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I still don't think you're the god of thunder, but you ought to be
Norwich tomorrow, Wednesday. Come if you're in the area. I am still very happy about A Mayse-Bikhl.
In the meantime—
Allowing for the fact that it makes a blended crack pretzel of Norse mythology, Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) is a surprisingly enjoyable movie. Its major fault is how quickly all the pieces spin by, the feeling that there should be more of it—which I suppose is going to be The Avengers (2012), but I would happily have watched Chris Hemsworth culture-shock his way around New Mexico for another half-hour, or Tom Hiddleston do pretty much anything. He's the element I should analyze when I have not had a terrible day (which I have, I resent it, I don't need any more karmic counterbalancing), because he bears almost no resemblance to his mythological prototype and he is a plausible and compelling Loki. Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don't have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he's a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child's desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.
(I am shortchanging Hemsworth, who in some ways has a much trickier role than Hiddleston. It's not just that he looks like a Viking god—and it looks good on him, not musclebound, simply built to a bigger than mortal scale—but he convinces with the archaic warrior's directness that needs not to come off as stupidity, the courtliness that can't be staged; he commits to being all in the open as fully as Hiddleston to being inscrutable. You can go wrong with charismatic villainy and still be fun to watch, but go wrong with true-hearted heroism and you don't even get camp, just cardboard. That doesn't happen here. I just still gravitate toward the outsider, the solitary, the loving and hungry brother who is always, even when it saves your life, doing something behind your back.)
It's not a tonally consistent film, which works oddly in its favor. The Æsir with their complex bindings of love and blood and betrayal are the stuff of grand tragedy, while the scenes on Earth are handled with a geeky, breezy humor: stripped of his godhood, Thor crashes to earth in a completely different genre, where he's the MacGuffin of a fast-unraveling day-in-the-life of a research astrophysicist that just happens to include wormholes and men in black. Natalie Portman's Jane Foster isn't Tony Stark or even Bruce Banner; she's a slightly fringe scientist, chasing geomagnetic storms in the desert, which means she's built most of her own equipment and can't afford a real lab assistant, making do instead with a Pop-Tart-munching PoliSci major who really shouldn't be allowed to handle the Taser. (The film does pass the Bechdel test. And while I would have liked to see Jane doing more research, I appreciate that she conforms to neither of the prevailing stereotypes of female scientists onscreen, sexy with her glasses off or just one of the boys. She's a science fiction fan without being a manic pixie dreamgirl, she's not the skeptic whose cold equations are blown away by Thor's demonstrable powers; she's a passionate believer in the awesomeness of the universe that only becomes more awesome the more we find out there is to learn. You can imagine her in Asgard with her research notebook, quizzing Heimdall about the mechanics of the Einstein-Rosen Bifröst. And just for that fact, I'll probably give the silly line about star alignments and quadrants a pass.) There is inevitable fish-out-of-water comedy, but some of it is as funny to the human characters as it is to us. There are throwaway, intelligent things in the script: I approve of Erik Selvig, for example, not just because I'll watch Stellan Skarsgård in anything that isn't Lars von Trier, but because there is a tendency in movies that make use of myth and folklore to keep a character of the appropriate ethnicity around to serve as an infodump—Erik hears "Thor Odinsson," snorts, dismisses the guy as a nutbar, and never explains anything to Jane beyond tossing her the film's equivalent of a copy of the D'Aulaires. The most romantic moment between Thor and Jane is not really their kiss, but their bonding over her research, as he draws for her the Nine Worlds and the branches of Yggdrasil that she is beginning to be able to see in the filaments of galaxies across the void. And then something changes among the Æsir, and the worlds begin uneasily to merge, and we end in a strange inversion of where we started: not with a human woman gazing up at the sky, but a god looking out fruitlessly for Earth.
I could have done with fewer battles. I would have liked more soliloquies. The main characters were so interestingly drawn, I wanted them to talk more—I keep forgetting how much more time an action sequence takes up onscreen than on the page, and every now and then I had the disquieting sense that some bit of connective tissue had been left on the cutting room floor. I'm told there are deleted scenes. As to the post-credits teaser: I'm sure in practice it would have gone all genderfaily, but I'm a little sorry that if Loki is going to be whispering in someone's ear all through The Avengers, it isn't going to be Jane's; she's certainly presented as a more than capable physicist, and he did threaten to pay her a visit. And that could have gotten complicated with Thor. The fact that I am talking about seeing the sequel at all is more than I expected. My summer blockbuster of choice this year is still, I think, Captain America—which I need to write up—but I avoided this one in theaters because I knew Marvel Comics wasn't the Poetic Edda, and it is possible I made a mistake. Either that, or I'm under somebody's malign influence. It's a chaotic system.
