Daily Archives: May 9, 2025

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Comics Films (9) Logan (2017)

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(9) LOGAN (2017)

(2000-2017: X-MEN / WOLVERINE – I’d count Logan as the fifth X-men film, skipping Last Stand and Apocalypse as well as not counting Dark Phoenix)

 

O Fox – why couldn’t you have capped off your X-men film series (that is, as your own studio rather than as part of Disney) with this film rather than Dark Phoenix? Or Apocalypse for that matter? It was even apt as a narrative conclusion, further into the grim future in front of the X-men.

Although that does illustrate the difficulty of my usual practice for counting off the films I like within the series in an entry – in this case, the X-men film series and its Wolverine spinoff. Arguably, both should also include the Deadpool films from my previous entry, particulary the third film Deadpool and Wolverine, but they have a sufficiently distinctive quality for their own entry. Essentially, I’d be prepared to count Logan as the fifth film I like in the X-men film series – that is, skipping Last Stand and Apocalypse as well as not counting Dark Phoenix, to go from the first two original films in 2000-2003 and the two ‘prequel’ films in 2011-2014 to finish with Logan. (Okay, okay – I’d also count the Legion TV series but that doesn’t really slot in with the continuity of the film series). As for the Wolverine spinoff films, well, I’d count Logan as the only Wolverine spinoff film.

Based on the X-men comic storyline Old Man Logan, the film is set in a dystopian future United States (rather than the post-apocalyptic future of the storyline in the comics).

Why do I like it so much? Well, it helps that it abandons the ensemble cast of the previous films of the franchise (always a difficult task to balance or juggle) to focus on its two most intriguing characters, fan favorite Wolverine (the titular Logan), played by Hugh Jackman and Charles Xavier (or Professor X), played by Patrick Stewart. As the film opens, Wolverine’s mutant healing factor (which includes longevity) has gone awry and he has aged, as he is being slowly poisoned by the adamantium in his skeleton. Charles Xavier has been even less fortunate – as the film opens with him a fugitive tended to by Wolverine, his former telepathic abilities now turned against himself (and others – to the extent that it has been classified as a weapon of mass destruction) due to neurogenerative disease. It also helps that both Jackman and Stewart are at the top of their game at portraying the depths of their respective characters.

The plot doesn’t always hang together (and is hard to reconcile with the previous X-men film franchise – what has become of the other X-men beyond those that were darkly hinted to have been wiped out by Professor X’s misfiring telepathy?!). It helps that it mixes genre effectively as a neo-Western superhero road movie. The Western elements particularly loom large, with the classic Western film Shane a point of reference on a number of occasions – not to mention the cybernetic Reavers (who, as one of those aforementioned plot points, don’t appear to actually be any good at, ah, reaving).

Above all, it has more heart than any other film in the franchise, even if at times it is a raw and broken one. And I have a particular soft spot for stories of heroes at the end of their days, but who still rise to the call of heroism one last time (or for one last chance of redemption) – or in the context of the Western, one last ride into the sunset.

 

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A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Stone Ages / Stone Age Iceberg (Part 5: 8-10)

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Gjantija Temples in Gozo, Malta, 3600-2500 BC, by Bone A and used as the feature image for Wikipedia “Stone Age” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

 

(8) ICE STONE AGE

 

We hunted the mammoth!

As I stated in my top entry for the Paleolithic, the Ice Age is the Stone Age – or rather, the most recent period of glaciation or Pleistocene Epoch, the Ice Age of popular imagination and culture, almost entirely overlaps with the Paleolithic Stone Age.

I have only the most superficial knowledge of human evolution, so I sometimes wonder how much the evolution of hominins depended on the impact of Pleistocene climate changes on Africa – or the evolution of our hominin species, homo sapiens, which occurred entirely within the Pleistocene, or its migration from Africa, similarly depended on that impact.

For that matter, the Stone Age of popular imagination and culture seems predominated by that of Paleolithic homo sapiens – and Neanderthals – in glacial or sub-glacial Europe, perhaps due to the striking imagery of Pleistocene megafauna and the cave art in Europe depicting it.

 

 

(9) FIRE STONE AGE

 

It’s always struck me that no matter how much stone technology was instrumental for or definitive of this period, the Stone Age is something of a misnomer because the truly impactful and game-changing technology was not stone but fire.

Claims for the control of fire by hominins extends almost as far back as that for stone tools or the Stone Age – potentially as early as 1.7 to 2 million years ago.

I’m tempted to substitute the term Cooked Stone Age as opposed to the preceding Raw Stone Age. Certainly, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss might have agreed with me on that one, given his book The Raw and the Cooked.

But seriously, although the use of fire was not limited to cooking, its use in cooking dramatically changed human food habits – allowing for a much wider range of food, particularly allowing a significant increase in meat consumption, to the extent of biological changes such as smaller teeth and digestive traits.

 

 

(10) MARITIME STONE AGE

 

There’s the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis or Theory, proposing that the ancestors of modern humans diverged from the other great apes by adapting to an aquatic lifestyle.

That hypothesis or theory is highly contested, such that it is generally dismissed by anthropologists or other scholars of human evolution. The true aquatic watershed (heh) of human history might be described as the Maritime Stone Age – for the development of watercraft to allow humans or hominins to conquer the seas and other bodies of water. Indeed, that might date back before homo sapiens to homo erectus, with claims the latter used rafts or similar watercraft to cross straits between landmasses or to islands as early as a million years ago.

The Maritime Stone Age might also be characterized by the migration of humans beyond the African and Eurasian continents to the Americas and Oceania, whether following coastlines of land bridges or island-hopping. For the latter, the maritime achievements of Austronesian expansion and Polynesian navigation used functionally Stone Age technology.

For this concept of the Maritime Stone Age, I was tempted to substitute the Exolithic or Xenolithic – to describe those societies with functionally Stone Age technology, usually tribal hunter-gatherers, that persisted elsewhere as other societies developed into the Bronze Age or beyond, even into the modern period.