Fancast Trailer Studies 101: “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”

By Andy Hunsaker, Fancast Movies

We finally got our first look at X-Men Origins: Wolverine last weekend, which brings the lovely and talented Hugh Jackman back to the role that made him a bankable movie star, and now it’s time to get a little more in-depth with taking this nerd party movie trailer apart.

Yes, everyone had a bad taste in their mouth after the haphazard mess that was X-Men: The Last Stand, thank you Brett Ratner, but this is a new crew led by director Gavin Hood, and we can only hope they can get back towards what made X2: X-Men United so great. The involvement of Brian Cox’s character of William Stryker is a good start. I’ve read no script and seen nothing about this movie beyond what’s in this trailer, but being passably familiar with Wolverine’s comic book history, this examination may be a little spoilerful, I’m afraid. Then again, there’s no guarantee they’ve remained unfailingly loyal to the source material anyway.

First Impressions With No Knowledge of Plot Spoilers:

1. We start with Contemplative Logan. In case we didn’t know by the clunky title, we’re going into his mind and getting his backstory. Now in the comic books, so many different writers have invented so many different chunks of his past that eventually there were bad ideas explained away as ‘memory implants.’ The smart odds would say that for the movie, they’re going to just chalk it up to one memory wipe during his transformation into Weapon X that puts him in the broken-brained mindset that’ll lead up to the first X-Men movie, so as not to needlessly complicate matters.

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2. The next thing we see is a young scared boy who lives in a big fancy house who comes across a dead man that’s probably his father. This comes directly from Wolverine: Origin, the recent book series that finally told the story of Logan’s childhood as a boy named James Howlett. That Paul Jenkins story, however, set the initial arc up as a bait and switch, as the son of the mansion’s groundskeeper looked a hell of a lot like our traditional Wolverine depiction. Yet it doesn’t look like there’ll be much mystery in the movie, as the sickly little proper boy in the well-to-do family is already revealed to be the man with the claws a bit later on in the trailer.

Yes, they’z some kiddie claws right there. They weren’t implanted - they’re part of his mutation! They’re made of bone! Surprise! Or… not.

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3. This is cool. James Howlett was born over 150 years ago, it would seem, as he fought in the Civil War as well as World War II and likely Vietnam to boot. He’s got that crazy healing factor that makes him age super-slowly, although it seemed to get him into general adulthood fairly quickly. Imagine if you aged so slowly that you had to be physically 12 for a few decades. Waiting three years between pubic hairs. Not fun.

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4. “The woman he loves” is Lynn Collins as Silver Fox. Yes, everybody’s got a cool code name, but in this case, her name is actually Kayla Silver Fox, a Blackfoot. She’s what Canadians call “First Nation,” and since a lot of this will be taking place in Canada, she’s not going to be called “Native American,” which I’ve heard is often considered an insulting term anyway (what with the massive genocide of all their tribes, and then lumping them all into one category and branding them with the name of their killers and all). As all loves in Logan’s life, it’s due to end in some kind of tragedy.

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5. Unfortunately, we can’t get Brian Cox back to play a younger version of himself, as cool as that would be. But we do get Danny Huston stepping into the role of younger William Stryker, the architect of Logan’s eternal torment and who would become mutantkind’s worst enemy in X2. He’s throwing together a military team of superfreaks built in his secret hero factory. He put that unbreakable metal adamantium in Logan’s bones, and he’s tried to distill his mutant healing factor to implant it into other people, with mixed results. He’s got his own super-squad, and he’ll likely call it all Weapon X. Naturally, Logan goes rogue and Stryker’s got to fail to bring him back into the fold - but it’s a long-standing plot point that the nefarious government forces behind his creation keep trying to capture, subdue and rebrainwash him into being their faithful agent again. Almost like The A-Team.

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6. That brings us to Wade Wilson, as played by Ryan Reynolds. I know a good deal about this guy, as he’s one of my personal favorite characters, despite his utterly lame early appearances at the hands of one of most reviled “creators” in all of comic-dom, one Rob Liefeld. Deadpool got a lot better once he found his way to the hands of writer Joe Kelly, who fleshed him out into this gloriously insane and hilarious character who could move from slapstick comedy to utterly disturbing tragedy with an amazing ease. Kelly also created an origin for him that was profoundly twisted and dark, and with the way this film looks to be set up, most of that is going to get tossed by the wayside. They’ll likely only keep the bullet points - Wilson is a sword-wielding mercenary who gets stricken with cancer, and the cure is an artificially implanted version of Wolverine’s regenerative abilities. It works to keep him alive, but something’s wrong with the process and it eventually disfigures Wilson by being overactive and constantly scabbing over and making his skin a fugly farm, and his hair all falls out to boot. Yet as we see above, Reynolds still looks as purty as ever, initially making people go HEY THEY HAVE SCREWED UP. But then, there’s this flash later in the trailer.

The guy in the air is bald, and you can’t really see his face, but the red pants and flippy-kicky stuff would seem to indicate Deadpool, so there’s a chance Reynolds will scar up his face like he’s supposed to. As far as his code name goes, it initially came from the fact that he flunked out of the Weapon X program and was put in a reject holding facility, in which there was a constant pool going to see which reject killed themselves first. For the movie, I’ll guess that Wilson will constantly be taking bets on which one of their little crack squad of black ops goons will get killed in the line of duty. Or maybe he’ll just really like that last Dirty Harry movie.

