Unlike everyone else, “The Battle of the East” and West was not the big thing that I was looking forward to this weekend. In fact, I was never truly excited for this fight — I was simply not caught up in the hype surrounding the latest and biggest fight in Pacquiao’s already-storied life and career.

But I did want to find out about Wolverine’s.

I had been looking forward to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” since I saw the trailer back in February. While I have never touched a comic book of the vaunted X-Men series, I was one of those kids who grew up watching the cartoon series and buying the merchandise.

And just like everyone else, I absolutely idolized Wolverine, the epitome of the dark, complex, and anti-social anti-hero. Of course, I didn’t realize that then. I just thought he was cool.

And everyone who has been a fan of Wolverine (or Hugh Jackman) probably looked forward to the film as much as I did, with just as much hoopla as the one surrounding the Pacquiao-Hatton match.

Considering how this movie was hyped to the hills, for critics the movie was a bit of a letdown — a feature it would share with the Pacquiao-Hatton bout, as I will demonstrate later.

But despite the amount of criticism that this movie has generated, I took the film for what it was: an action-driven popcorn blockbuster bound to take the box office solely by its popularity— and I liked it.

The plot was serviceable, even nice. The characters, while lacking in development, were interesting enough representations of the comic book versions they were supposed to imitate. It helped that the cast featured a combination of pop favorites and genuinely great acts such as Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, Liev Schreiber, and Daniel Henney. Among other things, the special effects also fulfilled Marvel-film expectations.

But its strength undoubtedly lay in the action scenes, which to my mind would be the same big reason behind wanting to watch a boxing match. This is where, strangely, watching a fictional fistfight between mutants would trump an actual fistfight between legendary fistfighters.

As a whole, the film may not have been as spectacular as Pacquiao’s two-round TKO of Ricky Hatton, but at least it provided more than five minutes of heart-stopping action with no commercial breaks.

Still, a comparison of a boxing match and an action movie in terms of entertainment value inevitably leads me to a comparison between the characters — or people, if you will — that are behind it. In this case, it is a comparison between Wolverine and Pacman. On one corner stands one of the most powerful and interesting mutants in the comic realm, and on the other is arguably the best pound-for-pound fighter in the boxing world.

Both are reflections of our human fascination with the idea of hero or legend: someone who is larger than life. Whether we tie our emotions and nationalist ideals to a boxer beating up a competitor in a prize ring, or find ourselves fascinated with the exploits of genetically-enhanced superheroes, this fascination is a reflection of our spirits’ greatest hopes and fears. Heroes and legends remind us that despite our inherent flaws and disadvantages, it is still possible for us to surmount insurmountable obstacles and reach our personal Mount Olympus.

So it isn’t so surprising that Pacquiao’s bouts are always the object of national obsession, or that we prematurely brand him as a national hero. Or that we find ourselves wanting to watch the next leg in the never-ending saga of superhero retellings, whether we grew up watching these superheroes or not. The point is still that in the midst of demoralizing life in an even more demoralizing world, these stories, factual or fictional, give us something to look forward to.

With Pacman and Wolverine, their stories resonate all the more for their being blue-collar: they were simply people who took what they were given and worked hard to perfect it, with or without recognition. In other words, “trabaho lang.”

It’s not such an absurd comparison, if you think about it: whether you looked forward to the movie or the match, we were all just looking for a little bit of hope.

(The author is an incoming sophomore at the Ateneo de Manila University. Visit http://james.soriano-ph.com, or mail me at james@soriano-ph.com)

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See also:

• Mosley to lose weight to fight Pacquiao
• It’s Pacquiao’s call – Arum
• Arum eyes all-Pinoy slugfest
• Pacquiao for President