They said it’s not in any of the timelines though. I just chose to use is as an end to the bad one.
We actually discussed this upthread. Margold says it is.
Yeah he refers to the epilogue, then again, they did that movie and we know there are more x-men titles being made, not stand-alones. I don’t know if they will do this with all the Marvel universe movie series they have going but the alternate universe stuff was always heavy and frustrating for X-men.
My main point is, I don’t think the intention is for everyone to think all roads, aka all future movies, lead to the ending in Logan.
Spoilers
I don’t think it’s just that Logan now is conveniently being poisoned by his adamantium skeleton; I think whatever they put in the water/food supply that suppressed mutant birth rates and contributed to their deaths was shutting down his actual mutation - healing. The healing factor is the only reason he was able to tolerate getting the adamantium in the first place. With the healing factor fading, that’s why it’s suddenly poisoning him.
I mean there’s 4 decades left for Snyder and crew to mine with the Baby Xmen (also at what point are we as an audience supposed to call out that those characters are barely aging in that continuity. Scott Summers was supposed to be 20 years younger than Alex in Apocalypse! Damn good genes, Summers family…), so there’s plenty of time for adventures even without another reboot.
I’m just saying, as it stands today, their cinematic universe is basically saying, “So in the end, the Baby Xmen fight the good fight and have really heartwarming adventures, and then, someday lose, and then Logan and Charles go on one last road trip through the vast spoils of Trumpmerica. The end.”
Sure, that can always get retconned; they already wiped the shitty deaths from X3, of course. But for now, today, this is the last chapter in a story they’ve been continuously telling since 2000 (even X3 counts, since the wheels it set in motion eventually lead to Logan going back in time to fix things in DoFP).
So more stuff with McAvoy et all will come set between 83 and 2029. Heck, maybe we’ll even see a timeline reboot someday. But without that, it’s all leading up to Logan.
Sorry ,I think I’m just spinning wheels in this thread now.
This was a beautiful ending, beauty can be tragic too. I definitely disagree with that screenrant quote about their being “no poetry” in it. Poetry can be sad and tragic, and Xavier (and his human frailty) being responsible for the deaths of the X-Men is awful to wrestle with, but great writing.
And there is hope here in the ending. First of all, this is about Logan saving Laura. Physically, but also—hopefully—by diverting her form the path his life went down. She’s violent right to the end because she has to be, but there’s hope and the possibility of redemption in his plea that she “doesn’t be what they made her”.
The two of them also save the lives of most (all?) of the other kids that had made it as far as that outpost. They were being tortured and were set to be killed, but through the sacrificial actions of the nurse who’s name I’ve forgotten and then Logan, Charles, and Laura, they’re freed and ultimately saved.
The movie isn’t emotionally really about them, but it’s another bit of hope in the end with their survival.
And finally, this movie really isn’t about the preservation of the x-gene, and it doesn’t need to be. Mutants being hunted and killed is one thing, but suppressing the x-gene? That’s sad for the diversity lost in in the same way it would be sad if someone eliminated the gene for a hair color, but it’s not lives lost. Unless I missed some exposition, it just means no one will ever have an active x-gene, not that anyone who would’ve been born a mutant is now dying. Lives are not at stake.
The “dream” is dead? What does that even mean? The dream of mutants and humans living together was a dream worth fighting for, but it by definition requires mutants and humans. If there are no more mutants, that dream is moot, not dead.
Maybe we’re looking at this differently. I know it’s easy to say mutants and humans like they’re two different things, but they’re not exclusive. Not all humans are mutants, but all mutants are also humans. So again, when we talk about mutants being a thing of the past, we’re not talking about the extinction of a race in the same way tigers are (apparently) extinct. We’re not talking about a lineage being cut off, a dead end for families. We’re just talking about when you’re having a kid, now you know with a certainty that it’s not going to manifest one of these mutations. Again, sad as a loss of diversity, but humanity’s future is not as bleak as you make it sound.
As for your late stage big pharma capitalism ruining everything, or whatever, I think you’re just projecting. Life is always hard somewhere, governments and administrations rise and fall, etc. There was nothing about the state of the world in Logan that made me think we were headed for any particularly inevitable and total collapse as a society.
This is a tragic end for the legacy of Charles Xavier, his school, and the X-Men, but it is not without hope, it is not without redemption, and it doesn’t spell doom for the planet. I can still find a lot of beauty in how this closes the story of the X-Men, and I doubt we’ll see many comic franchises have the opportunity to ever give this kind of conclusion to their stories.
I may have missed it but I thought:
Logan mentioned a tragedy in New Jersey that Charles caused involving lots of deaths, it didn’t specifically say that they were only mutant deaths
So it make me wonder if we may be misinterpreting the extent of what Charles did.
Movie reports 600 injured and I think 7 dead mutants.
I recall the figures a little differently than Darth.
600+ injuried, 100+ dead, “including several of the X-Men.” With those figures, you could have easily wiped out the bulk of the school and the surviving team members in addition to who-knows-how-many civilians nearby (no wonder the government now considers his brain a weapon of mass destruction). Anti-mutant violence and natural aging take care of the rest, and suddenly you’ve got stoned-out Charles living in a tank with no one left to talk to.
It means exactly what it says on the box? I mean, I think it’s a little odd that you so casually throw this aside, but mutants were a lineage, a new link in the evolutionary chain, growing toward something and living in vast numbers, if Cerebro visuals were to be believed. A new subspecies, but if Apocalypse is to be believed, not even all that new. Now they’re all dead, by old age or the above-described tragedy, and they’re never coming back.
