Thor: The Dark World

It is officially Week 8 of the Marvel-A-Week challenge. I confess, that I have skipped Iron Man 3 as I refused to buy it on Amazon Prime and for reasons, mostly, I suspect cynical, Amazon Prime have removed the rental option for quite a few of the Marvel films.

 

Thankfully Thor: The Dark World is a Netflix freebie and while my purse cries out with joy there is a very good reason for this.  The film sucks.

PLOT:  Set just after The Avengers, the Bi-Frost has been fixed and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has brought peace to the nine realms, which apparently went to war with one another off screen.  Asgard’s tyrannical rule has been restored just in time for the Convergence, a 5,000 year cycle in which all the planets align and borders become blurred.  Coincidentally, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) stumbles upon the long lost aether, which the Dark Elves, lead by Christopher Eccleston, now want back.  END PLOT

The plot for The Dark World isn’t ground breaking but it is harsh to say that it’s terrible.  The biggest problem I have with the film is the distribution of screen time. 

Apparently, the screen writers watched Thor and all they could take away from it was a misguided idea to give Darcy, the most unnecessary and pointless character in the history of fiction, a significant bump in screen time.  I hate the character.  I hate the way she talks. I hate the way she is the character to progress all the earth based plot points.  I hate that all her jokes fall flat.  I have no issue with Kat Dennings as I do not know the actress from anything other than the Thor movies but I absolutely hate everything about Darcy Lewis.  The only character more pointless than Darcy is her intern Ian, whose sole purpose is to give Darcy even more opportunities for witless quips.  I don’t understand the reasons behind this.  I cannot imagine, and refuse to even countenance a scenario in which people walked out of Thor thinking that the only way the franchise could get even better would be if there was at least 83% more Darcy. 

The increase in Darcy’s misplaced importance to the script didn’t do Jane Foster any favours.  Natalie Portman could have given so much more if Jane didn’t spend the entire film sporadically fainting and gasping into the distance.  Thor could have filled his favourite mead flagon with the aether and glanced at it occasionally to remind us that he had affection towards it and Jane would not have been missed at all.  The relationship between Thor and Jane is so uninteresting the passing mention of a mutual dumping in Ragnarok is more than it deserved.

As with all Thor films the scenes on earth are the weakest and, unfortunately, the most time consuming.  Thankfully the scenes on Asgard are what saves Thor from becoming a minor character in the Darcy ‘pause for the laugh track’ Lewis show.  The opening scene between Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) tricks the audience into thinking we are in for some strong Odin family drama but alas this is short lived.  The scenes in which any actor acts with Anthony Hopkins are the strongest but there are not enough of them.  The middle act with Thor and Loki’s escape from Asgard is the emotional heart of The Dark World and does justice to their characters.  Sadly, the tone shifts again and the big action based climax becomes a Scooby Doo like chase through the nine realms.  It’s awful.

Chris Hemsworth gives everything he has to the role but he struggles to be noticed amongst the earth based shenanigans and characters.  There is a reason the Thor franchise comes to life in Ragnarok.

Christopher Eccleston plays the main villain but he is unable to bring any menace or meat to the role.  Like, Natalie Portman, he gets completely shafted in favour of Darcy and Ian’s big adventure.  Odin is still a dick though, the script got that much correct and I am thankful for it.  The fucked-up family dynamic is the strongest part of the Thor franchise.

Thor: The Dark World had potential.  It cemented the perfect casting of the actors playing Asgardians but it squandered everything else.  The Dark World gets 5/10, only because the middle act saved it.  Without the strength of the Asgardian characters I do believe The Dark World would have killed the Thor franchise, and deservedly so.

The Avengers

It’s week six of the Marvel-A-Week challenge and the end of Phase One of the Marvel franchise.  It was finally time to watch The Avengers.

The past six weeks has reminded me just how much I enjoy the Marvel films and how invested in the characters I have become over the years.  However, as the weeks trundle on, it has also made me realise that the Marvel movies are not watched regularly, and in some cases, at all.  It’s an odd situation.

It certainly wasn’t a chore to sit down and watch The Avengers.  I was rather looking forward to it.

