Breaking Down Everything We Know About Logan

In one month, Fox's new Logan will hit theaters. The film has already garnered much well deserved buzz around the two fantastic trailers. But aside from the quick cuts, the action set pieces, and the Johnny Cash music, what can we find out about the movie from the trailers? We break them both down to find out.

Logan Has Seen Better Days

"Logan... What did you do?"

[gallery ids="1084,1081,1085,1082" type="rectangular"] Before we'd ever seen a frame of the movie, rumor was that the Old Man Logan comic book (2012) had inspired the movie. Since then, we've found out that there are many things in the movie that are original. But some things are similar. First, Logan is an old man. And he has seen some things in his life. He is living alone in the middle of the desert the exact same way he was in the comic book. We also see his hands shaking either with fear or age. Either way that's going to be a big change for our favorite clawed samurai. We also see that Logan has scars in a scene from the first trailer. This is a big change for the character as well. In past movies his healing factor always kept him from having any long-term consequeces from his fights. It is clear though that his mutant powers have started to wear down over time. It's also possible that Logan's scars aren't only physical. We see a few short shots that suggest Logan may be abusing drugs and alcohol. We know that good ol' Weapon X has always enjoyed a good cigar or a stiff drink. This time though, we see him taking pills, a method we've never known Wolverine to opt for. If Logan has developed a substance dependency after his years of trauma, it would go a long way towards explaining the music choice from the first trailer.

A Much Smaller Team

"This is what life looks like"

The film will be attempting to strike a middle ground between the Wolverine stand alone films and the X-Men series. Unlike pervious films, Wolverine is not on his own. He has a team, even if it is much smaller than his X-Family.

Most prominently, we've seen Professor Xavier, played by Patrick Stewart. A 90 year old Xavier has fallen on hard times. Unless he's running the dingiest private school in New England, the Xavier Institute has closed its doors. He's also experiencing tremors that affect his psychic powers. From what we've seen, when Xavier seizes, people around him freeze in place. Logan and Laura appear to be able to fight it, but only with "maximum effort" (to borrow a phrase from another mutant anit-hero).

The other big tell we get from the trailer disproves a popular theory. the internet has been buzzing about the funeral we see Logan attending in the first trailer. The most popular idea so far seems to be that it is Xavier's, and that he dies in the shootout we've seen so much of. But in the ads we see Charles Xavier sitting in the bullet riddled car, having a conversation with Wolverine. We'll be doing a full break down of our prediction for the film's plot closer to release. In the meantime, consider that myth busted.

Finally, we get a little bit of Caliban! Caliban should be fresh in the minds of fans, as they got a glimpse of him in X-Men: Age of Apocalypse last year. This time around, Steven Merchant is playing the albino mutant. For those who don't know, Caliban's power is the ability to find other mutants near him. There have been several statements from the team behind the movie that Caliban will be a good guy in the movie. But from a clip in the trailer, it looks like the bad guys might end up torturing Caliban to hunt down Logan and Laura.

X-23

"She is like you. More like you than you know."

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The entire plot of the movie centers around Laura, a mutant known as X-23. The source of that name? She is the 23rd attempt at cloning Weapon X, a.k.a. Wolverine. And from what we've seen so far Xavier seems to have it exactly right when he says that X-23 is very much like Wolverine. We see her going into the berserker rage that characterizes Wolverine in the comics. We see her making an escape from a medical research center in the exact same way we've seen Wolverine escape from Stryker in X-Men: Origins and Age of Apocalypse. 

In Trailer 2 we also got a nice little nod to another source of inspiration for X-23's character. It would be very difficult to put out a genre film in 2017, centered around a super powerful little girl, without inviting parallels to Netflix's Stranger Things. Fox and Marvel have shown that they are leaning into that parallel, giving us an extended scene with X-23 stealing everything but the Eggo Waffles from a gas station.

The Reavers

"She needs our help."

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If we've seen much of anything in these ads, it's been the villains. The main group we are dealing with is the Reavers. The Reavers are a group of cybernetic mutant hunters, led by Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook). In the comics, Pierce is known for improving his allies with cybernetic enhancements. We've seen in the trailer that he will be back to his old tricks in Logan. We see one Reaver with a gun for a hand. One with a robotic hand like Pierce's. And one who has a claw for an arm for a short period of time, before X-23 has a disagreement with him.

Unlike in the comic books, The Reavers won't be working on their own. Since they are hunting X-23, we can assume they are trying to bring her back to her creator. That man is Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) who we see getting off of a helicopter in the trailer. In the comics, Rice's father was killed by Wolverine when he escaped the Weapon X program, and has spent his life trying to recreate it. Eventually X-23 kills Rice the way Logan killed Rice's father, and she escapes the lab. We expect many of the same beats in the film, though probably not in the same order.

Final Thoughts

"Someone has come along."

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Returning to the comparison with the Old Man Logan storyline, this movie is going to be the darkest X-Men movie we've seen. While it does not look like it is Xavier's funeral we see in the beginning of the first trailer, we do see X-23 and Logan burying something in the woods. Considering that they were originally traveling with Xavier, and that he's nowhere to be seen here, we think it's a safe but heart-breaking bet that we know what, or who, they're burying.

From the opening of Trailer 2, we can see that Wolverine and X-23 are in Texas. The Old Man Logan story arc begins in California, and follows as Logan travels across the continental United States. So far we've seen scenes in the city, in the desert, and the forrest, along with about five different cars, so it seems likely that there will be a lot of travel involved. Our guess though is that the film will began with Wolverine living in Texas, or possibly out of the country since the Revers seem to be sporting Mexican Police cars.

The final comparison to the comic book that might be worth making is that, in the comics, Logan is reluctant to use his claws again. He is scarred by something that happened in his past, and he does not want to go back to being The Wolverine. We definitely see Logan "Pop the claws" in the trailer, but we also see him take a solid beating from the Reavers when they show up. Our guess is that we will open with a passive Logan, looking to change his ways. Only when X-23 is in danger will he revert back to being Wolverine.

The Wolverine comes to theaters March 3rd. Be sure to check back before then when we will give our full rundown on what the plot of the movie will be.