This, however, is an interesting shot. We see Sabertooth aka Victor Creed (we’ll get to him later) carving a smiley face into a table. The smiley face is more of a trademark of Deadpool, as the latter is kind of a happy-go-crappy nutbag who would wear boxer shorts covered in smileys. Creed is more of a “write his name on the wall in your loved ones’ blood” type of person. There was a storyline in which Creed murdered Wilson’s girlfriend, so this leads one to wonder whether or not Wolverine will be Creed’s only archenemy here.

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7. Who’s this guy? I had to look him up. This is Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and for some reason he’s playing John Wraith, a guy who can teleport. Probably all you need to know. He’s the black guy, which means he’ll likely have the worst odds in Deadpool’s Dead Pool. They always die first. I still feel bad for my man Kincaid in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

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8. Who’s this guy? I had to look him up, too. This is Daniel Henney, playing an uber-marksman character called Agent Zero, which is an alternate codename for a guy named Maverick, who was a very Aryan type in the comic books - his parents were actually Nazi scientists. Then again, Marverick was kind of a doof character, so there isn’t likely going to be anyone all that upset at the game of musical ethnicities here. Too many generic honkys in comic books anyway.

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9. Here’s the money shot longtime Wolverine fans are stoked for. The adamantium implantation process is so heinously painful that Logan has lost his mind when he wakes up and goes all ‘berzerker rage’ on the people who’ve been tormenting him while being pretty well starkers. There is no bub. Only snikt. Snikt and death.

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10. Look at this guy. What a douchebag. This is “Gambit,” a ridiculous idiot who is an inexplicable “fan favorite” character. The fact that he’s so damn prominent in this trailer means they’re going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make this dingus seem “cool,” despite stealing his gimmick from a Daredevil villain called Bullseye and his look from Abercrombie and Douchebag. This will be the major flaw in this film. The only upside will be if Logan or Deadpool or Sabertooth or ANYBODY guts him and leaves him dead.

11. Seriously. Gambit is a douchebag.

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12. Gah! Look out! Crappy slow-mo wirework!

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13. Ladies and gentlemen, The Blob. A giant fat guy who can kick Wolverine’s ass might make up for the aforementioned douchebag focus.

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14. Who’s the ice boy? Not sure, but it’s likely the debilitated young son of Stryker, the powerful mutant illusionist who Stryker uses as a weapon against the X-Men in X2. What with the eyes and all.

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15. Look, it’s kiddie Storm making an appearance! Played by someone who is already better at it than Halle Berry!

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16. Oh no! Wolverine just freed Gary Busey from prison! Where’s your god now?!

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17. Who’s this chick? Well, as much as it makes absolutely no character sense to have the high-born snooty aristocratic manipulator known called Emma Frost being held in a gritty ugly Weapon X prison, there she is, turning her skin into diamond armor. She looks to be a teenybopper here, so maybe she’ll eventually grow into the mind-breaking, ball-busting telepath who uses sex as a lethal weapon.

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18. Insane chopper explodey stunt madness! Which oddly brings to mind a shot from the Star Trek trailer.

Intentional subtle piggybacking on what’s likely to be next year’s uber-phenomenon? Or just utterly badass comic-book crazy slam-bang-biff-zowie action? You make the call!

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19. Finally. FINALLY, we end with the first bit of dialog from the fantastic Liev Schreiber as Victor Creed, Logan’s fiercest enemy who’s not all that different from him in the first place, in terms of animalistic nature and instinctual savagery. After watching Schreiber be a complete badass Jewish warrior in Defiance, it’s really not at all difficult to imagine him in the role as this remorseless killer. Now the question of continuity lingers, because when we last saw Sabertooth, he was a giant hairy man-mountain of few words and seemingly fewer thoughts, and only a brief bit of dog-tag business to imply that he even knew who Wolverine was.

Are we to believe that something happens between Origins and X-Men which turns Schreiber into a bulky, dim-witted stooge, or are we to simply assume that playing up the rivalry between Logan and Creed would require an actor of some significant substance as opposed to the ex-wrestler Tyler Mane, and thus no one should harp too much on the recasting? Sure, Mane looked the part as depicted in the books, but he was likely chosen in large part due to his size, because he’s supposed to dwarf Wolverine, but Wolverine’s supposed to be a really short guy anyway, and not the long and lanky Hugh Jackman type - hence the need to go with a guy nearing seven feet tall. Also, back when the first X-Men movie came out in 2000, comic book movies were still unproven, and if they’d cast Schreiber as Sabertooth then, the nerd outcry would have been immense enough to threaten the entire franchise before it began, and we likely never would have gotten the cornucopia of nerdtastic film sagas that we’ve been blessed with over the last decade. So we thank Mane for his vital “scrrrrream for me” service, and accept that in the era of The Dark Knight, we need to opt for truly exceptional actors to give these comic movies the heft they need to stick around and not burn out like the Schumacher Batfilms.

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So there we are. We don’t get this one until next May, but we’ve got a much better idea on what to expect now. Let’s cross our fingers and claws and hope we don’t all come away with the same overriding thought - ‘too much douchebag, not enough bub-snikt.’