PLOT:  Loki (Tom Hiddleston) fell off the Bifrost and landed on earth looking like a drugged-up vampire, brandishing a magical sceptre.  There are hints of a traumatic backstory but why waste time on a popular character’s development.  Loki is here to rule.  Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) invites Tony Stark (Robert Downey Junior), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to form a super group in order to bring Loki down.  Thor (Chris Hemsworth) rocks up without prior invitation and joins the team.  The Avengers Assemble.  The robots are defeated.  Mankind googles shawarma.  END PLOT

The plot is grand.  The world’s mightiest heroes fail to gel until they are given something to avenge and defeat Loki.  This is fine.  The Tesseract pops up once more as a glowing blue McGuffin, and, in the interest of full and frank disclosure, I still have no fucking idea why it’s so important.  The Infinity Stones are mentioned quite a bit in Phases Two and Three, and what with Thanos on route to earth, I have decided that I am going to use the Marvel-A-Week challenge to educate myself on an incredibly important issue that has passed me by to such an extent that my ignorance is actually quite impressive.

There is plenty of action.  The three-way battle between Captain America, Iron Man and Thor is a neat little dick measuring exercise which concludes in a three-way draw. The main action is the big battle for New York in which many Chitauri and buildings are destroyed.  The battle isn’t that exciting, like everything in the Avengers, what saves it, is the characters.

The trailer for the Avengers still gives me goose-bumps and when the characters are on screen together you can’t help but get excited.  The various personalities clash, but come together in battle with choreography that would make the Strictly Come Dancing judges weep with pride.  I will never tire of watching Hawkeye narrate stuff, Hulk smash and Thor and Captain America double team.  I take credit for their achievements as though I am one of the team.

The cast are on top form and your opinion on the division of screen time will depend on which character your true allegiance lies with.  I lean towards Asgard so the Thor and Loki scenes were the moments that stood out for me.  It may be 2018, but Hulk punching Thor still gets the biggest and most genuine laugh in the entire film.  Chris Hemsworth is grand, although Thor is a million miles away from his Ragnarok personality, and so is the rest of the cast, but it’s once again Tom Hiddleston who steals the show.

I agree with the late Agent Coulson (I do not acknowledge the existence of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D) that Loki lacked conviction about his master plan.  I agree with Tony Stark when he said that Loki couldn’t win.  I agree with all the Tumblr theories that suggest Loki wasn’t in complete control of his own mind and only had brief moments of lucidity.  This has to be the case, otherwise, like in Thor, Loki is just bumbling around from one scene to another, making up his plan depending on how various conversations play out.  They usually end negatively.  Loki is like the Anti-Gump with the endurance of Wile-E-Coyote.  I still love him and I’m rolling down the road to Infinity War believing that Loki will be the hero of day.  #TeamLoki. 

Drugged-Up-Vampire-Loki (sceptre not pictured)

Robert Downey Junior, Chris Evans and the rest of the cast are fine.  Mark Ruffalo appears as the newly improved Banner and fits right in.  After sitting through The Incredible Hulk during Week Two I was very pleased to see him. The cast cannot be faulted and I am appreciating their efforts more now than I did at the time. 

The Avengers probably isn’t a perfect film, but I don’t care.  If you came here for objectivity, and made it to the last paragraph, you really should not be surprised when I give it 10/10.  After five films, The Avengers united a team of superheroes in a thoroughly entertaining manner.  It’s an achievement and one I will give Marvel full credit for right up until I sue them for bladder damage.

Next week it’s Iron Man 3.  I suspect I’ll come crashing down to earth. 

Captain America: The First Avenger

Captain America: The First Avenger is the fifth instalment of the Marvel-A-Week challenge and the last solo film before The Avengers.

 

My enduring love of Chris Evans means that my excitement levels for Captain America: The First Avenger, way back in 2011, would have been at an all-time high.  My love of Chris Evans still burns bright, but my memories of The First Avenger have long faded, and it was with resignation rather than excitement that I sat down to watch it.   

PLOT:  Steve Rogers is a tiny little dude (played by the not so tiny Chris Evans) who has a myriad of health problems which renders him ineligible to enlist in the US army and fight with the allies in Nazi Germany.   Rogers’ heroic, but suicidal, attitude to teamwork catches the eye Dr Erskine (Stanley Tucci) who offers Steve the chance to be turned into a super soldier.  Thankfully for us all, it works and Steve and his washboard abs head off to defeat Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), a Nazi scientist who has somehow discovered that the Tesseract, a magical blue cube, is being hidden on earth.  Schmidt wants to use its  people vaporising powers to create weapons, win the war and conquer earth.  Hail Hydra.  END PLOT

Captain America: The First Avenger works as an origin story as by the end of the film we know exactly who Steve Rogers is and where he came from.  This is all fine in theory and it holds up on its own merits as an reasonably enjoyable summer film, but, everything about The First Avenger flows like a really long prelude to further Marvel films and revelations.  The First Avenger sets up Steve Rogers in the modern day for The Avengers, it sets up Bucky’s (spoiler alert) return as The Winter Soldier and, if my Timeline of the Tesseract is correct (it probably isn't), it also reveals that at some point, Odin lost the glowing blue cube on earth and then, in true Odin style, decided to ignore the problem in the hope that it would simply go away.  Seriously, if Odin wasn’t such a complete fuck up, the road to Infinity War would be very different. I digress. #teamloki

