X-Men Origins: Wolverine/Headscratchers

• Bullet hits Wolverine's head. Bullet scrapes off Wolverine's adamantium skull. This is accepted as canon, yeah, so it in itself isn't an issue. But in X-2, bullet is fired, bullet goes THROUGH Logan's skull and is pushed out by his healing factor. So, did the adamantium in his head degrade over the years or what?
  • Go back and watch the scene again. You can see the bullet embedded in the flesh at the front of his skull. It's right there, clearly visible. It hasn't gone through or even into his skull. And if you're wondering why he fell down -- he's just been hit in the skull by a lump of metal traveling at probably something over 1,000 feet per second.
    • Would you kindly press the tip of your index finger to your forehead? What you should notice is that there's next to nothing between your finger and the bone of your skull. If Wolverine were to do this then there would be next to nothing between his index finger and his supposedly indestructible skull. There's simply no room for a bullet to embed itself "in flesh at the front of his skull", especially when you take into account the dimensions of the only slightly deformed bullet that pops out of his skull. There's no real explanation for this scene that doesn't conflict with Wolverine lore or not come off as complete nonsense. The makers of X2 decided that they wanted some false tension and a good reason for Pyro to go postal, so comic book rules or definitions of the word "indestructible" could go to Hell, I guess.
      • Don't have the movie in front of me, but the bullet should have flattened itself as it hit his head. There's more than enough flesh in front of the skull to hold a flattened bullet in it.
  • Wouldn't the adamantium bullet that hit his skull (or marks from it) have shown up on the X-ray Wolverine got in the first X-men movie?
• How the HELL does Jimmy stay such a decent human being when he spent a hundred years with a brother as rotten as Victor?
  • And for that matter, spending a century with somebody ought to let you know him well enough to realize that he would have abandonment issues from losing the only person that would understand him (literally) forever.
• And if adamantium breaks adamantium, how come both Weapon XI's swords and Logan's claws were still intact at the end of their fight?
  • Not enough force?
  • This JBM that there's no reason why Stryker's bullets should penetrate an, essentially, indestructible material. Even if they are made of the same material. However powerful the gun, they should bounce off/stop/deflect from his skull with no damage to either skull or bullet.
  • For the same reason why bullets made of steel and fired from a gun will penetrate steel plating but steel swords won't cut through each other. Bullets are made for penetration, blades are made for cutting.
    • Bullets are made mainly from lead.
    • ....no, they're not. Most bullets have a lead core, but they have metal jackets to allow them to penetrate.
  • Bullets and blades are both made for penetration, and under the right conditions, the point of a knife can go through a bullet proof vest easier than a bullet. The adamantium bullets just plain didn't make sense. The cutting power of an adamantium blade comes from being able to be sharpened to have an edge that a lesser material couldn't hold. Those bullets weren't especially sharp, and even they were, a hand gun wouldn't be able to give them the force needed to puncture something as hard as adamantium.
• Where exactly are Weapon XI's swords hiding? Wolverine's claws supposedly fit into the length of his forearms. That's a little harder with a freaking three foot katana.
  • Well that's pretty much what it's suppose to be, supposedly it rests between the wrist and the elbow.
    • Unless you're some kind of giant, your forearms are way too short to conceal something that bulky.
• In the first movie the X-Men don't know why Logan has lost his memory. You'd think that two bullet holes in the adamantium skull would be their first clue.
  • Doesn't Wolverine's healing factor also extend to his skeleton, too?
    • Skeleton, yes. But not to the adamantium covering it. He would have skull there, but there would be two gaps in the adamantium.
    • Actually he doesn't have adamantium covering his skeleton...the adamantium is FUSED with his bone. So by all rules of his ability, he should be able to regenerate his adamantium. Which then raises fiurther questions, leading to what bugs me the most about the Wolverine character. IF his skeleton is fused with adamantium...HOW THE HELL did his bumpy-ass claws somehow transform into smooth blades that could probably be effectively used to rule a straight line.
      • No...it...wouldn't? It makes sense that rapid cell regeneration regenerates his cells. Not the metal parts. And the movie seems pretty particular about making it a coating.
      • Idea, maybe somehow his healing factor melted down the adamantium bullets to fill the gaps in his skull. No clue as to why, but it could work.
    • Um...no, no it couldn't. Do you have any idea how hot it would have to get to melt Adamantium? A healing factor isn't going to generate nearly that much heat.
      • Do YOU know how hot it would have to get to melt a made-up substance like Adamantium? If we can except a mutant healing factor, why can't we except that it heats up too?
