Logan FULL BREAKDOWN - Visual Analysis & Things You Missed

hi guys I'm Eric BOTS and now that Logan has been out in Cedars for a little while now my therapist says I can talk about it without breaking down sobbing oh I wanted to take a deeper look at the film to explore all the reasons that make it great now obviously Logan isn't like most other superhero movies that we've seen it's less about connecting to the continuity of the other films and setting up a bunch of Easter eggs although there are a few fun references and I'll point those out and if you want an explanation of how Logan fits in with the x-men I made another video about that but in this video I'm going to go through Logan and point out all the other details that I found interesting all the choices made by Hugh Jackman James Mangold and the creative team to make Logan unique to the genre of superhero films and obviously spoiler warning if you haven't seen Logan yet but still clicks on a YouTube video breaking down the film somehow that's on me let's get started okay looking at these opening images the first shot of the film is Logan rising up in the frame as the car Jack lifts his limo I love this shot it's almost like Logan is being dragged out of his drunken despair for one last fight and when the thugs shoot him in the chest the title of the film appears as he struggles to get back up and I think this is foreshadowing where Logan will end up at the end of the film bleeding out on the ground as his powers fail him now this scene with Logan pairing all these guys to pieces it's already the most violent that we've ever seen wolverine james mangold is using this opening scene to set the tone for the rest of the film like brace yourself this wolverine is going to be way more extreme than the version of the character that you remember but also kind of the version we always wanted now bogans our rating was the decision made early on in the process mango wanted to be able to make a more adult film where it seems could run longer and be shot more poetically without having to play for a younger more attention deprived audience now before I move on to the rest of the movie I haven't forgotten about that opening Deadpool scene that played before the movie actually made another video about that but if things seemed missing from that video it's because we made it before the fuller version of the no good deed scene came out online and that version had a few changes from the original theatrical versions like Wade is listening to a different song and there's a Stan Lee cameo still you should check out my other video because I point out some Easter eggs and explain how that old man in the sea synopsis connects with the story of Logan anyway back to Logan how this limo has a digital display showing Logan's license with the name James pallet that's his birth name which we saw in x-men origin but this modern digital display is one of the only instances of futuristic tech in this whole movie the production designer said that originally the limo was going to have a touchscreen poker table in the back but mangled ultimately scrapped it because it would be too distracting they felt that too many superhero movies include anachronistic hologram and touch display technology and they didn't want Logan to look that flashy or futuristic instead they shot Logan with limited CGI spectacle making it more of a true modern Western and Road film that focused on the relationships between the characters there were also a few clues here that hints at the later reveal of Whydah mutants are disappearing first there's a radio call-in show where a conspiracy nut job claims now the theory is ignored but the caller in Sabine's spot on Van der Rice actually was dispensing an anti-mutant toxin into consumer products also when the party roads are chanting USA through the sunroof check out what they're drinking that looks like an energy drink similar to the one that we see Laura drinking from at the gas station later on the production designer added this subtle detail because he didn't want to overwhelm us with the logistics of Rice's painted high fructose corn syrup being consumed by everyone just a few little details to justify it enough for people watching closely and yes there are some connections to the comics other people have already pointed out like Logan's clothes look similar to his apparent suggestible brain and Greenwood Cemetery does show up a few times in the Marvel comics and of course this whole version the character is based loosely on the old man Logan comics with Logan as an old grizzled recluse on a violent road trip but really of than that this movie is nothing like that comic which is super insane and stylized and it contains a ton of Marvel property characters that Fox doesn't have the rights to the author of old man Logan actually suggested early on that they could try to adapt it swapping out Hulk with blob and Hawkeye with Cyclops after he like lost his eyewear and had to cover his eyes the whole movie but ultimately mangled and Jackman just went in a different direction anyway moving on to this scene with Logan and Donald Pierce Boyd Holbrook's a part cybernetic leader of the Reavers view interesting things here one notice how Pierce keeps referring the Logan and the other former x-men