Fans who'd rather be kept spoiler-free till they find time to sit down and watch Hugh Jackman's Wolverine hack away at enemies alongside Dafne Keen's X-23 in Logan on the big screen are advised to keep off this article for now.
This article will be discussing Charles Xavier's (Patrick Stewart) tragic back story which revolves around the professor's mind as "a weapon of mass destruction." At some point in the film, fans learn of a terrible incident in Westchester, New York that injured around 600 people and left a number of the X-Men members and students of Xaver's School For Gifted Mutants dead.
Though this was a case that Logan was trying to keep from the professor, the film's co-writer Michael Green revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that early drafts of the Logan script featured a few physical flashbacks of the Westchester incident.
"It actually hits home a lot harder than the versions that really painted out specifically the flashback," Green explains. "Of course there are versions we wrote that were never filmed with the actual flashback of what happened, but I've found the experience of watching it is far more poignant to just know that it was something really regrettable and it was bad and most likely, friends were lost. Or maybe it was people we didn't know."
"I wanted to make a movie less about information and more about character," director James Mangold also adds.
While a physical flashback would help emphasize Professor X's backstory, Green is definitely right when he says a simple mention "hits home a lot harder" than other versions. After all, writers know the power of restraint and how much silence and limited information can evoke emotion in an audience. Green and Mangold definitely made the right choice in cutting the flashback from the film.
Logan is currently showing in theaters.
Read: Logan Screenwriter Explains Film's Surprise Villain
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