    • It doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the movie, but comic canon is that adamantium has a very narrow window of use once it's melted, 8 minutes I think, after which it better be in the shape you want 'cause that's it. You can't reshape it even if the temperature is still high enough to keep it liquid. I've never found a good explanation as to why that is, though.
    • I may not have the exact temperature, but in Wolverine, you see his claws glowing red from the head of Deadpool's optic blasts and it's still not melted. Unless Wolvie's healing factor could generate heats that should, by all rights, set him on fire, then no, it's not going to melt any sort of metal.
      • Depending on the continuity, the healing factor can regenerate much more than that (such as being in the middle of a nuclear blast).
      • If Deadpools eye beams are copied from Cyclops they shouldn't cause heat
    • Cyke's eyebeams causing heat or not is one of the more inconsistent things in comics. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. In the first film of this series, they're shown apparently burning through a seatbelt.
    • If nothing else, I'd imagine the concussive force could cause the target to heat up if it's resisting the impact; if the beam hits something but doesn't punch through, the kinetic energy has to go somewhere, so it bleeds away into friction heat. Cyke may know how to fine tune that effect: a small weak beam can burn through the seatbelt fabric like two sticks rubbing together (except a whole lot faster and more precise) while a bigger, less controlled beam punches right through a wall like a battering ram.
  • Worse: Even if it does, are we supposed to believe the bullets stayed there, but didn't show up on the x-rays from the first film despite the other adamantium being visible? How did he ever regain his memories, if the original cause of the brain damage was still present? You can remind a brain-damaged person of a fact all day long and they still won't remember it if they're damaged anatomically. And if he somehow absorbed the bullets themselves via an unexplained mechanism of his healing factor, why didn't he regain his memories sooner? The original explanation of pain and trauma was a lot easier to buy. The filmmakers got a bit too stuck on the concept of him having the adamantium for part of the movie.
  • No, it was explained by Stryker in that scene that his brain would grow back, but the memories wouldn't - presumably as the neurons regrow they make new collections and the memories get all jumbled up inside, hence the incoherent flashbacks in X2. Presumably the adamantium bullets, being not part of his body would be expelled over time.
    • Could it be Fridge Brilliance? This would explain how that bullet got through is skull in X2, via the two holes in his skull with out the metal.
      • Except that the bullet didn't get through his skull in X2. It could be clearly seen embedded in the flesh of his forehead, before it popped out the same way it came in.
    • Or, like most bullets, they could have exited out the back of his skull.
  • Yes, after it looked like Stryker had lost his (first) chance to remove Logan's memories, I was fully expecting Silver Fox, as she lay dying, to order Logan to forget her (and possibly other things by accident). The fact that didn't happen actually makes me a little angry, since it could have been a nice dramatic moment but instead was replaced by Stryker's apparently neurosurgical precision with a gun. (How do you * know* it will remove his memory? How do you know it won't impair other functions of his instead? Or be only a partial memory wipe, possibly leaving the bad stuff intact? Aghaghagh so annoying.)
    • Presumably Striker didn't care what he hit so long as it took down Wolverine in some way. Plus there was the fact that he was mind jacked to walk until his feet bled so if he had planned to try anything else then he just didn't have the chance.
    • In this troper's personal fanon, I go with his lover accidentally making him forget everything. That, seriously, is the only way it would make any bit of sense to me. Otherwise, you run into "indestructible adamantium skeleton being destroyed by an adamantium bullet? Pretty much negates the need to bond it with his skeleton in the first place!" thing. Hell, to tie up things nicely, I tend to like to think she was actually making Sabertooth forget and accidentally got Logan, too. Like part of her ankle was touching his, or something. I ignore the adamantium bullets as a whole. Makes my walls nicer, with fewer head-sized indentations.
• Wolverine starts out with his bony claws which are knobby and obviously organic. After getting the adamantium bonded to his skeleton, they are finely machined and polished blades.
  • Well, this one is easily, they simply put more adamantium on the claws to make them more refined and presumably sharper.
    • The method used to graft the adamantium to his skeleton (injection) didn't allow for very fine control of shaping it. Here's an analogy: Take a knife and quickly dip it in molten chocolate. Cool until it hardens. Repeat. The chocolate blade won't be sharper than the knife underneath. Indeed, the more chocolate you apply the duller it is.
    • Maybe not, but it'll taste a lot nicer.
    • The method used to graft it on shouldn't have worked at all. Injecting adamantium into his body would just put globs of molten metal in his innards, not graft it onto his bones. So, his claws being that way makes just as much sense as his skeleton being that, which is to say, not very much. MST3K Mantra.
    • This all seems to be the result of a retcon. In the first movie, he was shown to have adamantium plates grafted to his bones. Ones that were machine worked. Which would explain how his claws were fancied up, and would have let them use a more sensible form of application.
