Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase Three and BEYOOOOONND

[slikmar]

15 hours ago, zslane said:

Thor could have spent his days building an Asgardian-style "fortress of solitude" for himself somewhere in Scandanavia. I would have preferred a Thor single-mindedly obsessed with building some giant structure in homage to his lost people and lost realm than a Thor wallowing in pity and serving as the focal point for farce.

Part of the problem with this was that they were also trying to shift leadership over to Valkarie in Marvel/Disney's move toward dominant females in their movies. Not complaining or saying was wrong, but they weren't exactly subtle about it starting with Captain Marvel, who out stripped EVERYONE but Thanos in power and almost matched him.

[Lord Liaden]

Yeah, I know what Feige said about Captain Marvel, but Thor with Stormbreaker was just as devastating as her. And unlike CM, Thor fought Thanos armed with the full Infinity Gauntlet, and nearly killed him.

 

Clearly, if Thor had been in normal fighting form at the end of Endgame, Thanos would have had a much tougher fight on his hands.

[Greywind]

Cap was all the tough fight Thanos could handle

[Pattern Ghost]

Thor, Hulk and Wanda all seem to be in the same league as Captain Marvel in power. Thor adds in a few centuries of experience on all of them.

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, Greywind said:

Cap was all the tough fight Thanos could handle

 

I'm pretty confident if Thor had been in shape he would have wailed on Thanos as hard as Cap did. If Steve had just had backup at that moment Thanos would probably have gone down.

 

1 hour ago, Pattern Ghost said:

Thor, Hulk and Wanda all seem to be in the same league as Captain Marvel in power. Thor adds in a few centuries of experience on all of them.

 

I'd add Dr. Strange to that list.

 

MCU brutish Hulk has the raw power, but has repeatedly struggled against opponents close to his level with more skill and experience. Banner Hulk is more disciplined, but also smaller and presumably weaker. Strange and Wanda are no tougher physically than other humans, which shows when they're caught by surprise. Thor is at his best with a weapon to focus and channel his power. Captain Marvel really is the full package, blending superhuman physicality and energy powers with extensive training and decades of experience, and needing no tools besides herself.

[Pattern Ghost]

9 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

I'd add Dr. Strange to that list.

Agreed!

[Spence]

Finally watched the first two episodes of WandaVison and it was..........  underwhelming? 

 

I really hope they are not planning to continue along the same line.

[Bazza]

They are calling it a sitcom...so yes. 

 

[zslane]

The early episodes are deliberately misleading in that they slowly establish Wanda's tenuous state of mind in the form of classic sitcoms before it all begins to unravel and the real drama ensues.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I don't buy 1000 year old Thor being so bummed by a bad battle that he loses his self worth and becomes a mopey fat loser wallowing in self loathing.  He's been through everything in those times, including losing the worship and adoration of nations.  Read some of the myths about what Thor went through, he wasn't a grinning frat boy idiot.

 

But its where the actor and Feige who doesn't really understand heroism or wisdom very well wanted to go.  Hemsworth was not at all enjoying playing serious, Shakespeare Thor.

[Greywind]

Thor was the basis for the myths. Those myths weren't necessarily true.

[zslane]

In order to appeal to mainstream audiences, Feige has had to capitulate to the need to make the MCU characters "relatable" to the masses. Mopey Fat Thor is ostensibly much more relatable to Americans than Shakespearean Thor. This was not especially the case when Thor was introduced to Silver Age comic book readers in the 1960s. But times they have a'changed, n'est-ce pas?

[csyphrett]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I don't buy 1000 year old Thor being so bummed by a bad battle that he loses his self worth and becomes a mopey fat loser wallowing in self loathing.  He's been through everything in those times, including losing the worship and adoration of nations.  Read some of the myths about what Thor went through, he wasn't a grinning frat boy idiot.

 

But its where the actor and Feige who doesn't really understand heroism or wisdom very well wanted to go.  Hemsworth was not at all enjoying playing serious, Shakespeare Thor.

He didn't lose three quarters of his people before

CES

[Starlord]

11 minutes ago, csyphrett said:

He didn't lose three quarters of his people before

CES

and his mother...and his father...and his brother...and his friends...and he didn't just lose a big battle - he basically got half the universe killed because he had Thanos beat and took time to gloat.  Yeesh, it's perfectly realistic for him to quit on life IMO.

[Lord Liaden]

Thank you, csyphrett and Starlord.   It seems people keep forgetting to look at the whole arc of the MCU, because Endgame is the culmination of a decade-long story. Thor's life since his film debut has brought a series of tragic losses and failures. As he says to Rocket in Infinity War, "What more could I lose?" Because at that point he believed he's lost everything. And then he finds out how very much more he could lose. And it's his fault.

