A site called Scott Adkin Fanz has a spoiler review for X-Men Origins: Wolverine that they seem to have stolen from some other site – complete with message board comments and responses – and posted on their boards without sourcing. I’m only linking it because I can’t find the original review, and if you know the URL from where they got the review, I’ll happily link to that page instead.
Anyway, when I say the review is spoilery, I mean it will ruin the entire film for you, including who lives and who dies – including one death that’s surprising in its finality. The review leads me to believe that Wolverine may be a pretty good summer blockbuster, although it sounds more like a cartoon than a real film. Still, with some exceptions – like how Wolverine loses his memory – the movie outlined in these spoilers doesn’t sound like a disaster, which is what many of us feared.
But the review does raise a question that’s been nagging at me ever since the scope of the movie became apparent: what next? Fox isn’t intending X-Men Origins: Wolverine to be a one off movie, but as you can tell from the trailers and the commercials that have begun airing, this movie seems to reveal everything about Wolverine’s origins, and that is backed up by this review. While the film doesn’t quite take Wolverine up to the opening of X-Men, it certainly answers pretty much every single question you could have reasonably had about Logan. So should X-Men Origins: Wolverine do well (and I suspect it will), how do you make a sequel that feels like anything but filler? There’s been talk of finally getting Wolverine to Japan to get involved with ninjas and all that, but since that’s never been a serious part of the cinematic Logan, it’s going to feel like a bizzare, shoe horned detour (which it kind of was in the 80s as well, but we’ve come to accept that).
The real interest in the early days of Wolverine wasn’t his adventures, but the mystery of his origins. The only way to make a sequel to this film that would feel like there are stakes would be to make a movie that’s set in the post X-Men 3 world but that features lots and lots of flashbacks to Wolvie’s Japanese sojourn. Have present day Wolverine run into an old friend from his Far East adventures, have some sort of modern day problem that can only be solved by unlocking an element of his past. Hey, you can have that for free, Fox.