    • As per the comment above, in X1 we see that Logan has plating on his body, and the claws are activated or actuated(?) through some type of mechanism in his arms. We even saw in X2 (in Logan's brief flashback) that several doctors were still working on him just prior to his escape. The explanation of the smooth claws had a clear explanation in the second film (it was shaped and cooled prior to being implanted), but Origins just dumped all over it.
  • Even easier. Remember, he agreed to get the claws after his brother broke the originals, so it's possible that they removed his original claws and replaced them with the metal ones.
    • The bone claws grew back, like everything else. If they tried to replace the claws surgically, they would have a hard time getting them within the arm, much less replacing the original claws before new ones grew back. And since the adamantium claws would not a natural part of his anatomy, his body probably would have tried growing new claws in spite of the fact the space is occupied. Bonding to the skeleton the way they did was pretty much the only way they could graft the adamantium fast enough.
  • Blatant retcon. Stryker says they gave him claws in X2, presumably because the writers noticed the same problem you did, plus that, as mentioned above, healing and claws have squat to do with each other.
    • The bone claws are from the comics - but what bugs me is, why are they so knobbly in the first place? What actual animals claws are knobbly?
  • The claws have been retconned a few times in the comics from only being attached to his gloves to being implants (they at one time showed blueprints of the mechanisim behind them) to being organic.
  • The nkobly bone I would assume is just part of the mutation, remember, its a MUTATION, as in completely random, the shape of it is just how it developed. As for the metal smoothness, I assumed that in between being offered the Admantium to actuallly getting it, the let him grow them back and then sharpened them.
• Not to mention the goddamn ADAMANTIUM BULLETS.
  • Even more egregiously, Stryker apparently sent his most loyal lieutenant, Agent Zero, out to catch Wolverine without giving him the goddamn adamantium bullets, which turn out to be the only thing that can kill Wolverine.
  • Even worse? Agent Zero appeared to be the greatest gunman in the world, his only superhuman talent. THAT WAS HIS ONE THING, MAN, AND YOU DIDN'T GIVE HIM THE BULLETS!
  • Even worse? Sending Humvees and a helicopter after him when they knew Wolverine was Made of Adamantium on top of a Healing Factor. Seriously, what good were they expecting any of that to do? They have the greatest gunman in the world, and he clearly had the element of surprise. They could have ended it all be just giving him the damn bullets. Instead, they end up getting the one guy best suited to stopping Wolverine killed.
    • Lamp shaded/ justified when the general said "You just spent half a billion dollars making him invincible and now you want to kill him?"
    • I always figured this was deliberate on Stryker's part, honestly. Not only would he see how Wolverine performed in a 'real' combat situation, it'd give him the experienced needed to perfect his other projects. Keeping the only adamantium bullets with himself at all times strikes me as perfectly in character, given how he was presented personality-wise.
    • Everybody seems to have missed the fact that Stryker didn't know about the bullets when he sent Zero out. Their first appearance was the scientist unveiling them while telling him, after Zero's failure, that Zero never had a chance because only these just-now-revealed adamantium bullets could take him out.
      • Ouch. Gentleman, Occam's Razor has just cut us in twain.
        • Wouldn't it then be the scientist's fault for not thinking about that?
  • Agent Zero's actions were quite ridiculous. To start with, Wolverine's optic nerves still went from his eyes to his brain. Agent Zero, as the greatest sniper in the world, could have just shot him in the damn eye. Or he could have shot out his muscles with some really big bullets to immobilize for long enough to incinerate his fleshy bits with some thermite. Instead of, as near as this little troper could tell, trying to piss him off as much as was humanly possible.
    • When you've been able to strut through life gunning down wave upon wave of soldiers with head and chest shots, chances are you're not going to adapt in three seconds when you come up against something that is literally immune to everything you've used previously. Don't look at it as a troper - look at it as Agent Zero being hounded by a very scary mutant.
    • Agent Zero has worked with Logan before. Zero knew about his healing factor and fighting style, and was in the room when Logan got the adamantium plated skeleton. Logan's abilities couldn't have been a surprise. Also, rather than take advantage of the element of surprise and shoot Logan in the head, he shot that old guy right in front of Logan's face. Even if he didn't know that Logan was standing in front of the dude, Zero had to realize that Logan would hear the shot and be alerted to his presence.
• We're forgetting: at exactly what point did Sabretooth lose a) all memory of his brother b) his hair colour and c) 90% of his IQ? Unless we assume Sabertooth from the first movie was someone else, which explains far more than it should.
