Alright, we haven't done anything this week because we're quite busy and working on some other things. But, we both saw X-Men Origins Wolverine last night and I just woke up from getting home at 2:30 AM and well...I'm still deciding. Tom is more of the X-Men guru, I only read a handful of Marvel titles, two of them being Uncanny X-Men and Wolverine. Tom could answer almost every trivia question on X-Men Legends 2, I can't. But, I still have X-Men knowledge and I still care about them because I grew up watching the cartoon and then have been reading those two comics titles.
Anyway, usually a movie makes an immediate impression on me. Iron Man? Awesome. Incredible Hulk? Awesome. The Dark Knight? Beyond awesome. Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer? Terrible. X-Men Origins Wolverine? Ehh, I don't know. I went with a group of friends to the midnight showing last night, and while I was in the movie, there were some exciting parts, good fight scenes, things that I was thinking "great job" about. After the movie I kind of gave it a less than enthusiastic "it was good" rating. When a movie does this, when it does not initiate that first impression on me of either really good, really bad, or definitely mediocre, it usually winds up being labeled, not so good.
(If you haven't seen the movie, there's SPOILERS from here on out)
My first disappointment came when I saw the credits, Logan and Victor running through time, through all the wars, etc. It was an AWESOME way to do the credits, but I was disappointed no chunk of the film would be given to that aspect of their story, other than 4 minutes of no-dialogue flash images. I had a worry that the movie would be more focused on the secondary mutants, the swarm of fellows they put into the movie alongside Wolverine and Sabertooth. I felt that the story actually did revolve around Wolverine for the movie, however, I now have settled on the idea that there were too many mutants in the movie. I know the title is "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" so they have X-Men in the movie, but I think this movie could have been much, much stronger had they focused on a handful of people, a small handful at that.
Victor Creed was done amazingly by Liev Schrieber. I love him as an actor and people had their doubts about him playing Sabertooth, I never did. He was cold, malicious, amusing at times, and just down right nasty. He was a great villain, only problem was that he had to elbow and nudge his way into the role of the movie's villain which was largely taken by Colonel William Stryker, who was not a movie villain. He was a scheming bad guy, no doubt about that, but villains need to pose a threat to the main character, Striker poses none to Wolverine. In the X-Men movies, Magneto was the villain mostly, great threat to the X-Men. Colonel William Stryker is a regular man, someone easily killed by Wolverine if he had the chance. Why didn't he? Oh wait, Sabertooth was there to keep him from doing it.
Sabertooth would have been a great main villain. The two characters have a great relationship, which I felt was very well played upon when Sabertooth says "No one kills you but me." They should have made their involvement in Weapon X a large portion of the film. Wolverine should have obtained his adamantium skeleton early on, and then focused the rest on Wolverine breaking out of Weapon X, killing a lot of people, and then Sabertooth hunting him down. They didn't need to create a motivation for Wolverine to get the skeleton just to kill Victor, it was like they went to outrageous means to get him to come back to Weapon X to get it done after he left it once. Just don't make him walk out on them so early in the film. Which bugged me too, he joined them, then five minutes later, "Nah, I'm not down with this, sorry and he walks away." And am I the only person who thought in this scene "Wait, he's just walking off into the jungle? They aren't going to stop him?" Then Victor says "We can't just let you walk away" actually Victor yes, yes you can, because you did!!! These fantastic artists of death and destruction just let him walk quietly into the jungle? Really, now.
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