like they're celebrities saying he's a fan I actually had a theory about why this movie plays up the former celebrity status of the x-men and why x-men comics exist in this movie said I get into my other video now it's kind of a stretch that has to do with secret codes and x-men turned comic-book artists but it's super interesting so go check it out and there's also a few other possible references here Pierce says that they found a few torn up guides with police thinking it was either caused by Freddy Krueger or a tiger one of which is fictional and the other extinct but those also seem like descriptions for Wolverine and Sabretooth and Liev Schreiber sleepers whose was going to appear in this movie but they end up going another way I'll talk about that later and then there was my favorite joke reference in this movie which I brought up in the other video here says to Logan I heard you was in Phoenix yay was okay moving on to Logan's hideout at this smelting Factory south of the border now there's some interesting history behind this mangles original idea was to make Logan and Charles live in an abandoned bourbon distillery in Kentucky with Charles's room being an old Bourbon tank but then men gold was inspired by current events specifically the refugee crisis and the issue that the mexican-american border so they moved the setting to El Paso and Patrick Stewart said in an interview that this plot point of border crossing became even more relevant as time went on it may just be a case of life catching up with art because the movie was received and the ideas were first being discussed and the script in development before we had found ourselves worldwide in the situation that we are in with hundreds and hundreds of dispossessed abandoned people who just like the three principal good characters in our movie are trying to get to a border and cross it now at this point the idea was to make Logan's hideout and old oil refineries but the production designer realized that that would be too large and sprawling and after research he found smelting factories are smaller and more intimate more like a home and then a location scout showed him a photo in New Mexico of a tipped-over water tower and that and locked it in for him and I pointed this out in trailer but the interior of this water tank was indeed intended to evoke cerebro mangled liked how the holes look like a star filled and the metal dome keeps Charles's mind trapped inside a reversal of how cerebro works and this scene between Charles and Logan is a key moment between the characters mangled wanted a long rounded scene early on depicting Logan as a domestic caretaker and Charles as a plausibly senile old man suffering from Alzheimer's who at times doesn't recognize Logan and then ends up saying bitter cruel things to him Patrick Stewart said that he lost 21 pounds for the role and that's actually Hugh Jackman carrying him in the scene and the scene kind of implied some answers about this movie's timeline like Charles references the Statue of Liberty incident and Logan's cage riding past both from the first x-men film but really I think these are just meant to remind us of the film that we first saw these two men together and how far they've come also notice when Logan says we both could you sleep sleep I think that's a subtle foreshadowing of what's to come for these two both the characters and the actors who make their final appearances in the role then in Logan's bedroom we get some other references to past Wolverine films with his katana sword from his adventures in Japan and the Wolverine also his dog tags which we saw in x-men origins so again even a lot of these events were supposed to be erased or rewritten and date the future path this movie really doesn't want us to think too hard about the timeline but I want to talk about the look of Logan here this movie's director of photography was John Matheson he's the same guy who shot x-men first class Matheson explained that unlike first class nothing in Logan is meant to look attractive or glamorized everything is gritty and dirty and sun damage and the way he achieved that was by using just one overhead light to look like the Sun so that the light streaks down the actors face and hollows out the eyes mixed the scars stand out and make Logan beard looks ugly and unshaved and I think this lighting effect does a lot to accentuate Logan's age and exhaustion throughout the film and the next name makes Logan's deterioration even clearer with Caliban calling out his health problems and his failing vision which is why we see Logan wearing new glasses in the next scene Caliban also returns Logan's adamantium bullet which we also saw an x-men origin now I'm talking about Cal man in my trailer breakdowns but I like the details they added with this Stephen Merchant version for one his skin burns when it's exposed to sunlight making that Nosferatu joke he made earlier literal also his mutant tracking ability seems to come with a heightened sense of smell like he can smell the adamantium in the bullet and the fact that Logan's body is being poisoned from the inside this sniff gesture gives a little tech Atilla t-to Caliban powers like we can kind of see it in action as opposed to some abstract mental process okay moving on when Logan