The question of why Logan became the third comic book movie (as in, film based off a comic) in recent memory to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay initially provokes a cynical response. It was nominated, so this line of thinking goes, because it subtextually and textually takes the piss out of the superhero genre while being itself essentially a Western in the mold of Unforgiven or The Searchers. While still a "genre film," it's a genre that the large body of mostly old, mostly male, mostly white, mostly straight men who make up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science's voting body grew up on and have extreme respect for.
RELATED: Logan’s Oscar Nomination Is A Watershed Moment For Superhero Movies
Logan's metatextual piss-taking of superheroes is present throughout but it's best demonstrated by the hotel room scene where Logan (Hugh Jackman) angrily confronts Laura (Dafne Keen) and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) over the fact that "Eden," the North Dakota-located paradise and mutant refuge that Laura's late mother figure/nurse/rescuer Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) begged Logan to take his cloned child to, turns out to have been lifted from the pages of an old X-Men comic. (Created especially for the film by Dan Panosian and Joe Quesada.)
"Maybe a quarter of it happened, but not like this," Logan groused. "You do know they're all bullshit, right? Maybe a quarter of it happened, and not like this. In the real world, people die, and no self-promoting asshole in a...leotard can stop this...This is ice cream for bedwetters," he snarls. When you hear that line, it's not hard to imagine an elderly Oscar voter chuffing in agreement. Why YES, there are too many of these damned superhero movies, this hypothetical voter might think. Why, back in my day, we only had them in movie serials. And otherwise, it was nothing but Westerns and crime pictures all the day long!
RELATED: Hugh Jackman Reacts to Logan’s Oscar Nomination
The subtextual teardown of superheroes -- and specifically, other superhero movies -- is a bit harder to immediately grasp, but is an undercurrent from the very beginning of the film. Remember, this movie begins with Logan waking up in his backseat to an attempted carjacking and the title appears right as Logan is lying prone in the dirt, having been knocked down by a gangster.
"Yeah, ya see that?" you can imagine the movie saying. "That's what I think of your precious Wolverine! He's old and weak now. Deal with it, nerd!"
But such a cynical response -- it dresses down superheroes, so of course a voting body full of old people is gonna nominate it -- is, while understandable, also pretty unfair, both to the film and screenwriters James Mangold (who also directed the film), Michael Green and Scott Frank. Instead, it's pretty obvious why Logan earned its nomination. In the end, it's a powerful piece of writing that does what it sets out to do; namely, provide a swan song for Hugh Jackman's 17 years as Wolverine. More than that, it's also a brilliantly bleak, but not hopeless, meditation on aging, regrets and coming to terms with your actions.
Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Logan%20Is%20About%20the%20Story%20First...%20and%20Wolverine%20Second']
In order to accomplish this, and to its great credit, the film takes the general idea of the Mark Millar/Steve McNiven "Old Man Logan" storyline -- that of an aging Wolverine embarking on a cross-country journey in a dystopian America while grappling with the life he's led . Then, the film excises that story's plot and more cringe-worthy elements, both for legal reasons (an X-Men movie made by Fox, at least until next year anyway, can't include the Hulk) and for reasons of good taste (in the original story, the Hulk is the leader of an inbred clan of violent hillbillies with his wife, She-Hulk. No, really).
The final result is a story utilizing elements from both classic X-Men (the paramilitary force chasing after Logan, Charles and Laura are called the Reavers) and newer additions (Richard E. Grant's Dr. Zander Rice is an aged-up version of the scientist who tormented Laura as a child). It boils all of that down, for much of the movie's runtime, into a simple chase narrative, which makes the action clearly linear and very easy to follow.
RELATED: Logan Receives Surprise WGA Award Nomination
Within that linear story are plenty of somber, reflective moments where Jackman's bravura performance and Mangold's confident direction combine to sell the idea that Logan is haunted by his past. He's wracked with guilt over surviving whatever it is the film implies happened to the X-Men due to Xavier's wasting brain causing his psychic powers to go haywire. In those moments, you see how the guilt, pain and, above all, sheer exhaustion of Logan's century-plus life is weighing on him.
But what's crucial -- and helps explain why the film got nominated -- is that all of this is shown, not told. Granted, a lot of what winds up on screen in most any movie is the result of multiple takes, spontaneous director/actor decisions and so on, but at some point, somewhere, the decision was made to not give Logan any real expository monologue of any sort. The closest thing given to a speech by anyone in this movie is Logan's heartbreaking speech to Laura about how everyone closest to him dies.
Similarly, like Logan is with Laura, we're dropped into this situation. It's 2029, the rest of the X-Men and apparently the majority of the mutant race are gone, Logan's healing factor is gone somehow and he's being slowly poisoned by his adamantium skeleton. And we don't know why. You don't really learn too much about Logan's bad guys here. You don't know where the Reavers or Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) are. You don't know where Caliban (Stephen Merchant) comes from. It's somewhat the opposite of the more fanservice-y MCU films or even the direction the Fox X-Men films have taken lately.
The film tells you exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it, and only as it relates to the plot. But that's why it works. That's why it got nominated for an Oscar. And why it deserves to win is, it tells a great story first... and a Wolverine story second.