James Mangold talks Wolverine, promises a character piece

As sad I was that Darren Aronofsky left THE WOLVERINE, I’ve been a bit reassured by new director James Mangold that the film still might turn out well. Most of the old script is being kept, and it sounds like a much more understated affair than most superhero films these days.

Mangold recently talked to The Playlist about the film, and had a lot to say about how he plans to handle it.

“You can actually just tell a story about this amazing character from the start, just the way they do when you read a comic. It isn’t an origin story, so I’m freed from that burden, and it also isn’t a save-the-world movie, which most of them are. It’s actually a character piece; it has more in common with The Outlaw Josey Wales and Chinatown. We’re not crowded with cutting to nine other action heroes. We can really make a movie about this dude.”

“This movie is an intense psychological and action-packed character piece,” Mangold promises. “It’s much more about Logan getting lost in these very insulated worlds of Japanese culture, gangster culture, and ninja culture. The fighting is all influenced by Japanese martial arts, and half of the characters in this movie speak Japanese. This is like a foreign-language superhero movie; it’s as much a drama and a detective story and a film noir as it is anything like a conventional tentpole film.”

You know, that honestly sounds awesome and EXACTLY how this movie should be. The first WOLVERINE was such a let down because it was essentially a retelling of his origin (which we saw in X2 already) mixed with the usual “too many mutants” problem of these movies, and the character of Wolverine got lost.

I also like how there’s not a “save the world” endgame, as really, who says that the earth always has to be at stake in all these superhero movies? Why can’t you tell a different kind of story using these characters? And it sounds like that’s what they’re going to do.