Not Enough Of A Good Thing

I've been a fan of Wolverine for 25 years. I have X-Men comics dating all the way back to the '60s. Needless to say, I'm fairly knowledgeable on the subject of Wolverine.

Yet, here I am, watching Wolverine, the Movie, being inundated with all of this new information that I didn't know about Wolverine and the Marvel Universe in general. Here's a sampling of the revelatory bombs I was forced to assimilate:

-That Wolverine is about 170 years old, and has fought in nearly every war that the U.S. has participated in, dating back to the Civil War (even though he's Canadian);

-That he and long-time enemy Sabertooth are actually brothers;

-That Silver Fox was just a girl with a dumb power, and not a covert terrorist;

-That Wolverine is, more or less, immortal, and there's a ridiculous deus ex machina that exploits this fact to explain why he can't remember his past;

-That Professor X can walk;

-That Blob was a good guy;

-That Deadpool is some kind of freak with everyone's powers;

-That Wolverine's claws are actually bone, even though I have an Official Guide to the Marvel Universe (c. 1982) which quite plainly shows them to be mechanical in nature (wow, I really geeked out there for a bit);

-That Emma Frost never had any psychic abilities;

-That William Stryker is still a Colonel and not a Reverend.

What did I expect: It's a movie version of a comic book. Of course they're going to change things that aren't easily explained or don't seem cool enough.

But it can't be entirely blamed on the film's writers. Marvel has retconned Wolverine's origins and powers so many times over the years that the Wolverine of today's comics (hell, the whole Marvel Universe in general) bears little resemblance to the one that first appeared 35 years ago.

Oh, "how's the movie," you ask? Well, it's terrible. I didn't think it was possible to make a worse X-Men movie than the abortion that Brett "I Break Everything I Touch" Ratner foisted upon the world, but I was wrong. While I appreciate the attempts of the writers to do interesting things with elements from the comics, like actually using Silver Fox and the long-forgotten Team X, the film is basically just scene after scene of someone trying to kill Wolverine, which we all know is a Sisyphean task, as Wolverine can't die. And I don't ever need to see another scene, ever again, of two characters running at and smashing into each other from 50 paces, because, after having seen it roughly a million times in this movie, I'm set for life. Even the special FX really aren't that great.

In terms of a franchise, it's my personal opinion the X-Men Origins is dead (even though this thing will make $200 million, easy), because, once you get Wolverine out of the way, every other X-Man basically has the same origin story: So-and-So found out they were a mutant, joined the X-Men, The End. And that story is not exactly cinematic gold. The only two characters who I would even consider having interesting-enough origins would be Rouge and Emma Frost. But (and here's the problem with doing origins after you've already told the rest of the story) the previous films have already altered their origins so greatly that they don't even sync with the comics anymore. So, we'll see what kind of boring shit they come up with there.

Ya know, last year at this time, I was pleased by a comic book adaptation (and then was gravely disappointed mere months later by another) that had everything that I, as a fan of the book, would want in a movie version. And now, this year at this time, here's another comic book adaptation that...well, I'm not sure what comic it's adapted from, but it sure is terrible.

Not something I ever remember reading.