There is a gaggle of fair haired thirty-somethings in Hollywood cursing Chris Evans’ name for accepting the role of Captain America.  The CGI rendering of Wee Steve is as horrific as I remembered and I still believe that Steve’s shrunken head changes size in every scene.  The effects didn’t look great in 2011 and they did not stand the test of time.  Thankfully, Steve levels up so that we can all enjoy and appreciate Captain America in his true form.  Evans is grand as Steve Rogers and his awkward stiffness becomes a welcome contrast to the larger than life personalities that inhabit the nine realms. 

I paid much more attention to Sebastian Stan’s Bucky this time around given that I know how interesting his character becomes in The Winter Soldier.  Stan is fine in the dutiful best friend role that never gets fleshed out beyond that. Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter is excellent and is sadly left behind in the 1940’s.  Evans and Atwell worked well together, and, the final line of the movie – ‘I had a date’ – was a touching end to a relationship that ended before it ever got started.   

Stanley Tucci will always be welcome when he pops up in any film and even though Tommy Lee Jones scowls around like a grumpy old grandpa whose prune juice hasn’t kicked in he is actually great fun as Colonel Philips. 

I know nothing about the Captain America comics, but I sense that (the?) Red Skull is a greater adversary for Captain America than the film makes him out to be.  Hugo Weaving tries to bring some acting gravitas to the film and, while it definitely would not have felt out of place in Thor, it just didn’t work in The First Avenger.  Red Skull used the Tesseract to create a few zappy sticks before he himself became zapped by the Tesseract.  He was quite the criminal mastermind.

My biggest problem with Captain America: The First Avenger is that it looked cheap.  I don’t know if it was filmed for 3D or just made on a relatively low budget, but the CGI backgrounds were awful and even scenes set in a relatively sparse forest or rubble filled bar looked badly cobbled together.  When compared to Iron Man and Thor, the effects in The First Avenger were flat.

I am enjoying the Marvel-A-Week challenge, but I am not going to lie, I was relieved when the closing credits rolled.  The running time was too long for a film in which very little seemed to happen.  I would have accepted Captain America being thawed out and introduced in The Avengers as easily as the Avengers themselves accepted Thor randomly rocking up from space and becoming one of the gang.  If Captain America: The First Avenger didn’t exist the Marvel universe wouldn’t suffer.  It gets 5/10.  The weakest offering so far, which is sad as Steve Rogers is such a strong and likeable character.

The Incredible Hulk

I have somehow made it to week two of the Marvel-A-Week challenge which is a heck of a lot further than I ever expected to get.  The second film in the canonical sequence, according to the gospel of Tumblr, was The Incredible Hulk.  I freely admit that morale was low as not only had I forgotten the film existed, it brought back upsetting memories of a time when I wasted too much energy trying to convince myself that Edward Norton was interesting.   

True to form, I have never read a Hulk comic nor have I watched the TV show or sat through the Eric Bana movie.  I don’t intend to either.  There may have been a million in-jokes but they passed by as I watched on in blissful, and at times bored, ignorance. 

PLOT:  During a science experiment Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is infected with gamma rays and turns into the Hulk (CGI) when he gets angry. Banner goes on the run from the US army, which is nothing more threatening than General Ross (William Hurt) in a helicopter.  Banner manages to outsmart the military until General Ross and Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) create Abomination (CGI), a creature more much more dangerous than the Hulk.  END PLOT

In 2008 Edward Norton was probably the perfect Bruce Banner. I can vaguely recall being incredibly excited for Norton’s casting and I can definitely remember cursing Mark Ruffalo for taking over the role in The Avengers.  The biggest problem with Norton’s Banner is the passage of time.  Ruffalo has become the one true Hulk which just makes Edward Norton’s performance feel clunky.  Norton is a convincing runner and I believe he can hold his own in a fight whereas I am not convinced Ruffalo has the core strength required to open a medium sized jar of jam.  It is probably unfair to compare the two actors, but I just don’t accept Norton as the mild mannered Bruce Banner I have grown to love. 

Tim Roth is fine as the villain, but when Blonsky evolves into his CGI counterpart, Roth becomes as irrelevant as Norton.  Liv Tyler whispers her way through the film but never strays far from being the goddess that she is.  Individually, the cast is solid, but as a unit there is very little chemistry.