runs into Gabriella and Laura the motel we get another quick clue about the mutant mystery with this newspaper headline lack of mutant birth stuff researchers is there something in the water um yes there is don't drink it in fact don't eat drink or consume anything thanks great and I actually think that idea of the water supply being tainted is another concept taken directly from real-life headlines with dangerous traces of lead found in the drinking water in Flint Michigan now they discovered that in 2014 but many residents had been cleaning that for years with it just being brushed off as paranoia much like this theory and Logan it okay moving back to the hideout where Laura ends up with Logan and Charles and Pierce shows up with rest of the Reavers and here's where this hardy violent movie just codes berserk it turns out Laura is holding a severed Reaper head in the shot and even though I spotted that in the trailer it's still super intense to see her just like bowl it over like it's nothing and real quick I like how right as Laura springs into action we get this close-up of Charles smiling pretty much reflecting what we're all feeling in this moment like Oh 11 year old girl is murdering a bunch of people and getting her food this is great really I think Charles is just happy to see Laura act like Logan does he notices her claws her rage and here's Pierce say that she healed for Charles this is the first sign of hope that the excellent legacy may move on with a new generation we also see Laura's foot claw which is now x-23 was introduced in the animated series in the comics later Charles explains that the two sets of claws mirror the lioness which uses its front claws for hunting and back clods defensively and that's exactly what Bora does here using her hands to attack and her foot claw only when she's being held down now James Mangold mentioned a few movies that used as inspiration for Logan one of which was the gauntlet that's where Clint Eastwood have to skort a woman from Vegas the Phoenix on the run from some crooked cops and this case in the limo feels a lot like the chase scenes from that movie Eastwood was actually an inspiration for both the concept art for Logan and Jacqueline's performance mangled also said that he drew from movies like Paper Moon and Little Miss Sunshine which are both road movies featuring young girls also the production designer said that they had to build three different versions of this limo one for exterior shots like it gets shot up with bullets one for interior shots and then a third one that could go 100 miles an hour in the desert with insane suspension that's why in some shots the car looks merely torn to pieces but then it could still move powerfully over desert terrain and then when Logan and charles watch the video on Gabriella's phone we begin to get some answers on Laura's back story along with the other mutants and we get a quick shot of Wolverines DNA which is the same DNA that we saw being taken from the Weapon X facility in the post-credits scene after x-men apocalypse okay moving on to this gas station scene which we saw in the trailer and a lot of people are wondering why Laura isn't affected by this anti-mutant toxin and all this junk food and energy drink I think it's because she isn't a natural mutant like she was artificially engineered from Logan's DNA so maybe the gene therapy doesn't affect artificially enhanced people and then later when Logan sees the second half of Gabriella's video we get a shot of Laura cutting herself which is actually something Laura does and the innocence loss series in the comics we also hear gabriella describes a new x24 clone as something without a soul now mangled said that he conceived x24 as a version of Wolverine from the darkest time in his life the Weapon X days so basically everything Logan is physically without the soul that he gained from all the relationships that he's had over his lifetime okay moving on to Oklahoma City now in an early version of the story they were going to go to Vegas but mangled insisted that the direction of this roadtrip be kind of linear and not go too far wet however this was not in Harrah's Casino in New Orleans where apparently it's illegal for children to even set foot inside a casino like legally the governor of the state would have had to escort Daphne Kane around the casino premises so even though most of this movie was shot on location in camera with practical effects these shots of Laura simply walking through the casino had to be shot on a soundstage using green screen and upstairs from the hotel room more and Charles watched the classic Western film Shane and Shane was another huge inspiration for the film it features a lone fighter putting himself in danger to protect a family from encroaching on their land which is exactly what bogan does with a Morrison family later on and then of course Shane's iconic ending absolutely inspired Logan's endings with Laura repeating these final lines that Shane gives this teary-eyed dopey looking kid before limping off to his death maybe I think it's meant for interpretation also apparently Patrick Stewart improvised this line about seeing Shane in a theater as a young boy like one of the actors earliest memories was seeing the film in a cinema in Great Britain