The Last Movie I Saw

Remember when good guys were noble figures, protecting the innocent and refraining from anything but the most necessary force to subdue the bad guy? I know that was a simplistic view of things, but heroes that conformed to that description were useful in promoting certain qualities that were likely to come up in real-life, albeit on a scale much smaller than than the cataclysmic battles popular in superhero comics, for instance. There's a place for mythology, a didactic purpose, as a culture transfers its core values from one generation to the next. But it's critical to recognize the difference between mythology and reality (which is always much more complicated and messy). I honestly can't figure out what a film like X-Men Origins: Wolverine contributes to the mythology of our society, and it sure isn't a realistic depiction of anything. It's an incredibly well-made and well-acted picture, but its ultra-violent misanthropy is so grim, so chilling, that it's hard to fathom what lesson we'd like those who watch it to take away from the experience. I hate to think that we've reached a point where visceral thrills are sufficient to fulfill our entertainment needs, but maybe that's the point of this film. Those minor elements that seem calculated to provide even a little bit of heart to this movie are so minimal in terms of the effort made to develop them that they might as well not be there. This is a little surprising, because I think those elements were front and center in the earlier X-Men movies (or in the recent Iron Man movie, for another example in the super-hero genre). I was disappointed in the film, but maybe moreso in what it may signal about how we define a hero these days.