I watched Marvel's Logan tonight. It's...a very strange superhero movie. There have been a lot of boundary-pushing superhero movies lately, starting with Watchmen back in 2009 but accelerating with the gritty revolution. Logan is gritty, grittier than almost anything that has come out, but without the excess of Game of Thrones. But it is not, primarily, about being a gritty movie.
It's a movie about ordinary people.
True, these ordinary people have mutant abilities, but they are not trying to save the world. Or even themselves. True to form, Wolverine is being self-destructive and angsty, but he's neither the hero nor the focal point of this story.
The focal point of this gritty, dark, haunting superhero flick is an eleven year old child. It is tempting to make her a feminist icon, a badass little girl who gets stuff done and shows off her moves. But I don't think this does justice to her character. She's not your feminist protagonist, she's just a protagonist.
True, Logan is still running around with his angst and his adamantium claws. For the first half of the movie, he does the majority of the talking and the acting. He's clearly being set up to be the hero of this movie. It looks like a classic "save the child" scenario. The child is even obligingly mute.
But when she speaks for the first time, in a dusty town in Oklahoma, we realize it's her voice that we've been hearing all along. She has been the one forcing the action along, she is the one determined to keep Logan alive, she is the one fighting for hope and a new tomorrow. This is done through what is possibly the greatest acting job done by any child actor, ever. She can't talk for over an hour of the movie, and her ability to control her face, and to infuse guttural screams with different emotions, is astounding.
And that is the secret to this movie. It would have been so easy to create a "child redeems man" scenario with the most PTSD'd of the original X-men. The movie resists this temptation by putting the majority of personal growth on the child, a less common scenario that was both refreshing and hopeful in the midst of the carnage.
And carnage there certainly was. There was so much death, by bloody impalement, that at one point I was wondering if this qualified as a genocide. Soldiers drop like the cannon fire they are, and the largest plot hole is the strange survival of the head of security. Logan doles out plenty of damage, but I think the largest body count actually goes to X-23. A little girl. Doling out death.
For in the end, it always come back to her. She is the focal point, the head of the resistance to what is apparently a dystopian future of corrupt corporations and lawlessness. In the midst of this man's world, of cowboys and ripped superheroes and special-ops, a single, mute girl is not only a figure of considerable respect, but of remarkable empathy.
We see her grieve for each death, even those she's caused.
We see her panic at the thought of confinement.
We see her mourn the loss of her adopted grandfather, and then of her adopted father.
We see her make friends and lose them.
We see so many emotions, in between her scenes of terrifying death-dealing.
But we don't see her giving in to pubescent angst. She doesn't turn into Anakin Skywalker, sobbing in his rage. We don't see her breakdown. She is surviving in a cruel world, but at her heart she is a child who wants an attachment figure and a day without a cage. She is brave, so very, very brave. And she is so very careful.
All hail the rise of the new superhero, the ordinary human.