Director James Mangold revealed some details about “The Wolverine,” claiming that there would be a much darker tone and 90% of it would be set in Japan. He also stated that his intentions are to officially “reboot” the film with few tie ins to the first film except the role played by Hugh Jackman.
“The wonderful opportunity for me with this film is that 90 percent of it takes place in Japan, and even though other elements remain constant from the other pictures, namely Hugh Jackman, we kind of got our chance to reboot the tone and go a little darker and a little deeper than they’ve gone before with this character.”
Mangold also elaborated on the Japanese aspects of the film and its influence on Wolverine.
“There is a significant amount of Japanese spoken in the movie, and the cast is almost entirely Japanese. So there is this wonderful sense of cross-pollination between a very Western character and a far Eastern culture, and I think it’s very cool and something we haven’t seen so far. I think there is a lot of ways that Japanese film, Japanese fighting, Japanese martial arts have had an effect on this movie. And certainly the movie is dripping with Japanese tradition both cinematically, fighting-wise and philosophically as well.”
I think the mixture of cultures will be an added dynamic to this film that wasn’t present in the first film. Wolverine’s time in Japan was a great story-line in the comics and could be quite engaging if done right in this film. Although Mangold wanted to capture some martial arts style fighting, he also wanted to preserve to the animal nature of Wolverine’s fighting style.
“One of the things that has always been a feature of Wolverine in the comics is that he has a berserker rage, that he has anger and some of his abilities are driven by something more primal… Honestly, to get really pissed off—not cute pissed off, not quippy pissed off, not funny pissed off or cigar-chomping pissed off, just pissed off—that can then help drive the fighting, drive the combat. That is interesting for me and then for the character, some of the jet fuel underneath some of the combat in the film.”
From what Mangold has stated, the film seems to at least be more interesting than the previous. Perhaps he learned from his predecessor’s mistakes and this film may do Wolverine justice. A trailer should be out soon according to Mangold but he didn’t specify what “soon” meant so don’t expect it in a matter of weeks.
