Wolverine. A review that scratches.

By now most of everyone has seen the movie but before you start this review, be warned that it may have spoilers to the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and you may not want to read if you have not seen the movie, which is worth a watch. Now with that disclaimer out of the way lets start in on this movie.

Wolverine is the first big movie to hit the month of May as we gear up for summer blockbusters. In fact, May has many much anticipated hits for viewers, but somehow the man with claws tripped over the starting line and stabbed himself with 6 skewers and is taking down viewers as well. To put it simply, Wolverine was not set on Stun and it did not Save itself from a Terminating review. Ok, that might of not been simple and might of been filled with nerdy puns but they are absolutely true.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is everything that the title says. It is the story of how Jimmy, or Logan, got his start in this world being birthed in the 1800’s. Wolverine is a character that all young boys have liked since they first heard of X-Men. With his raw attitude and defiance towards superiors, we all wish we could be a little like him. If you are a fan at all, then you know parts of the back story of this hero. He’s the Raphael, the turtle that is, of humans with superpowers. I can’t explain it but us boys love sharp objects, especially when we can run with them. So that should mean this slices it’s way to the top, but honestly I don’t think the CGI is even capable of doing so.

From the start we get to see Logan’s claws, the bone claws that make us cringe every time we see them and that is about the last time that we get to see CGI that works for the movie. As the story carries on and more characters are introduced the less the animators put in effort. I think they got over worked on the intro to the film, which was of epic proportions, and said, “Well that should hold them off with the action.” Actually, give me the intro a few more times and the movie would of got a little better, but it doesn’t, so I carry on. We do get to see some other Mutants that we recognize and that’s all good fun, until they die. I think to make up for the CGI, that looks like it was done by freshman in college in the year 1992, the writer added deaths thinking that would make us stay connected to the movie by the action. Right when you think a character is B.A., they get the squeeze, literally in some instances. Others just fade off so they can be brought back in a later Origins, /sigh. In all honesty though, the CGI is just dreadful and makes me wonder where all their budget went for it, because we don’t find it in the storyline.

The storyline feels jumpy and it kinda felt as if the story lurched forward in the way a new driver feels driving a manual transmission. First we’re jumping through some years, which feels fine, and then we end up in 4th gear cruising or how his life was good, until the move to 5th and we drop it to first. Woops, wrong way! From there we try to get going in first and struggle to even make it to 3rd again. Here’s an idea, DON’T CHANGE THE STORY. What? Yeah, most the story of how Stryker and the mutants banded together didn’t really happen like that. Oh and Stryker wasn’t behind the Weapon X experiment. In fact, Wolverine didn’t even volunteer originally. It was put there to make the veiwer feel sympothy? It’s Wolverine, we know he has an effed up life always running, but I digres.

I don’t know. It could of taken one more step a few times and made it a great movie, or just used less crappy CGI, but they stepped backwards and fell into a ditch. After thinking long and hard on how to describe the movie in a whole, I ended up able to describe it as “Fan Film.” One of those “Fan Films” that are really good and you say, “I really wish this was in theaters.” A fan film meaning a film made by an over obsessed fan. The fact of the matter though, Fan Films are best on the internet, and in this case that is not that far of a stretch. If you had not heard, the movie was leaked weeks before premiere by someone off the companies lot. Many said it was good and just missing some CGI, wonder why they didn’t finish it. In most cases viewers said it encouraged them to see it.  So this kinda changes my mind on everything you just read. Maybe they had to rush it for release date making the story cutting choppy and the CGI sub par. We should cut them slack.

Wait! What? NO! I will be the first to say that you do need to go see Wolverine just so you get it out of your system and your not left in the movie stoneage, but I will also be the first to say it missed it’s mark and there is no one to blame outside of that studio lot. Yes, pirates got their hands on it, and yes people saw it before completion, but that sounds like a business problem that we should not have to pay for, literally. Honestly though, it feels like a story that execs feed to the public to get their paychecks cut.

Conclusion? Even with it’s great opening weekend of $87 mil, I think it’s going to have a hard time making out like a bandit, such as Iron Man. Yes, go see it if you read this far without doing so. Consider a 5 dollar showing. As I like to put it, it’s an okay $7.50 movie, but you only have two options, $5 or $10 in most cases. Scratch that. Go to a $5 showing and save the other $5 for a good movie like The Soloist. Origins comes across as a descently-done B movie but a very sub par Hollywood movie and with the name like “Origins” we can expect a few more. Hopefully next time they will spend some more time on the cutting/special FX floor, unlike this review.

3 thoughts on “Wolverine. A review that scratches.

  1. yes. yes to it all. way to bring it back into perspective in that second to last paragraph ha. another sucky thing about the film was that they actually did use some grade-A mutants, but totally underplayed all of them! come on! give gambit and deadpool more credibility than 5 lines and a well-beyond unrealistic death scene.
    it did have the makings to be a potentially good movie, but they strayed too far from the original films. this movie was just too far fetched, even by marvel standards. at least the first three films had some sort of ties with the real world and other goings-on.

  2. When I started reading this review I almost felt bad because my knowledge of computers at times ruins some computer claims in movies, I cannot even imagine if I could tell the different lenses or cgi tricks being used… but then I remembered that I too can recognize horrible CGI and it was distracting in this move. I thought character development was just all over the place… it had potential but the movie was poorly executed.

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