  • I was kind of hoping the movie would end with Sabretooth saying something like: "You made him better, now make me better." And because the Adamantium won't work with him, they say something like: "Okay, we've got this new super-steroid. It'll make you bigger, stronger and faster, but there's a teeny tiny possibility -- barely worth mentioning -- that it just might have a slight negative effect on your brain." Sadly, it didn't happen. But if you really want to fanwank it, it could have happened between films.
    • Who said he lost "all memory of his brother"? Though it's unstated, the first movie has him clearly at least a little fixated on Wolverine (him taking the dog tags, for example). Sabertooth just doesn't talk much in the first movie. He's clearly more animalistic by that point too, so it's possible that in the 15 or 20 years between Wolverine and X-Men that he just let himself go wild and in the process his priorities changed.
      
      Alternatively, I'm pretty sure there's gonna be sequels to Wolverine, which will probably explain things.
    • There's hair dye in the real world. Unknown why Sabertooth would want to be a blond, maybe a century of being brown haired was getting old? In any case, it's entirely possible for Victor to dye his hair, whatever his reason is. Also, he started to get wilder and crazier the first time Wolverine abandoned him. One would think that his condition would only get worse with even more time as well as thoroughly losing his brother due to the latter getting memory wiped.
  • Everyone seems to be avoiding this I'm just gonna say it....Dye your hair and Let yourself go all you want...but why was Sabertooth a two feet taller?
    • As a poster above pointed out, it seems like there will be sequels for the Wolverine Origins line. There's the very good possibility that somewhere in there Sabertooth will go ahead and take a mutant steroid or get a serious conk on the head or get abducted by a lab and tested on and end up the way he is in the series.
  • According to Marvelopedia, Victor Creeds and Sabretooth are two separate persons on Earth-10005. Victor may still be wandering around, waiting for the 4th or 17th X-Men film.
  • Yeah...I couldn't find this "Marvelopdeia" ANYWHERE...
    • Just for the record, you're both wrong. It's Marvelpedia.
• Fred's (Blob's) superpower is near-invulnerability, able to stop a shot from a tank bare-handed. And yet the first time we meet him, he has just gotten a new tattoo. How precisely did the tattoo artist manage to insert a needle into his skin without it snapping? Or is Fred just a big fan of henna?
  • Adamantium needle?
    • But adamantium is portrayed as a rarity, to the point where people are willing to invade foreign countries and slaughter villagers to get their hands on even a small amount. Would Stryker really obtain the material and then hand it to Fred to make pictures of women on his bicep?
  • In the comics, there's a mutant whose power is giving people tattoos, just by touching them. Maybe we can take Fred's ink as evidence that she exists in the movie universe.
  • Kevlar vests will stop bullets, but the layers of Kevlar are still sewn together with a plain old needle (it can get in between the fibers). Maybe his invulnerability has a certain "resolution".
  • Blob's power doesn't make him actually invulnerable. (In the comics) Wolverine has punctured his skin, and Cyclops blew off a chunk of his shoulder. There always was the idea in the comic world that he was just able to dissipate kinetic energy voluntarily.
    • Does movie Blob even have powers?
      • Blob's power is to control the fat in his body. Density and all that.
    • He was able to put his arm down a tank barrel causing it to destroy itself when it tried to shoot, suffering no noticeable damage himself. So yeah, that probably counts as having powers.
      • Since his powers weren't initially based on him being fat, one possibility is that all the weight he gained stretched his skin and dulled his invulnerability to the point that he could be pierced by something sharp. Wonder Woman has a similar weakness where anything sharp enough can hurt her skin.
• Where did Scott get quartz sunglasses if he had never met Professor Xavier before?
  • Scott actually got his ruby quartz sunglasses before he met Xavier in the comics as well. Just prior to his powers manifesting he began to develop intense headaches, which the doctors determined were the result of vision problems. Through trial and error they found that ruby quartz neutralized the problem and fitted him with a pair of glasses. The movie probably took that as the explanation too
  • On a related note, why is the teacher giving him shit about wearing sunglasses in class? Shouldn't he by now have people informed that he has an eye condition that requires him to wear them?
    • It was totally out of place, it's like its his first day at school and nobody knows about his condition? Yeah, no, that scene was total nonsense. If it was for the sake of knowing that he's Cyclops, then dammit, the name "Summers" and his frigging red glasses could give maybe a hint or two?
• Why come adult Scott doesn't remember Wolverine in X-Men 1 and is such a dick to him when the guy fricking saved his life in Origins?
  • Scott's got his eyes covered for almost the whole movie. He never sees Wolverine, and never directly talks to him. All he knows is someone broke him out. He wouldn't recognize Wolvie because he didn't interact with him.
