God of Thunder

Every week during the Summer of Superheroes, SuperMike Matthews breaks down the ins and outs of a current superhero franchise. Spoilers may follow, so read at your own risk. 

                                                  

This week: THE MIGHTY THOR!  

Superheroes aren’t for everybody.

I do understand that fact, despite occasionally giving off a vibe that seems to say otherwise. Some people, through no fault of their own, just don’t see the appeal of the genre, and they would rather look for their entertainment elsewhere. That’s fine. And yet, without invalidating that opinion, it does raise some interesting questions about what makes the superhero genre a genre at all. I mean, wouldn’t I be justified in calling The Punisher more of an action movie? Or even in calling Green Lantern a sci-fi movie? Hell, Wikipedia says that Blade is a “vampire-superhero-vigilante action film,” and I’m pretty sure putting that many adjectives in a row is the verbal equivalent of mixing colors until you get brown.

The superhero genre is no one thing, and Marvel Studios has taken to that idea to heart, arguably from the very beginning, but certainly by the time they started work on 2011’s Thor.

To make an argument that is ingenious at best, and at worst, entirely based in semantics, Marvel’s two Thor movies are not actually superhero movies, because they aren’t actually about a superhero. They’re about a god. If you want to get really technical, they’re about an alien, but the point I’m making is that the character of Thor, as published by Marvel Comics, is in fact the same Thor that has existed in mankind’s collective awareness for millennia. A figure with that kind of cultural baggage could never fit neatly into the existing superhero formula, which usually requires an origin story (something Thor doesn’t have, other than being born), an alter-ego, * and an array of costumed villains that may or may not carry enchanted crowbars. No, to function at his best, this kind of character requires a somewhat different approach.

You can't make this stuff up. Well… unless you're Lee and Kirby, I guess.

 * For the first 20 years of his publication, Thor actually did have an alter-ego: Donald Blake, M.D. He practiced medicine and everything! While the first Thor film uses the name a few times as an Easter Egg, it wisely stops short of fully committing to the idea. 

There’s a concept in screenwriting, known as the ‘buy-in,’ which refers to the parts of a film’s premise that the viewer is asked to accept right off the bat, without skepticism. The buy-in isn’t usually a hard sell – if you’re going to reject a movie’s premise outright, you probably wouldn’t enjoy it anyway – but everyone does have their own limit as to how far a film can push things, and Thor has a lot on its plate in that regard. I don’t mean to disparage the movie at all, but come on; not only does it posit that the Norse gods were real, it makes the even crazier claim that they’re still alive and kicking up in space, zipping about the cosmos via a rainbow-powered teleportation machine. You’ve got to admit that when I say it like that, * it sounds pretty dumb. It SHOULD be dumb. But it’s not. At least, not really. So what gives?

 * i.e., devoid of all context 

It all comes down to the magic of genre. I doubt this will serve as a revelatory statement to anyone reading this – or anyone at all, really – but the Thor films really do deserve to be classified as fantasy films. In that sense, they’ve cheated their way into a whole new buy-in bracket, one that ultimately has no upper threshold. It’s a smart move, in that favoring Thor’s fantasy elements over his sci-fi ones opens him up to unique storytelling possibilities and, more importantly, a wider audience than the usual comic-book fare. Granted, it’s not a perfect translation; splitting the action between Asgard and Earth gives the films an unusual texture, and the second film adds a not insignificant amount of spaceships and laser guns to the mix (because, again, aliens), but the core conflicts at play in both movies still have a lot less in common with The Dark Knight Returns than they do with The Return of the King.

In fact, any fundamental problems of the Thor franchise come mostly from the fact that it can’t seem to fully commit to the whole ‘epic fantasy’ thing. These are two movies that should easily have the most expansive feel of anything Marvel Studios has put out so far, but, in what I am forced to assume is the result of some sort of time paradox, they’re actually the two most claustrophobic, by a wide margin. To use an example, Thor: The Dark World, a film that I have seen in its entirety at least twice, exists in my mind as six long scenes, taking place across three-ish locations. One of those locations is on Earth. The second is Asgard, which we saw plenty of in the first movie, and the third is Svartalfheim, most notable for being a literal barren wasteland.

Whee.

While the actual story of the film isn’t bad so much as it straightforward, it’s still embarrassingly small in scope for a premise that could have taken place across as many as nine different planets. The first Thor admittedly gets a pass because of everything it had to establish, but it certainly doesn’t help that Thor interacts exclusively with the same three people on both of his solo visits to Midgard, * even when those visits take place two years and almost 5,000 miles apart. Narrow focus on a few characters is a perfectly valid entry point into a dense mythology (could you imagine what Star Wars would be like if we didn’t care what happened to anyone?), but I can’t help but feel as though it’s an overcorrection. Now that we understand how this universe works, the later movies should really give us a chance to see more of it and understand the kinds of threats that are out there.

 * The name Thor and his brethren call Earth 

Speaking of threats, how the Hel have we not talked about Loki yet?