and while this was happening Logan flips through the transition medical files and briefly we see bobbies paperwork which says that his source DNA was Christopher Bradley that was Dominic monoghan character from x-men origins aka bold which is why that we see Bobby have similar electrical abilities and then when Logan confronts Laura about her comic books he says that the stories were fiction from a self-promoting in a leotard now to me this line implies that the person behind these comics was one of the x-men in my other video I speculate that this self-promoting could be Cyclops who might have put these eaten coordinates in the comics to lead mutant refugees to a sanctuary in Canada and apparently there was a deleted scene from an earlier version of the story that involved Logan running into a sort of underground railroad for mutants run by another unknown mutant and I think that could have been Cyclops also as I mentioned before Liev Schreiber's Sabretooth was supposed to be in the story but he was left out because James Mangold didn't want a bunch of other mutant cameos I feel like Sabretooth could have shown up in this bar that Logan goes to when he realizes Eden coordinates were from the comics and moving on to Charles's Mass seizure in the hotel notice that when Logan struggles to walk down the hallway he looks super restrained and that's because Hugh Jackman had two crew guides restraining him with rope but really have you seen Hugh Jackman of the president needs six guys and then after they escape the casino news on the radio compares the event to the Westchester incident and that's the thing back east that Pierce referred to earlier which ended in Charles's brain being categorized as a WMD but before Logan turns off the radio we hear that 600 people were injured and it took the lives of and mutants including several of the and it gets cut off but I assumed she was gonna say x-men I mean what else was she going to say cast a Big Bang Theory and and in my other video I speculated that those seven could be storm Cyclops rogue Jean Grey beast Iceman Kitty Pryde maybe also Nightcrawler and Colossus but we don't ever know exactly and I'm not sure we ever will now why doesn't a film go into this in greater detail the screenwriter said that an earlier draft did actually include a flashback to this Westchester incident a mangled wanted to keep the story in the present to focus on the characters not the timeline or the details and he'd prefer the Westchester incident to be kind of mysterious than on the peripherals of the story and honestly I think the film is better off for it like we don't need specific answers to all these questions we just need to know that there was some tragic event in the past that caused Charles and Logan to be super guilty and then in the meantime nerds like us can make videos like this and speculate all kinds of theories on it now if you had any doubts that this movie is a Western the one time that we see Charles used his powers intentionally it's to herd a bunch of wild horses diam give this man a lasso and this family dinner scene again references Charles and Logan's time at his Institute and apparently an earlier script contain a line where Logan is asked if he's married and Charles says yes but he killed her mmm but that line was left out because mangled wanted this to be a purely picturesque pleasant evening and when Logan takes Charles upstairs Charles says this is what life looks like a home people who love each other a safe place you should take a moment and feel it and the reason this line is so important is for Logan's entire existence his regeneration and more or less immortality has made it so that he's never really been able to appreciate life and this concept will come back later now when Logan and Morrison head off to the water pump we hear Morrison explain that the paper corn grown on the neighboring corporate farms tastes like but that it's used for a corn syrup that goes into the energy drinks everyone's been raving about so we're Logan this further confirms the mystery form now I've already talked about the you know the drill confrontation in another video but I just want to point out how again Logan is really only lit with one source of lights the headlights on the truck again the DP is using a single light source to highlight the physical details on his arms and chest giving an over less glamorous shot that makes this a grittier more grounded scenes and then this scene back of the house with Charles and x24 is probably the darkest most shockingly violent thing I've ever seen in the superhero film and it's amazing to see how it all unfolds under mangled directions it begins with Charles's emotional confession over his guilt over the West Chester incident which plays out like Charles is about to be executed and he's confessing his crime but then when X 24 kills every member of the Morrison family this feels more like a home invasion slasher film mangled actually said that he couldn't believe that he got away with his dark turn going from a nice family dinner to this horrific violence now I mentioned before how mangled concede X 24 as the darkest version of Wolverine which really makes him the fiercest possible enemy for him really the only thing that we can imagine killing Wolverine in