What originally attracted to me about Wolverine, in my opinion the best Marvel Comic character (sorry Spider-Man) was the deep character development that occurred within the comic book series. Wolverine had substance and not a two dimension character. You can't say much about that with The Hulk, many of the X-Men characters, or even Iron-Man. The DC equivalent would be Batman; however, Batman is still the "king of the mountain" so to say in one large part of having better villians than Wolverine.
Jim Logan (a.k.a. Wolverine) had to deal with a lot of tragedies, from his childhood up to his Adamantium transformation as Weapon X. He has always been the anti-hero and had to constantly fight his animal instincts to try and be a civil man. In my opinion, the best portion of the Wolverine comic series was when went to Japan as a means to get peace with himself or reset himself physically, emotionally, spiritually, or a combination of them. That is where the character development grew the most, instead of the typical "I'm fighting for the X-Men and I'm going to kick ass."
After X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a stink pile of a movie, it is deserving to get Wolverine back on track, so to say. What the filmmakers did was extract many story and character developments from his Japanese times into the latest movie "The Wolverine". And so far, they did a pretty good job.
There might be some weaknesses here or there in this movie (no movie is perfect), but "The Wolverine" has more pros than cons. It was not a completely mindless action film. Jim Logan, performed awesomely again by Hugh Jackman, is back in isolation, trying to find peace after the events of X-Men 3. Yet in certain circumstances, he is on a plane to Tokyo and certain things happen - sorry no spoilers. Yet through these events in Japan, Jim Logan goes through character development - gasp! The plot made sense - ouch! The romance was minimized - Wow! There was not a lot of action for the sake of action.
Yes I could not believe my eyes and ears. "The Wolverine" was not a mindless spectacle of 3-D special effects and soundtrack loud enough to blow your eardrums. There was dialog, and in those dialog scenes it was quiet. Jim Logan's character changed from the beginning of the film to the end of it. And you did not need 3-D glasses to entertain and get the point across. You see J.J. Abrams, it's not that hard to do.
For all of the summer films I have seen in 2013, this is the best so far. I did not have to shoot idiot drugs into my system to enjoy this film. It had a balance of action, plot development, and character development. It is refreshing. It is PG-13, mostly to do with some violence but there is swearing in it.
P.S. Like many Marvel movies, there is a special foreshadowing scene shown during the ending credits. All I can say is that it ties into the Bryan Singer directed "X-Men: Days of Future Past" which is coming out next year.
So long BUB!!
