and those under his protection. I would have done the same in his situation.
Besides, what’s he supposed to do? Have the soldiers sit down for a powwow, discuss their feelings, and convince them of the folly of their plans with a rousing, heartfelt speech about intolerance and loving thy neighbor?
.:Nichol:.
Well, towards the end when they were all held captive by those rubber restraints, Jean Gray told him that his machine did kill, and Storm said “It’s true, I saw it” - and he didn’t seem to care too much after receiving that information. (I can’t remember exactly what he said, but he went ahead with his plan). Just sayin’…
He probably didn’t believe them and thought it was just a last-ditch ploy to get him to call off his plans. His entire scheme hinged on the mutated humans surviving – killing a bunch of diplomats would have done nothing for mutant liberation. Magneto was also willing to sacrifice Rogue – the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one.
.:Nichol:.
What Dooku said.
And I wasn’t objecting to The Villain killing the guy, even in a particularly nasty way. That’s what villains do. As villainy, it was admirable. I was objecting to Miller’s evaluation that the guy deserved it. If he deserved it, it wasn’t particularly villainous or you have accepted the villian’s moral code.
:smack: Ooookay. One more time for Dooku . . .
Freddy Krueger = bad guy
Thus: mass killing fully expected.
Wolverine = good guy
Thus: mass killing becomes an ethical issue in context of the film.
See?
As for violence in movies turning people into psychopaths, you must have me confused with another poster, in another thread, on another topic. Sorry!
In Marvel’s old RPG, Wolverine would lose all Karma.
What I meant by bringing up action movies is that, IRL, stuntment regularly set themselves on fire or get hit by fireballs without incinerating themselves. So, in a fantasy movie, I have no problem with a magic fireball not killing a character.
As for the guard deserving it, let’s say that baiting a would-be mass-muderer with superpowers is about five thousand different kinds of stupid. So as far as that goes, yeah, he “deserved” it. I cheered in the theater, because it was a cool way to kill an unlikeable character. I saw it as evil feeding on evil, which I count as a win for the good guys. Probably would’ve felt different if it had been Professor X, and he’d made they guy’s head pop like in Scanners.
No kidding. It’s got to be somewhere in this classic thread.
I guess I see Wolvie’s actions as unlike Waco because, unlike Waco, there was no declaration of authority or offer of surrender before the invasion. (“This is the police. Come out with your honds up”) Wolverine had no way of knowing these people with machine guns where an authorized government operation, and to be honest, he probably wouldn’t’ve cared. His job was to protect the children. He’s been in government hand - he knows they aren’t planning to take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese and return them. In fact, given the “Mutant Question” as it had been shown on the news, he had every reason to think that the invaders were ready to kill them all.
Someone above mentioned a pogrom. I could only applaud this minority for not going quietly when accosted in their own home.
StG