The The Wolverine review (that sounds stupid but that’s what it is)

The The Wolverine review (that sounds stupid but that’s what it is)

So apparently this site is turning into a movie review blog and I promise I’m going to actually talk about comics in the next blog but I just saw The Wolverine and I feel like I should review it. Just be glad I’m not going off for a couple thousand words about Elysium because I could do just that!!

*Ahem*

Wolverine. Yeah. It’s alright.

If your hopes were high well then first you are a special kind of optimist but I’m going to advise you to go ahead and calm right down because it’s nothing special. Decent but not great. Or even good really.

Hugh Jackman does an awesome job as Wolverine again but then you knew that. This being his sixth reprisal of the character anything less would be kind of a disappointment. The action scenes are interesting but nothing new. If you are paying attention you can probably guess the ending.

Chances are if a guy has been obsessing over you for fifty years and everyone keeps mentioning how crazy he is about you, you just might end up in a fight scene with him

The most exciting thing in this movie was the end. And no that’s not a tongue in cheek insult. I’m saying the most memorable/exciting part of the entire film was the teaser for the next movie after the credits. So yeah.

So you might be asking why even talk about this movie then if it’s so...meh? Well I kind of wanted to do an autopsy on a certain problem in this movie that prevented it from having the impression it should have. I mean I want to be clear, this movie is competent but has a huge problem. That problem is women.

So let’s examine the three female cast members and see if we can find out what was done wrong with them.

First there is Yukio played by Rila Fukushima and whom I’m going to call Sailor Venus because I can’t remember her name all the time and I’m pretty sure Sailor Venus was the badass one.

I don’t really remember this show. For some reason I was always um… “distracted” during it.

Sailor Venus’ main problem is that she doesn’t have a lot going on. In the beginning we are told that she is picked up off the street by some rich business men to be friends with the big bosses daughter.

You know like you do.

And some hints are dropped off that she there might be more to that story as another character calls her just a toy. So I’m thinking, ‘Is she a robot? A werewolf? A sexy Japanese werewolf robot?’ But alas, no. She’s really is just some girl that they picked up to be friends with another character who she never talks to throughout the entire movie. Okay I’m fibbing a little bit on that one. But it’s one crappy scene and I’m not even sure they pass the Bechtel test.

I mean she’s a psychic which is kind of cool even its basically just used to create artificial tension in scenes where there really isn’t real tension.

You know, ‘I had a vision a bomb is going to blow go off and kill everyone’  so when Hugh Jackman saves everyone we’re “surprised.”

But even her psychic powers really don’t come of anything. She never uses them to prevent anything or affect the future…so yeah… somehow they managed to take a hot samurai chick with psychic powers and a pretty forgettable character. That takes a bit of work. I’d be willing to be ten dollars that she’s not even in the next X-men movie and no one will even remember she stayed with Wolverine after the end.

Yeah, that’s fine you guys just go on ahead and make more movies without me. It’s not like I’m self-mutilating mutant who shouldn’t be left alone

Moving on we have Mariko played by Tao Okamato. I know you’re impressed by both my professionalism and Imdb skills. I’m going to call her Sailor Mars. Sailor Mars is suicidal, which starts off as interesting. Well that’s overselling it. That makes her a character; an emotionally distant woman attacked by kidnappers who we find out is in line to become head of the company from her grandfather created. Because apparently 21^st century Japanese companies still subscribe to the fucking feudal system.

                But she runs into the Zelda in Windwaker syndrome mixed with Star Wars 2 syndrome.

“I’m sorry you’ve got Lucas.” “Lupas?” “If only. George Lucas syndrome, it’s not fatal but you’ll, you'll probably wish it was.”

The Windwaker problem is she starts off as a fairly interesting character but all that slips away and soon as the romance starts. Why can’t she still be emotionally hardened in some other ways? She just kind of becomes nothing the moment they “fall for each other”.  And Do they end up together? No. Does she end up with her estranged husband? No he just kind of dies and is never mentioned again. She’s the romantic lead with no romance and a story that leads to nothing.

My theory for why these first two characters suck so much is because I believe they were originally the same character. I have absolutely no way reason to believe this is true and I refuse to even google it and you can’t make me! But, my writers intuition is telling me originally they were supposed to be the same person. For evidence I submit the scene at the end where Wolverine falls down after killing the bad guy.

(Oh yeah spoiler the good guy beats the bad guy in case you didn’t know).

It’s the classic scene where after the battle the hero falls down and the woman rushes to his side and says his name. Only there is this weirdness because there are two of them. So first Sailor Mars says, “Wolverine,” and rushes to his side while the other girl just kind of stands right behind her. Then sailor Venus does pretty much the same exact thing. My guess is in the original script this only happened once but no one really felt like changing it after the redraft.  I can’t say why they split these characters up. Probably because sailor Mars had to go play damsel in distress while doing something else so they split her up.

Finally let’s talk about the villain. And I want to start off by saying that I love a good fem fatal. There’s something so intriguing about a woman getting by on her wits alone. Wrapping men around her finger and killing anyone in her way. It’s great. And I actually really like this one.  Svetlana Khodchenkova (totally had to copy paste that one) plays the viper and to her credence pulls off a really interesting character.

She’s interesting. She seems to have complex motivations that aren’t really explained. She even admits to being a nihilist which I like because it steps away from the whole “Event A caused me to be evil” and lets her choice stand as evidence of character. But her power set does bother me.

We are never ever, ever, ever, ever, going to see the male version of this.

Her powers are annoyingly gender specific and I would be fine with it if not for one thing. The fight scene at the end. She is one of three mutants in the movie and the only other mutant with powers worth diddly squat. And the whole time the movie builds her up as not just manipulative but genuinely powerful. She spits a kind of acid that just fucks your day up and is even shown to be effective against wolverine’s healing powers. I knew that the silver samurai was going to show up for the climax but I expected the wolverine to have some kind of interaction with her. But instead we get a girl on girl fight “cat fight”  which strikes me as kind of hokey and demeaning. And not just because watching two women fight is “inherently” objectifying.

This makes us fully developed characters!

We’re waaaaay past that getting upset by something as trivial as a cat fight when your character goes from looking like this…

…to a bald headed snake woman to show that she’s evil. Because obviously if she was pretty she’d have to be the good one!

No it’s just demeaning because it would be like if there was a black character hanging out with the wolverine so they brought out the only black villain to make them fight. Or a Canadian to, I don’t know, be polite to each other. Why couldn’t Wolverine fight her? It would have been interesting. Certainly more interesting than watching Hugh Jackman body slam a machine for the millionth time and lose his claws.

(Which I wasn’t going to mention but really he losses his claws. That’s just weird. Even weirder that they didn’t clean it up by the end of the movie. Like you know he’s going to get his claws back by the next x-men movie and now we are going to have to waste time in that movie fixing bullshit from this movie.)

And yeah that pretty much sums it up. Three women with unclear motivations and uninteresting story arcs that go nowhere. An honorable mention for Jean Grey  for being the ghost of the main characters conscious.

Oh sorry somehow I got these mixed up

Another woman used by writers to just literally say the internal turmoil of a character rather than showing it through action in the movie.  

My problem with all of this is less, women aren’t represented well in movies and men should feel bad. And more this is why we can’t have nice things! If you don’t care enough to characterize and flush out your women then you are effectively ruining half of your cast and if you are going to have three prominent women you better make sure one of them ends up with some kind of climactic action which expresses their desires too.