The superhero movie Logan doesn’t look, sound, or behave like any other superhero movie ever made. It’s set around El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez, then in Oklahoma, and finally in North Dakota. It’s dusty and gritty and mostly rural, entirely unlike the nine world-capital-hopping X-Men movies featuring Hugh Jackman’s Logan (also known as Wolverine). No major city is destroyed or threatened here; the only urban scene is set at a casino in Oklahoma City. The planet is never in jeopardy, and the movie’s climax doesn’t involve the world’s salvation.

Logan is old, tired, and slowly being poisoned from the inside by the indestructible metal that was inserted decades earlier into his once-indestructible body. Even more striking, his onetime mentor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) is now an unshaven, intermittently senile nonagenarian whom Logan has hidden away in an abandoned smelting furnace in Mexico as Xavier rages against both Logan and the dying of the light.