If you’re not familiar with the X-Men, you could make it 88 seconds into the 107-second trailer for Logan before you realized you were watching a movie about a Marvel superhero. Set to Johnny Cash’s spartan cover of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, the film’s first trailer looks like an intimate character study of an aging, gnarled man—one who just happens to have Adamantium claws and regenerative healing abilities.
Logan could supply a badly needed dose of subtlety for a genre often defined by pageantry and excess. It looks like X-Men: The Acoustic Sessions. Watch a battered Wolverine come to terms with his diminishing superpowers:
It’s reminiscent of the teaser trailer for Man of Steel, set to Howard Shore’s transcendent score from The Lord of the Rings, which promised a restrained, contemplative Superman film. What we would up getting was mostly explosions. Hopefully the Logan trailer is indicative of a film concerned more with human emotion than superhuman warfare.
Still, this is a superhero movie, so it won’t be completely devoid of action. (20th Century Fox—not Disney, which owns Marvel—holds the movie rights to most X-Men characters, including Wolverine.) Nothing’s wrong with some good old fashioned mutant fighting, as long as that’s not the entire thing. Logan is directed by James Mangold, who also helmed, fittingly, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, and the remake of western 3:10 to Yuma.
The best comparison might actually be Unbreakable, the underrated superhero film from M. Night Shyamalan, a horror director better known for his twists and gimmicks. Unbreakable, which starred Bruce Willis as a lonely security guard with strange abilities, was the rare superhero film that didn’t care about destruction, or even combat. Instead, it’s an understated story of a men grappling with tremendous power.
Logan comes out March 3, 2017, and will be Hugh Jackman’s last outing as the iconic mutant. Wolverine’s not the only one losing his powers.
