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If you’re not aware, the big news regarding the piracy scene and movie industry lately was the Internet release of an early workprint of Wolverine, which won’t be released in US theaters until May. The workprint’s basically close to DVD quality, but missing some effects, perhaps 15 minutes of footage, and doesn’t have its own music in there- I read a comment on VCD Quality that said the music was taken from Transformers and is in there as a placeholder, a common practice for works in progress.

As someone’s already been fired for reviewing this, I don’t want to stress how much of a pirate I am, but I will say that I did argue whether I should download it. I had read an article a couple of weeks ago that discussed Gabe Newell’s (he’s the head guy at Valve, makers of the Half-Life franchise and the Steam gaming service) thoughts on piracy, and he felt that a lot of piracy comes from people just not being able to get what they want when they want it. An example he gave was with regional releases- if you’re in the UK, you might have to wait an extra few months for its official release (even if you’re willing to pay) there when you could just pirate the US release right now.

This is what influenced my decision. I didn’t know if I was so into viewing a unfinished version, but then I looked at Megastar’s release calendar, and you don’t see Wolverine listed at all (movies are often listed 2-4 months in advance, so it’s not that Megastar lists later). Some movies come to Vietnam theaters quite quickly; Watchmen came here one week after the US release. But others take quite a while; Dark Knight came 6 weeks after the US release, and Slumdog Millionaire is finally coming here at the end of April, over 4 months after I watched it in the US, 5 months after it was first released in the US, and 1 month after it will have been released on DVD. And a good quality bootleg of that has been available since January, thus greatly negating the motivation for moviegoers here to want to wait it out.

Taking those into consideration, and some positive impressions of the workprint I’d read, I decided to check it out.

I liked it. Wolverine really surprised me, and this is coming from someone who had no particular inclination to go watch it before this. I really thought it would be a dud.

I don’t want to go into extensive details or give you my rating for it, since it wasn’t a final version, but here are some notes:

• The music, even if it was taken from Transformers, fit the movie well enough. Wasn’t a problem. So I imagine the final version with the real music will be good.
• Intro parts of the movie to introduce the character were very well done.
• Liev Shreiber as Victor Creed was a great character. He’s fleshed out well here, while in the comics and cartoon, I tend to think of him more as a dumb Wolverine knockoff.
• It’s cool to see the partly finished special effects. You can learn a little bit more about how movies are made. I know that some movies have released green screen versions of their movies (Sin City), but maybe this is something more and more action movies should consider doing.
• The plot is much more complete and well thought out than I was expecting. It made me want to rewatch X-Men and think about how this all connects, and there are a lot of appearances from other comic characters.There’s also an emotional depth that I think is deeper than in any of the X-Men movies.

Knowing that this version isn’t complete and there’s potentially more footage actually excites me. Instead of watching this and thinking, well, I’ve already seen it, no need to see it in theaters, I think of this version as more of an extended trailer. So while before this pirate release, I really wasn’t interested in the movie, now I definitely want to see it whenever it comes out to Vietnam. Will go invite the team at work as well, I think they’d really enjoy it.

See the official trailer below:

Update, May 18, 2009: Ended up seeing Wolverine in its premiere weekend at Vincom in Hanoi. Since I originally posted this, I, like Jin and Tu, now believe the leak may have been a PR hoax. Of course, I am not sure why (why release an almost-final version instead of a half finished version with promise) or how they could get away with such a thing (think of their partners), but Wolverine has done pretty well at the box office, so maybe it was quite brilliant. The ironic thing is that Fox initially said that the leaked movie was quite different from the final one, and that’s what made me see it, knowing I could see an even better version once it came out to theaters. The reality is, the two versions are essentially identical. I wasn’t going to see it in theates once I found this out, but ended up giving up my money when I was hanging out with a friend in Hanoi, and there was nothing else decent we could see. In the end, I did like the movie- I gave it a 7/10

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