fact there's some basis for this in the comics there was a Wolverine clones named Albert that was a robotic clone developed by Donald Pierce and it turns out that the number of claws that I noticed in the shot in the first trailer was actually important it just applied to x24 instead of my earlier theory that it was jock and fun while it lasted and then this scene gets even darker with the box back deaths of Logan's two soul companions from the start of his film Charles bleeding out in the truck and Caliban going out in style with grenades and mangled said that he was inspired to kill off a major character at the end of the second act by the Cowboys a movie where John Wayne dies in the middle of the movie which was a huge deal because everyone was like wait John Wayne's dead but he'll are going to do now and then the surviving kids in the movie had to figure out things on their own which is similar to what happens in Logan and both Charles and Caliban final words are significant Charles mentions the boat that they were going to by the Sunseeker and Caliban turns Pierce's torturous phrase back on him by saying beware the light in both cases these men are voting light imagery in their final moments signaling that even though this is obviously the darkest moment of the film there's light at the end of the tunnel that will eventually vanquish their enemies and I think this lost retirement dream of the Sunseeker living on the Seas of Charles is what Logan is referencing when he buries Charles by this pond breaking down and saying it's got water and let's talk about Hugh Jackman's acting here he's really a top of his game and sure these small emotional moments are perfectly restrained but what really impressed me the most is his physical transformation throughout the film Jackman said that he trained harder for Logan they needed for any of the other Wolverine movies and you could definitely see it as the film goes on his exhaustion and deterioration intensifies going from merely wounded and weary and tired to literally every breath and step he takes being strained as if they could be his Lac and this is not easy for an actor to keep track of most films are shot out of chronological order so Jackman had to prep for every scene by carefully adjusting his physicality so that he wouldn't look any more or less worn down than the scenes that would come before or after it when the scenes were all edited together and that kind of discipline is definitely oscar-worthy in my opinion moving on I like how when Logan wakes up in the doctor's office the first thing he sees are these fish mobile things with the colors yellow in blue the x-men colors from the comics and considering how much this version of Logan hates that depiction of the characters it's almost like it's saying that he woke up in x-men hell surrounded by these colors that he's so tired of seeing and as Logan and Laura make their last weary leg of their journey to North Dakota a lot of people pointed out how their relationship looks pretty similar to Joel and Ellie in the game The Last of Us now I'm not certain that that was an inspiration but you could definitely see the parallel and characters look especially when Logan passes out in the car I've also pointed out how the end game of this story is similar to the movie children of men which is also set in a near-future world with a fertility crisis where a weary hero reluctantly escorts a special young female really his last hope through a war zone to a safe haven bringing harm to himself and those closest to him okay moving on to this outpost now it's interesting that those coordinates from the comic book actually lead to anything at all right so even if Eaton doesn't exist as it does in the comics the fact that they do lead to this lookout tower implies that whoever put those numbers in the comics did indeed have a plan to rescue mutant refugees so who was it now I go into one theory my other video but it's also possible that another group is behind this rescue operation apparently in the credits some people are saying that one of the camera units includes the term Alpha Flight now I haven't been able to confirm this but Alpha Flight is the name of a team of Canadian superheroes from the Marvel Comics and then when Richter communicates with someone over the border with the radio it's a female voice saying your Asylum is approved and some people are saying that could be Emma Frost the White Queen January Jones played her in first class before she apparently died leading up to the events of Days of Future past in the 70s but either way in the comics Emma Frost becomes an ally and she sets up a butan Haven which some people are saying this could be where the kids are going at the end of the movie but really I'm not sure if either of those will end up being the case if there's ever any people that follows lore and the other x-23 kids but we'll see okay moving on during the foot chase in the woods we get to see these kids in action and a lot of their powers do seem inspired by mutants that we've seen before there was Bobby Bolt who I talked about earlier and Richter is an actual character in the comics he can control seismic energy and I don't know if it's just because this healing serum is green but when Logan injects it and goes