This entire movie verse has been about the struggle of mutants against humanity, striving desperately to find a workable balance. For Charles to prove once and for all that they can live in harmony, growing and changing with each other, learning and helping each other. Even Trask saw a version of that, hoping mutants would push humans in general toward greater heights.
The entire overarching plot’s been one of resisting oppression and baser impulses to strive toward unity and togetherness and acceptance. Now. . . it’s all for naught. The oppressors won, in the most fundamental, absolute way imaginable (if it weren’t for their little experiment, at least, but with the suppressor out there, who knows if these kids can even lead to more mutants?).
I mean, if you’re cool with a company casually and with no one’s permission suppressing the ability of new redheads to be born anywhere in the world, tossing it aside as a “minor loss of diversity,” okay, cool, I guess bro. But specifically within the context of the X-Men cinematic mythos, this is the endgame Charles and crew have been fighting against since 1962, and their world ended not with a bang, but a whimper. It’s chillingly sad. All those battles, and they’re undone by corn syrup.
I don’t think the picture the movie paints of humanity is particularly bright. A world where an enormous megacorp can insinuate a genetics-modifying agent into the global food chain with no repercussions or pushback, then start breeding a clone army, and eventually growing a clone army of de-empathized killer soldiers, and are able to (at least it’s implied) program their automated tractor trailers to attempt to murder civilians at will, all while rolling through middle America in an enormous paramilitary convoy, covering up the deaths of dozens of civilians at the hands of their cyber-modified mercenaries, in an operation spanning multiple countries and at least a couple of decades, buying out farmlands and eliminating the need for human labor callously. . . that’s not a cheerful world. That’s the scenario a superhero story normally presents to you and says, “Gosh, look how bad this is. Humanity is being crushed by forces it can scarcely fathom, much less defeat. Good thing there are superheroes to stop them!”
Except now, there aren’t. This company’s got free reign of the US, at least, for the foreseeable future, and has had it. There’s no one left to save us. We’ve bred out the folks this verse has put forward as strong enough to be our defenders. It’s bread and circuses from here on out. We’ve got our fast food and milkshakes and casinos, and humanity is content to be led along by the nose without a care in the world, while our masters do as they please behind the curtain.
That’s. . . not a cheerful world-state. It’s not necessarily all that different from our current world-state either, but that hardly makes me happier. As I’ve mentioned upthread, I don’t generally go to the movies for a sad ending. That might be on me for choosing to watch Logan.
Don’t worry Armando. There was a janitor who was frozen in the past in the same timeline. When he wakes up in the future, he’ll help save humanity from itself when there’s nothing left but Costcos, ads and Gatorade.
On a more serious note, I agree it’s a pretty bleak ending. I also walked out pretty bummed out. I got over it a little by posting here at Qt3 about the things I loved about the movie, and that made me feel better, despite how bleak it was.
It seems to me Logan is uninterested in whatever overarching X-Men plot has supposedly been established. Instead, it’s interested in using an indestructible character as a way to tell a story about the inevitability of passing generations, from fathers to sons to daughters, all connected to each other, all inevitably losing each other. I don’t think it cares about X-Men so much as it cares about being relevant to people’s lives.
Comic books, which were previously dopey power fantasies, are now mythology. As such, they’re used to interpret many facets of our lives.
-Tom
Hey man, I’m all for comics telling more complicated stories (even if I don’t always enjoy them–I’m a bit of a simpleton when it comes to my media consumption). I just kinda wish the director hadn’t gone out of his way to say, “No but Hugh’s wrong, this totally takes place five years after DoFP’s ending,” because even if the film was made without keeping what came before much in mind at all, he’s making an authorial call to include it in that mythos anyway.
Except in the world of comic books, especially x-men where they have a list of the top ten x-men writers, top TEN, one person’s claim is not the end-all. The other franchise is still going.
Pretty sure Mangold just chose a time after all the other movies and wrote his story thinking he’s free of most shackles. Apparently, people at Fox didn’t realize that Caliban appears in both, so maybe the same dude that was supposed to check for that sorta thing also didn’t flag DOFP. As far as Mangold is concerned, “My stuff takes place after every other X-Men movie.”
Based on the tweet answer and the wording, it feels less like “this is in-line with the other movies,” and more like Mangold nipping the idea that “Logan” is in an alternate future that can be discarded as “LOL, it’s Earth-812, not Earth-314 like the movies.” He views it as the last X-Men story, even if the particulars don’t line up as nicely as you’d like them to.
Well I am guessing when they made Last Stand they didn’t plan on a reboot series either. These comic universes are just that, universes. I view this last movie as a send off mostly to the actor more than the characters, and it’s a pretty nice send off for them…
There is a tradition of knocking out a “The End” story every now and then, with a wink and knowing nod that things will never really end. As long as sales keep up, anyway.
This was a really good one of those stories, by the way. A nice close to the Stewart/Jackman era of X-Men movies.
Fucking awesome film. Brutal, heartbreaking, touching, with a dash of hope at the end.
A modern western through and through.
Loved that “Shane” was on the TV as well.
I haven’t seen this yet, but I’m reading all these reviews saying how it was the first “real” comic book movie.
Did no one ever see Watchmen?
I don’t know what those reviewers mean. Logan is fantastic, but there’s no meaning of “real comic book movie” I can come up with that doesn’t already have precedent.
It’s just genre snobbery.