    • More importantly, how come Xavier himself knows nothing about Logan in X-men 1 when he'd have first-hand accounts(plus mental images) from all the OTHER mutants he rescued, all of which had seen Logan?
    • I'm not sure if you're talking about Xavier remembering Logan or knowing his abilities, but, in the first movie, Xavier tells Logan that it has been nearly fifteen years since he last saw him... But then again, they never really met in Origins. I guess he could have looked at the kids memories of Logan, but that doesn't really sound like something the Professor would do. I mean, I could be mistaken, but isn't he really respectful of other's privacy?
    • Xavier never mentions having seen Logan at all in the first movie. It's only mentioned that Logan's been on the run for 15 years.
  • Scott wasn't a dick to Logan, Logan was a dick to Scott. Cyclops saved Rogue's life (Wolverine would have been fine) and did nothing to antagonize Wolverine; it's Wolverine who is being consistently unpleasant in their interactions, and making moves on Cyclops' girlfriend. Being a dick is just part of Wolverine's character.
• In Origins Stryker takes the long walk and is then confront by some Military Police who're about to question him in the death of his commanding officer. Then in X2 we see him not only back in full force but possibly in a higher rank and was again given liberty to repeat the experiments he was doing years ago. I can get him simply blaming the commanding officer's death on Weapon XI going haywire but there's no way that not only not get a discharge from the military but be allowed to recreate the experiments that lead to the deaths of multiple military personnel but the destruction of a nuclear facility and a beautiful stretch of the Canadian countryside. And his own black ops military squad to boot.
  • Presumably, Origins is a Broad Strokes prequel, not meant to tie in perfectly with the continuity of the prior films.
• The jacket. While watching Wolverine, I was told it's the very same jacket Wolvie wears in the first movie - I haven't watched said movie again since, so I haven't checked and cannot confirm, but it did ring a bell and it would be a nice callback. Except... that jacket stayed in the helicopter, didn't it ?
• Do you mean the plane Gambit was piloting? I thought Gambit brought it with him when he came to retrieve Logan.
• Why doesn't Agent Zero shoot Logan first, then the old couple? Was he contractually obliged to squander the element of surprise by shooting the couple and completely fail his mission and die just for a good action sequence?
  • After killing the old couple, Zero radios Stryker and tells him that Logan killed them, so it was quite possibly done in order to give an 'excuse' for killing Logan; they could claim he was a murderous fugitive who was killed to protect the public or somesuch bullshit. If anyone came asking, they'd have the (incinerated) corpses of the old couple and possibly a recording of the radio message saying that Logan killed them.
    • Zero could have still said Logan killed them regardless of what order he shot them in. Since Stryker could only hear the action, he couldn't see what order they were shot in.
• Why does Wolverine just walk out of the plant after learning that Silver Fox is alive despite knowing that Sabretooth killed several people and Stryker had a bunch of mutants holed up, then only comes back when he hears Silver Fox in danger and rescuing the mutants is an afterthought? Granted, his memory loss means the Logan we know and love is years away but it was still an uncharacteristically un-heroic moment from a guy who left Weapon-X over their slaughter of innocent humans and had a desire of revenge against the men who had ruined his life.
• Why is Gambit, supposedly the only human to have ever escaped Weapon X, so damn easy to find? You'd think someone who's a fugitive from the government wouldn't introduce himself to strangers with only the concern that he might have gambling debts to them.
  • Because he's Gambit -- he's laid-back, cocky and always assumes he can get out on his own.
• Why is the Weapon X base quite clearly a different base to the one in X2? The one in his X2 flashback is even better guarded, with enough personnel there for it to seem like an actual military operation, rather than 3 soldiers in a single room to stop an invincible killing machine.
• In the beginning, when Wolverine decides to leave the others after the mission in Nigeria, Victor warns him "We can't just let you walk away." but they TOTALLY DO.

• Wolverine and Sabertooth. They start out as kids with their powers, then age until they are in the best shape of their lives, then they stop. Really?
  • Growing to maturity is not an injury or damaging process. Wolverine and Sabretooth's mutations allow their bodies to heal from damage, so while normal people would reach maturity and then our bodies slowly succumb to accumlated damage, Wolverine and Sabretooth reach maturity but their bodies constantly recover from any damage, thus halting what we percieve as aging.

• In the game of the movie in the flashbacks he is handled like he'd already have the adamantium in his skeleton. Like dropping him from a plane made a crater and flesh was ripped but otherwise he was okay. I'm not an expert but at least some of his bones should was been broken or dust from a fall like that. He was also getting shot and hurt in ways that should have left him pretty broken