The action sequences either consist of Edward Norton running very, very fast or Hulk and Abomination having a big old brawl in some New York side street.  If you were so inclined you could make a drinking game and take a swig every time a vehicle is thrown through the air, which, with the threat alcohol poisoning, is the only way any sense of tension could possibly be created.  The effects aren’t particularly dated, it’s worse than that, they just aren’t interesting.  The only time I sat up and paid attention to the action was when Hulk extinguished a fire by clapping and this is because I almost choked on my tea and died the most British death of British deaths.

There are glimpses of Marvel humour, such as the taxi ride through New York, but the comedy doesn’t land.  It almost feels like The Incredible Hulk was so scared of becoming cartoony it overcompensated by being too serious.  Iron Man relied on AC/DC and witty quips to get by; The Incredible Hulk took itself far too seriously for such tricks, and in the end, suffered for it.

Zac Penn knows his way around comic book adaptations and Louis Leterrier directed one of my favourite go to films, Now You See Me, so I know that The Incredible Hulk was in capable hands.  Maybe fans with prior knowledge of the comics will appreciate the film more than I did, but as a fan of the Marvel movies rather than the source material, I still don’t fully understand what happened to Bruce Banner to turn him into the Hulk.  The opening credits attempt to fill in the blanks but in a rushed and vague manner. By the time the closing credits rolled, I no longer cared.  The Incredible Hulk gets a generous 5/10.  I am happier with the Ruffalo era of Hulk.

Iron Man

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, but thanks to Tumblr, I’ve discovered that starting January 2018 you can watch a Marvel-A-Week and be completely caught up on the series just in time to watch Loki die an unjust death Infinity War in May.  My commitment to this challenge is as strong as my overall desire to blog, but at the minute I am motivated and willing to give it a shot.  The fact that it is the middle of a Thursday afternoon and I have little interest in doing some actual work is the key driving force behind this spontaneous, yet somehow predictable, appearance on my own blog.

The first film in the Marvel-A-Week series is Iron Man.  A film, in normal circumstances, I would have absolutely zero interest in revisiting due to my lack of interest in Tony Stark and/or Robert Downey Junior.

PLOT:  After being kidnapped by a band of terrorists, an injured Tony Stark adapts his own arc technology and builds a weaponised suit made of iron to escape.  Several montages later, Stark has created his first fully functioning Iron Man and must use it to defeat his warmongering business partner and long-time friend Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges).  END PLOT

The opening set piece in Afghanistan and the closing battle with Obadiah are sandwiched between Tony’s constant flirting with Rhodey (Terrance Howard) and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and many mini-montages involving Tony building his suit and getting doused with a fire extinguisher.  This is more of a comment than a criticism as I would be lying if I implied that I didn’t enjoy every dam minute of this film.  In truth, it has been so long since I have watched Iron Man I could only remember fragments of the plot and not in an overly fond manner.  I was surprised by how much repressed affection clawed its way out of the dark depths of my stone cold heart.    

I was not expecting my re-watch of Iron Man to be a positive experience as I have an irrational dislike for both Tony Stark and Robert Downey Junior.  There is no specific flaw on the part of either, but my memories have decided that both get far too much screen time in the Marvel universe at the expense of other, just as interesting, characters.  This is the same logic used for my dislike of Wolverine and Hugh Jackman.  In truth, Robert Downey Junior was born to play Iron Man and his Tony Stark is a super intelligent marshmallow, with a heart of gold and a genuine hero.  I am now curious to see at what point in the Marvel canon I turned against both character and actor.  Based on my enjoyment of Iron Man, I hope it doesn’t happen.

Iron Man is undoubtedly Robert Downey Junior’s film, but the supporting players all do their bit.  I fully admit to getting excited at Rhodey’s ‘next time’ even though Terrence Howard transforms into Don Cheadle for reasons that I can’t quite remember.  Jeff Bridges is fine as the corrupt corporate villain, but Obadiah Stane will once again be quickly and easily forgotten.  However, I don’t believe we need to remember him.

The effects hold up even though they are now approaching ten years old – nothing felt particularly dated but nothing felt particularly ground breaking either.  Aside from the reveals of the various Iron Man suits, I can’t remember what the big money shot was.  I suspect that the soundtrack and musical cues helped make the action feel fresh.

Realistically, the likelihood of me making it to the end of the Marvel-A-Week challenge is slim to non-existent.  It has been a worthwhile adventure, if only because it gave me an opportunity to watch a film I otherwise would have written off.  Iron Man turned out to be an enjoyable watch and gets  8/10.  Next up is The Incredible Hulk……..