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Fox’s Logan is loosely based on the Old Man Logan storyline from Marvel Comics, but there are important differences that we explain here. Both depictions have their own strengths and depressing brutality, and they ultimately revolve around an attempt to find your place within a changed world.

Logan, however, discusses more than just finding your own place. It is the classic redemption story, the pursuit (literally and figuratively) of Eden, the paradise existing before the Fall. This is the central image in which all other themes, tropes, and cliches within the film revolve.

There will be spoilers ahead in this analysis.

What is Eden

The film is not religious, but it acknowledges a strong religious subtext. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Logan(Hugh Jackman) question the nature of mutants and it is casually mentioned that God did not want mutants to exist. A scene from Shane mentions the Lord’s prayer. “Eden” is a place often mentioned, but it is never quite found, at least not in the form originally depicted.

There are many other references, but none of them really matter. Instead, Eden is traditionally depicted as a human ideal, the highest a mortal can reach to the Heavenly state. Although the Eden story is well known from the Book of Genesis, it was John Milton’s Paradise Lost that instilled most of the images we attribute to the Fall of Mankind. It is through our desire for the Knowledge of Good and Eve that led us to defy God and be cast out.

Within the movie, it is both a location for Logan to take the young child Laura (Dafne Keen) and an ideal to pursue. The world of heroes is gone, lost due to a series of tragic events that led to the X-Men being exterminated. The mutants, however, are victims of circumstance and forces beyond their control, and the remaining mutants are Fallen within their own mind. A return to Eden, therefore, would be a return to heroes, especially that led by a young team of mutants who seek to save the world.

Logan, no longer Wolverine, is the remnant of the earlier age of heroes. He takes care of Xavier in isolation, caring for a cripple who barely has sense of his own state of decay. The X-Men are long gone, killed off in an alluded incident or possibly in some other manner. The events are unimportant to the plot; all that matters is the fallen state.

There are no heroes left, yet humanity carries on anyway. The stories of the X-Men are turned into comic books, Logan mocks the comics, explaining that they lack the brutality of reality and that their depiction of heroism is unrealistic. “In the real world people die,” Logan spits, half out of self-loathing.

At the same time, Logan calls into question the idea of Eden, pointing out that it is in the comics. But “it is for Laura,” Xavier explains. There is no barrier between fiction and reality, only that which you create for yourself.

Eden as Family

Eden is the destination for a journey that takes place both within and without. But Eden is also represented by the pursuit of the family.

Before Charles’s passing, he takes small pleasure in finally being able to have a “perfect” moment, one that is domestic and built around a new family, but he laments that he does not deserve it. He knew that he was responsible for the loss of his previous family, the X-Men, and he feels guilty. Family plays an important theme within the X-Men movies, especially in the newer films, and its loss is the Fall of Charles and Logan.

However, the loss is self-made. Charles admits that he “kept on running away,” just like Logan. He could not rebuild what existed before, even in his moments of clarity. Yet, he pushes Logan on the journey because he hopes that Logan will connect with Laura before his own passing. They are two people from a bygone era, but there is still a little hope that remains.

When Charles dies, Laura reaches out to hold Logan’s hand. It is a fleeting moment, but one of connection. Charles tried to rebuild something, and many died in return. But his idea did not die. Logan, frustrated, tries to reject Laura, but he ultimately succumbs to remaining heroic impulse left within him. He reluctantly abandons everything to lead her along the final step of the journey to find her friends, her old family.

Laura’s old family is not her only family. When she reunites with the other children, she does not give up Logan, and Logan does not give up her. Instead, he sacrifices himself for her and the others to give them a new chance at life. Although he dies, she is able to live, and in those final moments he is able to obtain a family once more.

Return to Eden

It is not enough to be present with someone to be family. Family requires love, and love requires sacrifice. Throughout the film, Logan, and the others, are constantly at battle with an animalistic side of themselves. Laura, especially, is vicious and raw, unable to be controlled, but she is tempered by Logan’s example. “Does she remind you of anyone?” Charles asks.

On the other side is a villain, Zander Rice (Richard Grant), who represents a different type of father figure for Laura and others. Through the company Transigen, Rice creates the new mutants while ensuring that other mutants are either not born or are killed off. Control, he explains, is his reason. He is attempting to become God through controlling life, and his father pursued the same path in a limited manner.

Rice’s father turned Logan into what he was, a brutal killing machine, but was killed in return. Like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, he was able to create, but he didn’t truly understand the responsibility. His son followed in his footsteps, and he was able to accomplish far more than his father. Not only did he kill off and recreate mutants, he was able to create a younger, faster version of Logan to serve as his own weapon, X-24.

Both Logan and Frankenstein are heavily influenced by Paradise Lost and the loss of Eden. Rice seeks “control,” but he really seeks power without control. He is similar to Charles, destroying those around him, but he is worse because Charles feels remorse for his accidental actions.

Charles is a “pharmaceuticly castrated” impotent God, like the fallen Cronus replaced by a new generation that so too will be laid low, but he still has power to destroy those around him. Rice, however, is like the mistaken Lucifer who assumes his power can rival God’s. Finding that he cannot be the supreme power, he seeks to dominate humanity by ruining their paradise. The one is sympathetically pathetic, the other is spiteful and petty.

Rice wishes to destroy Laura and the children because they will not bend to his will. They exist only to be tools, and, when they show independence, he seeks to destroy them. In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s monster told the doctor that he should have been Adam, not Satan, but the lack of love drove him to rebellion. The children, however, were driven to rebel against Rice because they were taught about heroics, flipping the moral dynamic of Shelley’s work.

This moral reverse extends to the battle between Logan and X-24. Although X-24 represents Logan’s younger, angrier self, he also represents unbridled power and self-interest. In X-24 is everything that Logan needs to overcome to become a hero once more, and the battle between the two of them is the battle over Logan’s soul.

In the end, Laura helps end X-24 because they are family, and Logan has proven to her that there is a better way. The fight, therefore, allows the children to have a new chance, and Logan’s sacrifice shows them how to become heroes.

Heroics and Eden

Although the comics are not real and Eden is not a real place, Logan gives a glimmer of hope that heroes can return. We do not know what will happen to Laura and the other children, but that is not the point of the film. It is Logan’s story, and Logan becomes a hero once again.

Earlier in the film, Laura admits that Charles told her Logan was dying, that he wants to die, and she can not let him die. Charles’s point was not an attack on the idea of death and the transient nature of life. Instead, it was that Logan can still make it to his own Eden if he is supported along the way.

Logan informs Laura that she will “have to learn to live” with the idea of killing others. After Laura claims that she only hurt bad people, Logan says it is “all the same.” These words are true for himself.

In his dreams, Logan is haunted by those he hurt, and it seems that the deaths and pain were for nothing. It was a nihilistic existence, one he could easily walk away. But he doesn’t. Instead, he literally charges forward to save the children and to become a hero. He willingly sacrifices his life in hope that his action can allow them to escape.

Learning to live with past bad deeds means committing yourself to doing the right thing when it truly matters regardless of the cost. True heroes are not measured by their bad actions but by their good. Redemption is always possible, and it comes at a steep cost. Heroes cannot die. They can only be forgotten.

The concepts of Eden, the family, and heroes are all the same, an ideal for a better life. Logan, in the most brutal way possible, is not a movie about hope but about pain and sacrifice. It is about loss. It is about death. It is about the end of all things. It is also about remembering who you are and trying to restore some goodness in the world, even if it is something that you can never enjoy yourself.