The Last Jedi vs. Logan

Photo Credit: Fandango

WARNING. This post is chock full of spoilers. If you haven’t seen The Last Jedi or Logan and have any plans to do so, abort now. I repeat. ABORT!

OK, for those of you still with me... I watched both The Last Jedi and Logan last week, the former at the theater and the latter via DVR. I consider myself a big-time fan of the Star Wars series and a reasonably enthusiastic fan of the X-Men series. I’ve seen all the films multiple times. I can carry on just about as geeky a conversation about these universes and characters as you’d want to have so I feel fairly comfortable stating that I’m confused. X-Men’s dedicated fanbase seemed almost universal in their praise of Logan. Most of what I see online from rabid Star Wars fans is disappointment in The Last Jedi. This makes no sense.

These films serve the same purpose. Both these movies kill off the old characters you love in order to usher in younger characters as our new heroes. As Yoda states, “We are what they grow beyond.”

Logan establishes very early on that every single mutant we’ve seen in any of the previous films is dead except our beloved Wolverine and Professor Xavier along with lesser known sidekick, Caliban. Every. Single. One. Magneto, Mystique, Storm, Cyclops, Jean Gray, Rogue, Beast, Angel... DEAD! It then goes on to kill Caliban, followed by Xavier, and ending with Wolverine six feet under. That’s right, even the title character is X’d out. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

I sort of get it. Logan is No Country for Old X-Men. It’s Unforgiven X. It’s a dark, dystopian western that feels appropriate given the shit-stained world we currently live in under Herr Trump. But director James Mangold and star Hugh Jackman turned our favorite good guys into sad, old, weakened fugitives then killed them all. And as an audience, we thanked him for it. So why the hate for Rian Johnson?

2015’s The Force Awakens already took out Han Solo like a punk, skewered on a lightsaber by his long-lost Sith-emo son. In The Last Jedi, director Rian Johnson gives Jedi-turned-wizened hermit Luke Skywalker a heroic death. He steps out of his self-imposed retirement to become “the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down.” He literally stands alone against the entire First Order and sacrifices himself to save all the good guys including his sister General Leia and all the new characters that are meant to carry the Star Wars torch. Fans hate him for it. Why?

Sure, floating-thru-space-Leia was bad CGI and desperately needed some brief explanation of how the Hell that was possible. Yes, Admiral Akbar’s untimely demise deserved more than one sentence of exposition. And I'll give you, a space-chase scene built around the idea that the fully powered bad guys would just sit around waiting for the good guys to run out of fuel was silly, but was every beat of Logan well thought out? Xavier owned a massive school with its own super-jet and mega-satellite. Now he lives in a rusted shed and Wolverine works as a chauffeur?

It seems to me that both these films were engaging, well made movies tasked with a morbid purpose. If you loved one, I don’t know why you don’t love the other.