Defending so-called “genre” fiction against the people who shallowly assume that it’s nothing but stories of ray guns printed on cheap paper stock is a long and noble argumentative tradition.

It helps, of course, when science fiction and comic book stories do more than provide stock images of cities collapsing and gussied-up jargon that’s meant to make dumb concepts sound smart. By these standards, the past six months at the movies have been outstanding, giving us two smart, moving films about aging and parenting that say things about these mundane, universal subjects that mere literature could not.

Logan follows Logan, better known as Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), as he struggles to care for Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who is having seizures that cause him to lose control of his telepathic abilities, while also dealing with his own mysterious ailments that have made it harder for him to heal and leave him in need of reading glasses (in a nice touch, Logan forgets to take the tag off the specs he buys at a drugstore). This task becomes more complicated when Charles insists that Logan take responsibility for Laura (Dafne Keen), a little girl who turns out to be Logan’s biological daughter and the product of an experimental programme to breed new mutants to use as weapons.

Arrival is also a story about someone acquiring a daughter by unexpected means. Linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is asked to decode the confounding speech of newly arrived aliens, and as she begins to make progress, she is plagued by visions of herself playing with a child and then caring for her as the child becomes gravely ill. Ultimately, she learns that the aliens don’t experience time linearly. Her mastery of their language is allowing her to live simultaneously in her own unfolding timeline and in the moments when she is raising and caring for the daughter, Hannah (a joint performance by Jadyn Malone, Carmela Nossa Guizzo, Abigail Pniowsky and Julia Scarlett Dan), she has not yet given birth to, who will die from a rare illness.

After Logan and Arrival, can we stop pretending ‘genre’ movies are unserious?

Logan and Arrival make for wonderful companion pieces, and not simply because of their obvious differences: Logan is about a father, while Arrival is about a mother; Logan is almost unremittingly violent, while Arrival is surprisingly, genre-defyingly gentle. One is a movie about the grief inherent in the natural order of things, a world where parents (or at least parental figures) die before their children. The latter is about the grief that follows when this order is disrupted, and a child dies before a parent.

Which is not to say that the deaths in Logan are natural, precisely; both Charles Xavier and Logan are ultimately killed by X-24 (also Jackman), a clone of Logan himself. This is, after all, an X-Men movie: snicking claws and emotionally wrenching deaths are de rigueur. Director James Mangold made clear that this was a different — and more substantive — take on the superhero movie (and earned praise for doing so) by eschewing CGI-heavy setpieces, making the violence more intensely visceral and pervasive and giving his hero concerns that were deeply rooted in ordinary human experience.

It’s definitely different to do all of those things, but if Logan falls short of the reputation for radical innovation it’s garnering, it’s in that Mangold felt the need to make an action movie at all, rather than simply using the characters’ superpowers to amplify the normal dilemmas of aging. The cut-down version of Logan that’s sharply focused on Logan’s efforts to be a good son to Charles, Charles’ efforts to make sure Logan has one last chance at emotional connection and ethical integrity, and Logan and Laura’s wary exchanges as he learns how to parent her and she learns to accept his care, is among the best movies I’ve seen in 2017.

In these scenes, Logan is a testament to what franchises, especially genre stories, can achieve that one-offs can’t. It’s precisely because we’ve seen Charles at the height of his dignity and power that it’s wrenching to see him become a man who forgets to take his medication with deadly consequences, or who needs help using the toilet from a man who loves him but is temperamentally unsuited to caregiving.

Logan and Arrival make for wonderful companion pieces, and not simply because of their obvious differences: Logan is about a father, while Arrival is about a mother; Logan is almost unremittingly violent, while Arrival is surprisingly, genre-defyingly gentle.

Because we know precisely what Logan’s adamantium-coated claws can do to a human body, a very funny scene that ends with Laura poised to gut a gas station clerk who tried to stop her from shoplifting has a particular zing to it. Teaching your child to be a decent human being is a particularly consequential endeavor when her tantrums can end with someone else filleted on the floor.

There’s an unquestionable bitterness to Logan, but the movie is most effective when it’s raging against the dying of the light rather than mired down in yet another lethal scientific conspiracy. Logan can’t guarantee that Charles will recover his lost dignity or moral authority. Charles can’t guarantee that Logan will find peace and family life before he dies.

And though Logan is able to tell Laura “Don’t be what they made you” before his own death, it’s not remotely clear that his affection for her and the brief protection he provided her will be enough to make up for the circumstances of her birth and upbringing, or the lingering psychological effects of violence she inflicted on others as she fought for her freedom. These shortfalls are agonising, and exacerbated by circumstances, but in their essence, they are not unique to super-powered people being pursued by villains with robotic hands and bad blonde-dye jobs.

Neither is the pain that Louise faces when her Hannah dies. As in Logan, the circumstances of Hannah’s death in Arrival come with a science-fictionally enhanced twist. Louise doesn’t merely know that her daughter is going to die before Hannah does. She knows her daughter will die before the girl is even conceived, before Louise even gets together with Hannah’s father, fellow scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). She also knows that Ian will leave her when he learns that she knew all along that their daughter would become fatally ill and didn’t tell him.

As I wrote when Arrival was released last November, the film is about facing forthcoming pain bravely and staunchly. It’s also specifically about Louise’s conviction that Hannah’s life, even if it is compromised and ultimately shortened, is worth bringing into being. Arrival doesn’t have to state this explicitly for it to be clear: We see Hannah and Louise playing, arguing, trying to remember words, talking about Ian’s departure and discussing Hannah’s art.

That joy is undeniable, and Louise’s ability to see exhilaration, agony and regret simultaneously prevents her from looking only backward and seeing Hannah’s life purely through the prism of her death. The very ability that means Louise must live with the pain of her daughter’s death more than a decade before it becomes a reality also means the bedrock certainty that Hannah’s life was beautiful and important is always fresh and always with her, untainted by all that Louise has lost.

Logan and Arrival work so well because they use science fiction to make the emotions involved in parenting swell like well-orchestrated music, rather than wielding their concepts like jackhammers.

If Laura and Hannah feel like invaders touching down in their parents’ lives — the products of genetic engineering and an alien invasion, respectively — it’s because, to some extent, all children are mysterious creatures who transform their parents’ lives from the moment they arrive. If Charles’ and Logan’s declines and Louise’s private grief play out on global scales, it’s because when we lose our children or our parents, our suffering becomes, for a time, our entire world.

Looking at it from this angle, science fiction isn’t an odd way to tell stories about some of the most personal, painful experiences of our lives. It’s the only way.

— By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 2nd, 2017