As Thor’s adopted brother and the series’ main antagonist, Asgard’s resident trickster god has become, in many ways, the new lifeblood of the MCU. This popularity comes in no small part from Tom Hiddleston’s amazing performance, but I would be quick to argue that it also comes from Loki’s compelling psychological depth, something he possesses far more of than any other Marvel Studios villain. To sum things up as best I can, Loki was raised by his adopted father Odin to want nothing more than to be king, only to be told when the time came that he can’t actually be one. When Loki later finds out that he is the biological son of a different king entirely, he blames Odin for all his troubles, and what makes him such a great villain is that he kind of has a point. Sure, he’s dealing with it in entirely the wrong way, but we can sympathize with Loki’s plight, something that elevates his character to another plane entirely. More than that, because he isn’t simply evil for evil’s sake, he has varied and distinct relationships with lots of different characters: genuine love for his mother, sheer hatred of his father, begrudging respect – and maybe even affection – for his brother Thor. These people have been a family unit for going on 3000 years now, and those kinds of bonds aren’t easily broken.

So, yeah. Loki’s great. And it’s a good thing, too, because the other Thor villains thus far have really struggled to live up to their full potential, making it even harder for the series to achieve the saga-like feel it’s going for. The secondary villain of Thor, for instance, is The Destroyer, an enemy that the comic-book version of Thor has yet to fight without almost dying, but which fails to carry the necessary weight on film due to its portrayal as nothing more than some sort of mindless Asgardian security guard. Because it only appears in one shot before being sent to kill our hero, the viewer is given no reliable gauge as to what it’s capable of, and I, at least, found myself struggling to understand why Thor and pals were having such a hard time.

The main villain of The Dark World, on the other hand, is Malekith the Accursed, and he comes with an entirely different set of problems. Unlike Loki, whose goals pretty much begin and end with ascending to the throne of Asgard, Malekith wants to return the Nine Realms to a primordial state of darkness, in which his people, the Dark Elves, can once again thrive. I’m going to assume, in the absence of any other information, that being enshrouded in darkness equates to complete destruction for anyone who isn't a Dark Elf, and that in turn means that the film’s stakes shoot up so high that they actually roll back around to zero. After all, narrative rules dictate that someone like Loki or the Iron Monger could emerge victorious, unlikely as it may be, because their victory would have reasonably finite consequences. Malekith, on the other hand, can’t possibly win, because Marvel Studios kind of needs to keep more than one of the Nine Realms around if they’re going to go on making movies.

 For what it’s worth, I think The Dark World’s secondary villain, Kurse, was used to optimal effect, and I love his character design.  –Ed. 

So what’s next for the god of thunder?

What If?

I’m honestly not the biggest fan of Thor, which means I don’t have the best grasp of where the character ought to go from here. But honestly, why put a limit on it? Why can’t we have a movie where Thor goes everywhere? Yes, yes, I know that sending your hero on a far-reaching quest is pretty much the most hackneyed fantasy trope imaginable, but darn it all, when you have a playground as big as the Nine Realms at your disposal, I want you to USE it! There are still four realms out there that we haven’t seen at all! Of course, with Thor now permanently residing on Earth, putting him back in space means jumping through more narrative hoops than ever.

Getting a bit more specific, any future Thor movie will obviously have to deal with the fallout from the second film’s cliffhanger ending, and I’m sure that will be at least half of Thor 3’s finished product. I do worry, though, that devoting an entire film to that conflict will feel like a rehash of the first Thor, mostly because that’s exactly what it would be. To add a little more variety to the mix, we should turn our attention to the franchise’s other ticking clock: Jane Foster.

Up to this point, Jane Foster has been an essential part of both the Thor franchise and the personal development of Thor himself. In fact, she provides the inciting incident that causes the entire second movie to happen (and then becomes basically a human MacGuffin for the next 80 minutes). Natalie Portman, who has played Jane in both films, appears to be losing interest in the role, but for Thor to simply let her go at this point would be a complete betrayal of his character. This means that Marvel will need to either recast the part – something they certainly aren’t above doing – or find a way to justify writing her out in the next film.

If I had to craft a movie with all of those goals in mind – and I really am just spitballing here – I might open with some sort of cliffhanger-related exploit that eventually leads to Jane’s death. From there, Thor would need to journey through the Nine Realms into Hel, thus reclaiming her soul. Once she was saved and back on Earth, Thor would realize that his presence serves only as a danger to her, and tearfully let her go.

I understand that there are a number of terrible things about that scenario: Jane getting ‘Fridged,’ the logical questions of why she would go to Asgardian Hel, the fact that it would provide a way to cheat death in all future Marvel movies, the fact that it pretty much rips off Disney’s Hercules… the list goes on. I never said it would be perfect. Hell, I came up with it in ten minutes. But the very least, it’s a suitably epic story that harkens back to old mythology and has a personal motivation at its core. That’s something to shoot for.

Look, ignoring all of that previous stuff, lf I get nothing else out of the next Thor film, the one thing I do want to see is a better use of the character’s supporting cast. Because, truth be told, the guy has got a pretty great one! Beta Ray Bill would be amazing, but I would gladly settle for more of Lady Sif and the Warriors Three. To me, they’re super interesting, and they’ve been major supporting players in both movies so far, but their characters remain thinly sketched at best. In fact, now that I think of it, their lack of development might be my biggest gripe with the current state of the franchise.

So yeah, if there’s one message I’d like to leave you with, I guess that’s it: Needs more Volstagg.

Every movie could use more Volstagg.

 In Two Weeks: Who’s strong and brave, here to save the American way?