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X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the much-anticipated and much-pirated action flick opens with a scene set in the NWT.

Wolverine, a mutant antihero whose powers include indestructability, razor-sharp knuckle blades and alpha male machismo, is born in the early 1800s in a giant two-storey cabin in the Midwestern Canadian subarctic.

Played by Australian actor Hugh Jackman (Scoop, Van Helsing), the immortal Wolverine passes his time travelling from battle to battle. - photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Following an Oedipal murder scene committed somewhere North of 60, the film accelerates into a rapid-fire montage of jump cuts that bring the title character into 30-something manhood.

Played by Australian actor Hugh Jackman (Scoop, Van Helsing), the immortal Wolverine and his similarly supernatural half brother Victor, played by Liev Schreiber (Love in the Time of Cholera), pass their time travelling from battle to battle.

They fight on the Union side in the American Civil War and march into Europe during the First World War, surviving bayonets, bullets and mortar shells along the way. The brothers' amoral brutality is sketched in greater detail as they storm the beaches in the Second World War with video game violence then burn a village in Vietnam.

Once their powers are recognized by the U.S. military, they are recruited into an elite squad of other mutants to travel the world in search of natural resources. The brothers' moral thresholds diverge as they are ordered to destroy another village, this time in Nigeria, in the quest for a rare mineral.

"Your country needs you," an army colonel says to Wolverine, trying to keep him in line.

"I'm Canadian," the mercenary mutant replies, and attempts to start a new life using his powers to deforest the Rocky Mountains as a super lumberjack.

The political plot makes way for comic book chaos throughout the remainder of the film, pitting mutant against mutant in a series of grand showdowns. The graphic violence challenges director Quentin Tarentino's films in its ferocity while the script pays homage to other famous cinematic scenes such as Michael J. Fox's comedic bathroom puberty scene from Teen Wolf, the social re-engineering scene from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and various familiar moments from more recent films.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine screens tonight at the Capitol Theatre at 7 and 9:30 p.m.