10 Years Ago, This Is How The Wolverine Set the Stage for Logan

July 26, 2023, marks the 10th anniversary of The Wolverine, which saw Logan (Hugh Jackman) head to Japan to meet an old friend and confront his past. The film was also director James Mangold’s first superhero rodeo before he returned to close out the Wolverine trilogy in 2017 with Logan. 

The Wolverine has since been overshadowed by its sequel, which is rightfully considered one of the great superhero movies due to its mature, down-to-earth storytelling and sense of finality. But forgetting The Wolverine would be a mistake. The script is refreshingly tight and character-driven for a 2010s blockbuster, plus Jackman is as good as ever (even with an unfamiliar ensemble around him). The Wolverine can be viewed as Mangold getting a handle on the superhero genre before really flexing his muscles with Logan.

Character-Driven Superhero Movies

The Wolverine debuted just over a year after The Avengers changed superhero movies forever. As a result, it feels like a product of the small sliver of time — post-The Dark Knight but pre-Avengers — when studios were trying to make more “serious” superhero movies and TV rather than building cinematic universes. The influence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t totally absent; take the post-credits scene here that sets up X-Men: Days of Future Past. However, for the most part The Wolverine does not feel like a film trying to emulate Marvel Studios.

The MCU has been criticized by some for its mile-a-minute comedy, where serious moments often don’t last long enough to land. Compared to the breakneck pace of such films, The Wolverine is a downright quiet movie. Rather than racing to the next set piece, it’s willing to sit still; there are plenty of meditative and moody moments between the action. Take the 20-or-so-minute stretch of Logan and Mariko Yashida (Tao Okamoto) hiding out in Nagasaki, which is only focused on character-building.

The Wolverine feels like a product of the small sliver of time — post-The Dark Knight but pre-Avengers — when studios were trying to make more ‘serious’ superhero movies.

As for the action itself, Wolverine spends most of the movie fighting Yakuza thugs, not CGI aliens or even fellow mutants like in past X-Men movies. This, especially in the bloodier Extended Cut, means more violent fights when Wolverine lets his claws loose. The strengths of The Wolverine can easily describe the Logan movie as well. However, in other ways the two films are quite different.

Influences of Mangold’s Wolverine

Both of Mangold’s Wolverine movies adapt specific comic stories. The Wolverine adapts the 1982 Wolverine mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller that saw the character go to Japan. The Japanese setting, the ensemble, and the opening scene of Logan mercy-killing a poisoned bear are all from that comic. The film even makes some improvements; Mariko gets more agency in the film while Yukio (Rila Fukushima) goes from a one-note assassin who lusts for Wolverine to a character in the tradition of Kitty Pryde, Jubilee, Rogue, and X-23 — a young mutant woman who’s Logan’s sidekick. 

Frank Miller’s comics are often film noir-esque. He brought that style to both Batman and Daredevil and eventually created the noir love letter Sin City. Claremont’s narration (written in Logan’s first-person perspective) feels right at home in a hard-boiled pulp mystery. 

Mangold carried over the comic’s noir influence for The Wolverine. However, in both films he doesn’t just draw from comics but from film history too. The Wolverine can be seen as a superhero version of, say, Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza or Ridley Scott’s Black Rain — action thrillers about men out of their element in Japan. That said, Japan itself also has a strong tradition of noir and crime films. Look at the works of Akira Kurosawa (High & Low, The Bad Sleep Well) or Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill). The Wolverine honors the cinematic traditions of its chosen setting. 

Meanwhile, Logan, set in the rural United States and Mexico, is modeled on Western films. It loosely adapts Mark Millar and Steven McNiven’s Old Man Logan, but mostly just takes the premise of an aged Wolverine on a cross-country last job. While the Old Man Logan story is patterned after Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (in the comic, Logan wants to provide for his family, a la William Munny), Logan the movie alludes heavily to the Old Hollywood Western Shane.

Logan has a sandy, desaturated color scheme, giving the impression of dry heat. Marco Beltrami’s score uses harmonics right out of the Old West. Even simple shots sell the mood, like the villainous Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) standing in a prairie field as a moving train rolls a few feet in front of him. The image of Pierce, visible only through the cars, feels like the style of a classic Western applied to the modern world.

