'Logan' is an Ending Fit for an Icon

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.

Fox's X-Men franchise has seen a lot of ups and downs over the past few years. The high water marks (like X2 and First Class) have come just as often as the complete duds, and I'm conditioned at this point to have zero expectations when it comes to the release of a new film in the franchise.

This is also my relationship with most blockbuster game franchises at this point. While every other Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed game is experimental or genre-bending, the others are plodding messes, and we can extrapolate those examples across the wide field of games with little to no alteration.

Logan is the latest high-high in the X-Men series, and it's also an antidote to a lot of problems that are deeply embedded in the creative processes of both Hollywood and the AAA games industry. Understanding how the movie works is to generate some critical inspirational "takeaways" from the film, even for game makers.

Note that I'm going to be talking about Logan in-depth here, so there are some story spoilers!

The first thing that game writers and designers can take from Logan is its worldbuilding mechanism. The film has no expository dumps. No one monologues to camera or in voiceover about the utter corporatization of America, the brutality of the clear class divisions in the film world, or the apparent extinction of all but a few mutants. You only pick these details up in conversation or in context: a limousine full of young white men chanting "USA! USA!" while driving through a corporate security checkpoint, or a character's history as a hunter of mutants. None of it is explicit, but it doesn't need to be. It's unimportant for the story being told to us, but it is critical as backdrop for that story to be projected on.

Blockbuster games often mistake the work of worldbuilding by generating a ton of lore, and then presenting it as-is. Destiny created an immense amount of background information for their universe to be viewed in an out-of-game website. The idea, I think, was to supplement the things you heard in the game with deeper information about the aliens, locations, and items that you encountered in Destiny. What ended up happening is that very little of the game's narrative even made sense without the additional online information, fundamentally short circuiting its purpose.

What Logan gives us is a fiction of evocation without the pain of total, absolute explanation. We don't need to know everything about a world and in a world, and games like Hyper Light Drifter have done a truly spectacular job at evoking the shape of a world without dumping an immense amount of Star Wars-style lore into our brains.

The second thing to be learned from Logan is about character relationships. The dystopian, post-X-Men future that the world presents us with is absent most mutants. In fact, we only see a handful, and the relationship between Professor X as a failing father and Logan as a disappointing son dominates the majority of the film's runtime.

The two characters have an imbalanced relationship, sometimes tender and sometimes brutal, and it is further complicated by the Professor's dementia. That friction between these characters isn't one of hate, and it isn't one of complete ideological difference in the mode of something like the rivalry between Magneto and Professor X. Instead, they are merely human, and they have room and time in the film to be annoyed with each other, to be over-familiar, and to look toward the end of their lives with weary regret.

This is the same relationship shared by Nico Bellic and his cousin Roman in the now-classic Grand Theft Auto IV. The two characters are familiar with each other, and they have a history, so they are able to be annoyed by one another. Games, by virtue of us spending exponentially more time with them than any given film, have the ability to drive that character-to-character relationship home.

Professor X quipping at Wolverine is a limited form of Roman calling the player over and over on the telephone and asking to go bowling. It's an opportunity to understand a character relationship as something other than goal-oriented or murder-intentioned. When two people have a shared history, they will talk about things other than the immediate task at hand, and even the most fun of idle dialogues (in something like a Gears of War franchise) rarely hits beats that would make us believe that characters know and appreciate each other outside of the immediate context in front of them.

The third and most important thing to learn from Logan is how to die. Or, rather, how to end a beloved character and that character's position in the world? On face, it's profoundly difficult. We live in a world where intellectual property translates to cash, and the idea of closing the book on a money-printing character like Wolverine seems like the kind of effort that might make an executive or two whiplash their head around like The Exorcist.

It's the same with game franchises and characters. How do you kill of someone like Soap McTavish or Commander Shepard? The best answer that video games has come up with is that you do it in a grand, showstopping way. The music swells. The character slips out of another's grasp, or gasps their last breath, or sacrifices themselves heroically in a spaceship duel that we hear over the radio. These kinds of maximally-produced deaths play into the tropes of the big-scale blockbuster films that they're emulating, and they often ring hollow because of it. When a beloved character dies in a grand way for abstract reasons (God, Queen, country, or any of those other big structures), we're robbed of any kind of empathy. They become the biggest kind of hero in the broadest kind of way.

Logan gives us the death of a beloved character within a specific context. Wolverine, at the end of his life, puts his entire life on the promise of the future for his daughter and other genetically-engineered child mutants. The stakes are specific, and they're on-screen, and they impact characters in a direct and emotional way. That isn't to say that structure is ignored here. Rather, the "big scale" implications of the heroic death are palpable: The future of this version of the Marvel universe are Mexican children freed from the violent apparatus of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and who have opted out of the cycles of mutant warrior violence that birthed characters like Wolverine.

When Logan dies we see the stakes both interpersonally for his daughter Laura and for the rest of the dystopian world that we've been introduced to. It's a future for a world that doesn't look like the one we live in. It isn't a film that reasserts the dominant paradigms of how we live our lives (looking at you, The Road). Instead, it gives over the superhero genre to something else, and that isn't predictable or set in stone yet.

Logan gives us something new within a familiar framework of the superhero film. Much like the film industry, video games love to return to the same conceptual wells over and over again until audiences fail to find a connection. Then they go somewhere else, create something new. It's my hope that Logan can help spur that newness, that freshness, and provide a roadmap for how to approach a familiar conceptual framework without repeating the same ideas over again.

Or, at the very least, I hope Logan can teach us how develop worlds, show how they work, and then let them die.