Thoughts (Which are unlikey to change) on The Wolverine

 

Well I've waited quite a long time before watching this movie! But I figured it was something I wanted to eventually do (Because it's Wolverine!), so a few days ago I sat down with a friend, and we watched the whole thing.

And what did I think about it? Check out below the break! As always the article will be spoiler-free!

I went into this movie with quite a bit of anticipation since I heard that it was one of the more enjoyable X-Men movies in recent years, and that it might break a bit away from the formula that we were so used to in most of the films.

However I walked away from the movie extremely disappointed.

There are quite a handful of issues with this movies, and most of them are important ones which usually will determine if a movie ends up being any good, or not.

Let’s start with the biggest one in my opinion: The characters. The main issue with the characters is that they’re all completely bland. None of the characters in the movie caught my interest, and in my opinion are all completely forgettable. Even Wolverine himself suffers from this somewhat although his case is less severe, even though that’s not saying much.

On the topic of Wolverine I get that in the movie they wanted to illustrate him being stuck in the past, and was pained from it, but while I got the idea they were trying to do that, I feel that it definitely could’ve been executed much better. It’s generally not a good thing when I have to use my mind to think of what Wolverine is going through as opposed to feeling it spontaneously in the core.

Also the character Yashida, who is the old person that we see Wolverine save from WW2 in the trailer, is also one that I feel could’ve been handled differently although this is a more personal preference I feel. Without spoiling the plot, and how it goes, I’ll just say that I had wished for Yashida to be more of a wise voice in the entire movie that was seemingly separate from all the other evil bad guys, but in the end I thought he just ended up as a generic person whose motive wasn’t all that interesting.

Next up after the characters is the main motivations of the characters in the movie, which generally acts as the movie’s driving force forward. There’s not really all that much to say about the motivations, except that I thought that it was mostly a jumbled mess, and a lot of it wasn’t clear, and sometimes even seemingly contradictory.

Also I was very much looking forward to the mortality aspect of Wolverine which we knew was going to happen in the trailers. And sure it happens, but I feel that it was just sort of there to add challenge to Wolverine it seems, and the filmmakers didn’t do anything interesting storywise with that particular portion of Wolverine’s down time.

That’s not saying that I didn’t find enjoyable moments in the movie though. My favorite part was probably when we discover what the main antagonist was intending to do to Wolverine from the first place, and when he pulls it off (Somewhat) that was the one flash of brilliancy I felt from the movie, because when it happened I got chills for seeing what had happened to Wolverine.

In the end though, it’s not really enough to save the movie which I thought as a whole was generally extremely forgettable.