Saturday, November 16, 2013

Thor the dark world!

My advice is to pretend that "Thor" is a verb there and try to parse the title as some sort of imperative.

I saw this movie, and it was nonsense, but agreeable nonsense, which was good, since that was exactly what I was hoping for.  It wasn't a great movie qua movie, or even in the upper echelon of Marvel efforts, but rarely does a film so neatly fulfill one's expectations.  Tom Hiddleston as Loki remains great, Kat Dennings is funny, and her little romance with the intern is cute.  Okay.

Two things I want to complain about (spoilers):

1. The little teaser at the end: geez louise.  These are generally little winks-and-nods aimed at fans of the comics, which is fine, but the one in this movie--where some of the secondary Norse gods visit some sort of alien fashion designer and his pink demon-lady assistant, and cryptic nonsense is spouted--is really just perversely, aggressively hostile to anyone not in the know.  Also, the post-credits bit is remarkably limp.  And this after the awesome bit at the end of Iron Man 3 with Mark Ruffalo!

2. The bit at the end where, oh my, it turns out that "Odin" was really Loki in disguise!  He wasn't dead after all!  Now, I don't blame the filmmakers for wanting to preserve Loki for future films, since he's about the best thing these Marvel movies have going for them (even if it does rather blunt the impact of his role in this film).  And I'm sure they can come up with some satisfactorily bullshitty way of explaining it.  But really…couldn't they have thought of, oh, any other way to achieve this end?  Because, not that this movie was ever going to be hugely emotionally resonant or something, but the final scene between Thor and Odin was clearly meant to be a serious father-son thing, and it more or less worked in that regard on its own terms--only, in their headlong rush to include this Big Twist, they retroactively completely invalidated the whole thing.  NOT GOOD WORK, GUYS.

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