I hope I can get some sleep.
In the meantime—
Allowing for the fact that it makes a blended crack pretzel of Norse mythology, Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) is a surprisingly enjoyable movie. Its major fault is how quickly all the pieces spin by, the feeling that there should be more of it—which I suppose is going to be The Avengers (2012), but I would happily have watched Chris Hemsworth culture-shock his way around New Mexico for another half-hour, or Tom Hiddleston do pretty much anything. He's the element I should analyze when I have not had a terrible day (which I have, I resent it, I don't need any more karmic counterbalancing), because he bears almost no resemblance to his mythological prototype and he is a plausible and compelling Loki. Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don't have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he's a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child's desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.
(I am shortchanging Hemsworth, who in some ways has a much trickier role than Hiddleston. It's not just that he looks like a Viking god—and it looks good on him, not musclebound, simply built to a bigger than mortal scale—but he convinces with the archaic warrior's directness that needs not to come off as stupidity, the courtliness that can't be staged; he commits to being all in the open as fully as Hiddleston to being inscrutable. You can go wrong with charismatic villainy and still be fun to watch, but go wrong with true-hearted heroism and you don't even get camp, just cardboard. That doesn't happen here. I just still gravitate toward the outsider, the solitary, the loving and hungry brother who is always, even when it saves your life, doing something behind your back.)
It's not a tonally consistent film, which works oddly in its favor. The Æsir with their complex bindings of love and blood and betrayal are the stuff of grand tragedy, while the scenes on Earth are handled with a geeky, breezy humor: stripped of his godhood, Thor crashes to earth in a completely different genre, where he's the MacGuffin of a fast-unraveling day-in-the-life of a research astrophysicist that just happens to include wormholes and men in black. Natalie Portman's Jane Foster isn't Tony Stark or even Bruce Banner; she's a slightly fringe scientist, chasing geomagnetic storms in the desert, which means she's built most of her own equipment and can't afford a real lab assistant, making do instead with a Pop-Tart-munching PoliSci major who really shouldn't be allowed to handle the Taser. (The film does pass the Bechdel test. And while I would have liked to see Jane doing more research, I appreciate that she conforms to neither of the prevailing stereotypes of female scientists onscreen, sexy with her glasses off or just one of the boys. She's a science fiction fan without being a manic pixie dreamgirl, she's not the skeptic whose cold equations are blown away by Thor's demonstrable powers; she's a passionate believer in the awesomeness of the universe that only becomes more awesome the more we find out there is to learn. You can imagine her in Asgard with her research notebook, quizzing Heimdall about the mechanics of the Einstein-Rosen Bifröst. And just for that fact, I'll probably give the silly line about star alignments and quadrants a pass.) There is inevitable fish-out-of-water comedy, but some of it is as funny to the human characters as it is to us. There are throwaway, intelligent things in the script: I approve of Erik Selvig, for example, not just because I'll watch Stellan Skarsgård in anything that isn't Lars von Trier, but because there is a tendency in movies that make use of myth and folklore to keep a character of the appropriate ethnicity around to serve as an infodump—Erik hears "Thor Odinsson," snorts, dismisses the guy as a nutbar, and never explains anything to Jane beyond tossing her the film's equivalent of a copy of the D'Aulaires. The most romantic moment between Thor and Jane is not really their kiss, but their bonding over her research, as he draws for her the Nine Worlds and the branches of Yggdrasil that she is beginning to be able to see in the filaments of galaxies across the void. And then something changes among the Æsir, and the worlds begin uneasily to merge, and we end in a strange inversion of where we started: not with a human woman gazing up at the sky, but a god looking out fruitlessly for Earth.
I could have done with fewer battles. I would have liked more soliloquies. The main characters were so interestingly drawn, I wanted them to talk more—I keep forgetting how much more time an action sequence takes up onscreen than on the page, and every now and then I had the disquieting sense that some bit of connective tissue had been left on the cutting room floor. I'm told there are deleted scenes. As to the post-credits teaser: I'm sure in practice it would have gone all genderfaily, but I'm a little sorry that if Loki is going to be whispering in someone's ear all through The Avengers, it isn't going to be Jane's; she's certainly presented as a more than capable physicist, and he did threaten to pay her a visit. And that could have gotten complicated with Thor. The fact that I am talking about seeing the sequel at all is more than I expected. My summer blockbuster of choice this year is still, I think, Captain America—which I need to write up—but I avoided this one in theaters because I knew Marvel Comics wasn't the Poetic Edda, and it is possible I made a mistake. Either that, or I'm under somebody's malign influence. It's a chaotic system.
I hope I can get some sleep.