We may all be sick of Logan/Wolverine, but that doesn’t mean 20th Century Fox is sick of making movies about him. After Deadpool, the studio was desperate to make another R-rated hit but rather than going for another meta-narrative, they went for the most sincere yet equally dark one they could find.
Based on the Mark Millar comic Old Man Logan, the plot revolves around the world falling apart around our favorite characters. Logan is losing his healing power, Professor X has developed Alzheimers, and the X-Men are no more. The two come across a little girl, a clone of Logan, that Logan must protect from Nathan Essex while taking him down. Hugh Jackman will return as Logan as well as Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Charles Xavier, with Stephen Merchant and Stephen E. Grant as Caliban and Dr. Xander Rice, respectively. There was some secret surround who would be playing Logan clone X-23/Laura Kinney, but this trailer revealed that it is Dafne Keen. Still no word as to who is cast as Nathan Essex, also known as Mister Sinister, but that likely won’t stay a secret for long.
So here’s a thing I never thought I would say about a X-Men solo film: it actually looks pretty good. The trailer has sort of an aging Western feel, the last big hurrah of a man whose seen too much and lost just as much. It certainly helps that they chose of the most beautiful Johnny Cash songs, Hurt, to play throughout. Even though the R-rating is more about the extreme violence, the trailer is more focused on the sentimental end-of-an-era storyline. It almost looks like The Last of Us except with a younger girl and no fungus zombie looking to separate people’s heads from their bodies. If this isn’t another case of the trailer being better than its film, this might actually be one of the few good X-Men movies, and certainly the first good solo film of the franchise.
Logan will premiere in theaters March 3, 2017.