Logan the Wanderer

The Wolverine is hardly a Jidaigeki (Japanese historical movie), but Logan’s arc does feel right out of a samurai movie. At the outset of the film, he’s left the X-Men and sworn off violence, his penance for killing Jean Grey back in X-Men: The Last Stand. A wandering warrior who renounces killing is a Japanese media trope (see plenty of anime/manga, e.g. Rurouni Kenshin and Vinland Saga) and in The Wolverine, the Japanese characters refer to Logan as a ronin — a samurai without a master. The film is about him finding renewed purpose as Mariko’s protector. When fighting her evil father Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), Logan declares himself the Wolverine once more and pulls Shingen’s sword from his chest like a reverse Seppuku — he’s come back to life.

Westerns and samurai movies are cultural counterparts. Take Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, which solidified Clint Eastwood as a generation’s vision of a gunslinging cowboy. It was an unlicensed remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo. That the same story could be told in both settings shows how similar the archetypes were.

The Wolverine is hardly a Jidaigeki (Japanese historical movie), but Logan’s arc does feel right out of a samurai movie.

Both Westerns and Jidaigeki recall a more violent national past while cowboys and samurai evoke similar feelings in viewers: power, freedom, and justice. In many stories of both kinds, the leads are wanderers running from their past and towards people who need them, like knights-errant of old. That describes Wolverine too, but he’s not in search of redemption. In both films, he’s a man who wants to die, but can’t thanks to the gift of his mutation — living forever means it’s all the easier to get hurt. 

Logan has his healing suppressed for much of The Wolverine and tastes mortality. Many characters tell him that what he wants most is an honorable death. Logan fulfills that — Wolverine has always found purpose in helping people and he goes out doing just that while ensuring that his daughter Laura (Dafne Keen) won’t grow up to be used as a weapon the way he was.

The Same Problems

As much as Mangold’s movies excel with Wolverine’s character, the villains are a different story. Take Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) — a literally serpentine femme fatale isn’t a bad idea on paper, and like much of the rest of the film, it coats a film noir trope in the skin of a comic book. However, Viper is a cartoon character. Her supervillain behavior and ostentatious green wardrobe stand out poorly in the film around her. She’s an early sign of the camp that hurts The Wolverine’s third act.

That camp has a name and it is the Silver Samurai. The comic version, Keniuchio Harada, is a mutant who can reinforce his sword (he needs to fight Wolverine’s Adamantium claws, after all). However, he’s otherwise a relatively down-to-earth baddie draped in ceremonial armor. Reinventing that armor as a 10-foot-tall mecha suit is a choice that doesn’t work, even if it does gesture to Japan’s love of robots.

The movie Silver Samurai, Ichiro Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), envies Wolverine’s healing factor and wants to steal it. This is a solid thematic parallel — Logan is an immortal who’s grown tired of living while Yashida is a dying man who wants to survive. However, the execution is proof that good ideas need to be more than just that.

Meanwhile, the villains in Logan, scientist Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and good ol’boy mercenary Donald Pierce, are serviceable. The film definitely relies on the actors’ presence to flesh out these characters, but that’s not an unwise gambit. The real problem is X-24, their attack dog who is also a clone of Wolverine.

I can see the thought process here — Logan’s greatest foe is a dark reflection of himself, reflecting his internal self-hatred in the movie. X-24 is also a loyal, animalistic assassin, which is what Weapon X tried to turn Logan into when they experimented on him. However, cloning is the sort of outlandish sci-fi that the film largely avoids in its more grounded approach. Neither The Wolverine nor Logan devised a capable physical adversary for Hugh Jackman’s character without betraying their tone.

Even though both films are imperfect, let’s remember that not many superhero movies take as many risks as these two. Despite having the same director, the films are a loose duology, lacking much narrative or character carryover beyond Wolverine himself. However, they are cut from the same cloth. And taken together, the two films refer to both identities of their hero. There can’t be a Logan without The Wolverine.