berserk it's kind of like he's Popeye taking the spinach right Hugh Jackman actually shared a video himself recording Logan's audio for the sequence and it's pretty amazing and then Xander writes arrives to introduce us of the Logan mentioning his father Dale Rice who was one of the scientists Wolverine killed at the alkali Lake Weapon X facility in Xmen apocalypse but I loved the decision to have Logan just kill Rice right in the middle of him explaining his evil plan because as we've seen Logan already gets it the radio collar the newspaper headline the corn farm and now that Rice outright confirmed that he's been flipping anti-mutant gene therapy into consumer products Logan doesn't need to hear anything else this guy's evil when he's got to go now when X 24 returns a lot of people are asking how a wooden branch on the tree was able to impale bogans adamantium skeleton but from the look at the angle the branch went through his lower torso off to the side probably missing in the adamantium but definitely hitting vital organs making this wound too much for Logan to recover from meanwhile the death of Donald Pierce is a lot creepier with the kids surrounding him and using their powers collectively to bury him and grass and freeze him and shock him and I think snap his neck but it's appropriate that baby the ones to kill him since he's arguably been more of a greater animated these kids than he really ever was the Wolverine anyway back to Logan and next 24 understand how Logan's adamantium bullet does go through the brain of Wolverine as he intended it just kills a different Wolverine and then cue the waterworks because as Logan fades away he finally connects with Laura as father and daughter with her calling him daddy and then he says this line so this is what it feels like now on the surface Logan is talking about death here the character has been fatally wounded and killed over and over but he's never really been at death's door until now and this looking away is a whole new sensation for him but another way to look at this is Boggan is calling back Charleston's advice to him earlier and he's saying this is what life feels like he has a family who loved him and by destroying x24 Weapon X Wolverine the darkest part of his past that he could never get over he's finally freed himself of his demons and it could be at peace he finally just live if only for just a moment and the final spoken line of the film is Laura's emotional eulogy for Logan as they bury him by a pond maybe connecting them in some way to Charles's burial site as Laura quotes Shane's final speech to the kid in the movie shame a man has to be what he is Joey can't break the mold there's no living with the killing there's no going back right or wrong it's a brand a brand that sticks so you run on home to your mother tell her everything's alright there's no more guns in the valley this is really perfect for Logan like saying he was a classic Western hero a loner with the dark path that he could never really escape as much as he wanted to we could never really settle down with the family he could only deliver them from harm and then go his separate way leaving the kid behind crying asking him to stay but unlike saying this ending is not at all ambiguous mangle didn't want a coy ending that lets things up in the air so this is final no claws popping out of the ground no pebbles hovering over the dirt and I mentioned this before but I love how Logan says farewell to the character by surrounding him with kids with body holding a Wolverine action figure I feel like we were around this age when we first saw huge accent play the character and these kids take us back to this place emotionally as we say goodbye to the first of the x-men who started it all okay that's everything I found interested in Logan now again there might have been some little Easter eggs and timeline stuff I didn't cover but honestly that's not really what this movie is all about but I've covered Logan pretty exhaustively already in my other trailer breakdowns and my other explainer video and the Deadpool preview scene videos so make sure to check all those out and if you like this video please hit like and subscribe to new rockstars and share this video around and check out our other videos which cover all kinds of stuff including a bunch of Marvel properties and if you really like this channel you can contribute to us on patreon thank you so much to all of our current patrons because they're awesome especially you Wilhelmina ebbesson you can hit me up on Twitter a da Voss with any thoughts or theories you had about Logan or you can follow a new rock stars on Twitter at new rock stars for updates on our videos okay thanks for watching bye [Music]

Channel: New Rockstars

Views: 1,437,416

Rating: 4.9007392 out of 5

Keywords: logan, logan full movie, logan breakdown, logan analysis, logan final wolverine movie, wolverine, logan dies, wolverine dies, logan death scene, logan easter eggs, logan timeline, x-men movie timeline, logan x-men references, x-men, charles xavier death, professor x death, wolverine vs x24, logan girl, logan daughter, logan x23, logan trivia, logan fight scenes, logan deleted scenes

Id: diA0gm3onSs

Length: 27min 52sec (1672 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2017