Last night at the FOX studio lot, a screening was held to showcase the Wolverine Unleashed Extended Edition, which hits Blu-ray on Tuesday, December 3. Although KSiteTV is a website mostly focusing on TV, home video definitely falls into something you can watch on your set, and I (KSiteTV webmaster Craig, dropping the editorial “we” for this review) love comics, so this is something that I jumped at covering.
I’ll completely admit that when I saw The Wolverine in theaters, I kind of forgot the parts I liked quickly because of that awesome (at the time) post-credits sequence. That’s probably all a lot of people talked about when it was over, which is a shame, because the movie itself actually has a lot to like, with some of it adapted from the legendary Wolverine comic book mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. Last night’s screening cut off right as the credits were to begin — I’m assuming the credits are the same as the theatrical cut, so don’t worry, you’ll still get your X-Men: Days of Future Past teaser. But without the teaser, it makes The Wolverine a more complete movie, about facing death and the people who either embrace it or are afraid to face it.
One interesting thing to me as a viewer is that in the extended cut, characters like Mariko and Yukio were both a bit deadlier and seemed to have more to do. There’s a scene with a snow plow and Yukio that I certainly don’t remember seeing the first time around! It’s impressive to me that such expensive-looking sequences were cut from the theatrical version of the film, but, I’d imagine that time constraints are also a concern, especially when you want to get as many showings in a day as possible.
Aside from the notion that Logan and at least one other character are mutants, there are conversations with a dead person, and of course claws and healing factors are part of the story, The Wolverine is almost not a comic book movie; it’s a character piece with a character who happens to be a bit extraordinary. Director James Mangold seemed to be a great fit for this film, as it was not a film made to sell toys, but rather, to get a good story committed to the screen, and I consider The Wolverine to have successfully done that.
At a Q&A following the movie, James Mangold described The Wolverine as the kind of movie he himself, as a viewer, would like to see. In doing so, he did make some aesthetic decisions, including the toning down of the crazy Wolverine hair from the comics and the previous movies.
“For me, you’re always trying to walk that line between some kind of relationship to the existing comic book art and at the same time having to physically make it work on humman flesh so my thing is just, there’s my own barometer of what I’ll reject, and I didn’t want Wolverine to look like A Flock of Seagulls,” he explained. “Just pushing that through 20th Century Fox when there’s been as many movies as you’re listing that have had his hair like that and they’re like, ‘Why can’t we do that?’ You’re like, ‘Because I think it looks like s–t and I’d like to try and do it differently.’ It was very much in keeping with the idea of trying also, given that the previous Origins film had not been extremely well-received, to try and kind of say ‘let’s rethink some things about how we’re doing thix’ and we were very conscious, even at the scripting phase, of giving ourselves room to do it,” he continued.
“I mean, honestly since he let his hair grow so long in the beginning and there’s people cutting it who may not know the official Marvel style, then maybe I can just credit it to what happened in the room with those two ladies in the tub. But, for me, I think he looked fantastic in the movie and I think anytime you can allow your actor within their own skin and their own scalp to be their character and not be separated by layers of — wearing a wig feel like wearing a hat! — [where] everything separates you from authenticity and that’s what I was after. And that relates to the claws as well, where I felt like some things got over-designed. I mean, I literally just pulled a page from Marvel Comics where I think it was Weapon X right on the cover and I said, ‘Make these.’ I think that the claws had looked so fake, frankly, in some other shots and movies that I wanted to just…to me, this was a film that wasn’t going to operate on the will the world be saved question so it was going to live and die by whether you’re interested in him as a character. The stakes were completely different; it may not seem gigantic from the outside but from the inside it’s an entirely different construction where there really is not central villain out to hurt millions. The whole thing is operating from a different architecture and from that point of view you’re kind of like, ‘How can I make the humanity of this character and his whole reality come to life’?” he said.
You can see The Wolverine on Blu-ray and other formats December 3. Pre-order your copy on Blu-ray and support this site!
You can read more commentary and coverage of the Wolverine Unleashed event at ComicBook.com.
