An obviously very prevalent movie currently in theaters, Logan is (supposedly) the last of the Wolverine/X-Men movies, or at least the last that Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart will be a part of. I’ll be giving this review spoiler free. After all, it’s often better to target “Hey is this worth watching?” people over “I wonder what everybody else thought of it” people, especially when it comes to newer things.
I’ll give a disclaimer here: I did not watch Rise of the Apocalypse. To be honest I don’t even know for sure if it’s in the same universe, because of all the time travel and retconning that happened. So my review could be a little biased without that information, but it is what it is.
First off, is it worth watching? Yes. It’s a lot sadder than I expected, and not for the reasons I expected, either. The entire movie has a beaten and jaded feel to it, as in the beginning we see Wolverine and the X-Men are old news. From the get-go we get the sense of “What now?” as it seems that life for everybody just sucks.
Here is the biggest problem I have with the movie. It doesn’t explain anything that happened or the position that everybody is in. Early on a new character is introduced that I had never heard of before (not being familiar with the comics), and while obviously important, his relationship to the other characters or reason for being there is only vaguely implicit. The entire beginning involves a lot of hitting the ground running as nothing is explained, you just have to say “That’s how things are? Oh, okay.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying suspension of disbelief is hard here. Rather it’s a lot more realistic and ‘gritty’ than many other superhero movies, but to me Logan seems to be set in a dystopia without a clear basis of what bad thing happened in the past. I have no trouble believing that life is hard in this world, I would just have liked to see how “this world” got to be in the first place.
Here’s the thing. Even if this problem is purely because I didn’t watch Rise of the Apocalypse, I would still have an issue. Yes, you should always read the first book in a series before you pick up the sequel, but you still need to explain what happened previously in that sequel.
To be frank here, that’s the only gripe I had with this movie. I personally didn’t like how violent and bloody it was, but I can’t fault it for that, all things considered. It was just a feature that didn’t suit me particularly well. Other than that, the character interaction, the set design, the film score, everything worked out and was executed quite well. Many of the things I expected to happen did, but in this instance it was good. It’s always cool to think “Realistically, this character should just shoot the guy” and then have that occur half a second later. That means the characters are acting believably, and that’s always a great quality to see in acting.
So, is it worth watching? Yeah, totally. Just know that it’s really sad, violent, and more dystopian than you may or may not have expected.
KR Cooley 
Your issue is totally valid and makes sense, but I feel like this movie is meant to completely break off from the rest of the movies. It is separate and doesn’t rely on anything but itself. X-Men doesn’t appear in the title, for example – it isn’t an X-Men film.
That of course introduces the exact issue you have, where people with knowledge of the universe feel like they’ve missed important plot points. Except those points purposefully do not exist, because, from the perspective of this a movie, they old news and no one brings up those pointless old arguments anymore.
Funny note about the previous movie: the director of Logan accidentally has a continuity error in using one of the characters. By the time he caught it, it was too late.
Even the director wasn’t super concerned with linking the two movies, and your having missed it might have improved the experience slightly lol
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I have no idea what error you’re talking about, so I’ll take it. But maybe I hadn’t explained my case well enough: it’s not that it “isn’t an X-Men movie” that bothers me, it’s that none of the past events that made the characters who they are are explained. Saying “none of that matters” isn’t enough of an argument because I need clearer backstory, dang it!
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But they are explained. There aren’t any details, and they aren’t relevant to the story at hand. Also… no spoilers? So I’m not going to put anything movie related here, but here’s an example of how I view it:
Main Character is a Vietnam vet. Done
Could you go into more depth? Absolutely! But this isn’t that story, yet knowing that one fact already sets up a pretty good archetype of that character.
What is important is that something big made these characters who they are. That big thing? Everyone knows about it. It was huge! It certainly was talked about a lot back in the day. It really isn’t discussed now though; it’s irrelevant to normal day-to-day. Old news. The only people who ever mention it in any capacity are those who lived it.
That’s how I felt about the back story here. Things come up later because events of the movie are related. But how often do you talk about the Vietnam War these days? I mean, it was a pretty big deal, and yet, the odds of it ever coming up are probably closer to 0% than 1%.
That’s my perspective on it, and why I liked it. This felt a lot more real to me, and way less fiction of “SIT DOWN AND LET ME TELL YOU A STORY OF WHY EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS THIS WAY WHILE WE RUN AWAY FROM CERTAIN DEATH ON OUR WAY TO SAVE THE WORLD.”
Side note: I spent a lot of the movie imagining what things looked like to moviegoers who had never even heard of a mutant, and what these insanely powerful people must look like to them (and to the regular humans in the film). But that’s kinda off topic. I just keep forgetting to bring it up.
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