Logan vs. Life

Caesar

on 3/24/2017

Life was a disappointment. I'm not sure why I expected more, but I did. Logan, although too long, was a thoroughly satisfying viewing experience. Logan ends Life.

smatticus

on 3/29/2017

I certainly don't think Logan ranks as "one of the greatest superhero movies ever"; if anything I thought it was a bit overrated, probably because I haven't really watched that many of the X-men movies apart from the first one and Deadpool (never really had any inclination to watch the others), and while I respect Hugh Jackman for sticking to this role for as long as he has and clearly he puts it all the effort up on screen here, I've never cared much for Wolverine as a character. That being said, Logan was a decent, impressively nihilistic film that hasn't been seen in the superhero genre for a while; unlike the last decade or so of DC movies, which think that "grim and gritty" automatically makes a superhero film "mature" despite having weightless "sound and fury" action scenes and virtually no depth of character, Logan's nihilism serves a purpose of making the violence really uncomfortable to watch (I found very little catharsis in watching it, unlike most superhero films) and the character losses and changes to the universe from the older films all the more tragic. Much like Johnmason, I enjoyed Life for what it was. I thought I would hate it from the trailers (Alien but with the Gravity instagram filter), and it does suffer from a mixture of story predictability, token character stupidity that we have come to expect in this genre and a weird restraint by the filmmakers to really show or even imply any real gore or nastiness (aside from one earlier scene, the film felt incredibly muted when it came to the horror aspect, as if they were originally aiming for a hard PG-13/12 rating but only just got away with a soft R/15 rating). I get that "less is more" in horror, but in Life, less is really less 90% of the time. As for the idiotic decisions, I do commend the writers in trying to avoid falling into the usual traps of modern horror films by trying to write in contingencies to make the human characters seem smart but the creature even smarter (if nothing else, it did give me a newfound appreciation for how dumb the writing in Prometheus really was, even though I still maintain the latter is a decent, handsome-looking Sci-Fi adventure film), but by the end, I could tell that they gave up, probably realising that intelligence is no substitute for good old fashioned human suffering in most of these films. That being said, the visuals and production design are impressive (as good as Gravity but for half the budget, even though less than 50% of the runtime is spent looking into space, whereas that made up about 90% of Gravity's runtime, hence the discrepancy!), the performances are good, even if a few bits of dialogue delivery felt weirdly stilted, and the creature design and conception is one of the more innovative and menacing in recent years of Sci-Fi horror. So while Life was a fun, but unquestionably problematic film, and while I had more fun watching it than Logan and am probably inclined to be more generous to it than all the pedantic arseholes who will inevitably come over from Prometheus internet forums to declare that any space film not made by Stanley Kubrick or Christopher Nolan is stupid by virtue of not being 2001 or Interstellar, I have to contend that Logan was the better film and will probably hold up better on repeat viewing. In fact, I almost feel as though Logan, much like The Wolf of Wall Street, holds up better after sitting down to think about it than actually watching it in the cinema. Logan wins.

Ethan8

on 3/30/2017

Logan is the better film. Life only got noticed for a minute because someone started a rumor that it was a secret "Venom" origin movie. One that was proven false the movie was rightfully ignored.