The official trailer for Gavin Hood's X-Men Origins: Wolverine arrived in 2009 and announced the franchise's first solo Wolverine film with a visual ambition that signals something considerably more expansive than the ensemble entries before it. The opening montage, tracing Logan and Victor Creed's shared history across a century of warfare, establishes the brothers' relationship as the film's most compelling element. Hood understood that the film's primary obligation was to deliver the origin story the character's popularity had long demanded, and the trailer makes it feel like a worthwhile creative expansion, even if the film would squander its most interesting premise in favour of increasingly generic spectacle. Liev Schreiber's Victor Creed is introduced with enough menace to mark the character as the franchise's most criminally wasted villain performance.
First Impressions
The trailer leads with the century-spanning montage and the Weapon X sequences, conveying the film's origin story ambitions with considerable visual impact. The Logan-Victor dynamic is given enough weight to feel like the film's central concern, and Hood is promising a Wolverine film built around the character's most dramatically interesting relationship. The trailer makes that feel like a worthwhile creative foundation. The film abandons it in favour of something considerably less interesting.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes Logan and Victor's shared history, conveys the Weapon X procedure, and glimpses the film's action sequences with enough visual clarity to signal its production ambitions. Schreiber's Victor Creed is introduced with enough menace and physical authority to suggest a villain of real weight, and the footage positions the brotherhood conflict as the film's primary selling point. The film delivers the action spectacle intermittently and abandons the character drama almost entirely by its second half.
Music and Sound
The score conveys the film's action register with a dramatic urgency that suits its origin story ambitions with real conviction. The orchestration reinforces the most spectacular visual elements with a boldness that makes the trailer feel like a franchise expansion of genuine ambition, signalling a film reaching for something larger than the ensemble entries had attempted. The music makes the promise feel earned. The film reveals that ambition and execution were not equally matched.
Most Memorable Moment
The opening montage tracing Logan and Victor's shared history across a century of warfare, shown with visual impact and emotional weight that convey the brothers' bond as something of real complexity, is the trailer's most purely compelling sequence. The wars. The decades. The two figures always together. The film proves it right and then wastes it anyway.
Trailer Verdict
A visually confident trailer for a film that squanders its considerable potential. Origins is a significant missed opportunity built around one genuinely compelling idea, and this trailer's emphasis on the Logan-Victor dynamic makes the film's eventual abandonment of that dynamic all the more frustrating. The gap between what this trailer promises and what the film delivers remains the most honest measure of its failure.