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Read some of the myths about what Thor went through, he wasn't a grinning frat boy idiot.

 

I have read all Thor's myths, and you're right. Thor wasn't a grinning frat boy, he was a rather simple-minded, rash, short-tempered, violent lummox, good for killing the enemies of the gods but not a lot besides. A good hero for Vikings, not so much for the sensibilities of the modern world. The comic character himself differs radically from mythic Thor, as he had to for his comic to sell.

 

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

But its where the actor and Feige who doesn't really understand heroism or wisdom very well wanted to go.  Hemsworth was not at all enjoying playing serious, Shakespeare Thor.

 

I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. As a character, after his first film appearance Thor was in a rut. Every action he took was only in reaction to someone else: his brother, his father, his foes like Malekith and Ultron. Thor wasn't changing or growing. That's why Hemsworth said he was getting bored; and that's why he and Kevin Feige and Taika Waititi agreed to blow up all the constants in Thor's life.

 

Feige and Hemsworth understand very well that a hero is defined by the challenges they face. There's no heroism in always standing tall if you're never at risk of falling short. It's a fall that makes the subsequent rise so inspiring. No one has had more reason to fall as far and hard as Thor, but when it really mattered he stood up again. That's a hero.

 

(And all this is coming from a guy who HATES that entire story line. But I can see why they did it, and it makes both dramatic and economic sense.)

[Lord Liaden]

2 hours ago, zslane said:

In order to appeal to mainstream audiences, Feige has had to capitulate to the need to make the MCU characters "relatable" to the masses. Mopey Fat Thor is ostensibly much more relatable to Americans than Shakespearean Thor. This was not especially the case when Thor was introduced to Silver Age comic book readers in the 1960s. But times they have a'changed, n'est-ce pas?

 

You may very well be right that sensibilities have changed. But I think there was something else at work. Comic-book Thor never really fit in the modern world, but he came from a world where he did, where things and people are grander, nobler, and more awe- and/or terror-inspiring than on Earth. And Thor's comic title built that world of Asgard and its attendant regions, and gave Thor friends and enemies to interact with who operated on the same level and shared the same style. Comic readers could accept his grandiloquence and honor and boasting of his prowess, because his whole native milieu is like that.

 

Asgard was never developed to the same degree in the MCU. That may have been a deliberate choice, or just a function of the limited time for background that they had in a movie. But they hadn't given the movie-going audience enough to connect with it, and they were tuning out. Personally I would have preferred a movie that did for Asgard what Black Panther  did for Wakanda, but it's too late for that now.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

I'm afraid I have to strongly disagree. As a character, after his first film appearance Thor was in a rut. Every action he took was only in reaction to someone else

 

You're not making the case that Feige is good at portraying heroes very effectively here.  That's Iron Man's entire story arc, cleaning up the problems he created and whining about it.

 

And Thor lived for millennia, in that time his sister went berserk and nearly killed all Asgard once already, he is not unfamiliar with the concept of loss and war and death.

[Ranxerox]

23 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

You're not making the case that Feige is good at portraying heroes very effectively here.  That's Iron Man's entire story arc, cleaning up the problems he created and whining about it.

 

And Thor lived for millennia, in that time his sister went berserk and nearly killed all Asgard once already, he is not unfamiliar with the concept of loss and war and death.

 

No, she didn't.  He didn't even know that he had a sister.  Her first attack on Asgard happened either before he was born or when he was very young.

[Lord Liaden]

37 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

You're not making the case that Feige is good at portraying heroes very effectively here.  That's Iron Man's entire story arc, cleaning up the problems he created and whining about it.

 

And Thor lived for millennia, in that time his sister went berserk and nearly killed all Asgard once already, he is not unfamiliar with the concept of loss and war and death.

 

MCU Hela isn't the most relevant example, as Thor wasn't even aware she existed until Odin's deathbed confession that he deliberately concealed that part of his past. And I have no doubt that Thor had experienced loss over his lifetime, but it couldn't have been deeply personal, because it's clear from his attitude in his first movie that he had never failed before, at least to his way of thinking.

 

Every one of Tony Stark's movie appearances had involved some action of his that drove the plot, and led to character growth, whether it's accepting consequences for his past actions and trying to make amends, or embracing self-sacrifice, or facing his own mortality, or coping with PTSD, or reconciling in his heart with his late father, or learning to be part of something greater than himself. But I do agree that his whining can get annoying at times. It's mostly Stark/Downey's wit and charm that lead most of the audience to let him get away with it.

[Starlord]

33 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

You're not making the case that Feige is good at portraying heroes very effectively here.  

 

Does anyone actually need to make that case?  Are there actually people out there who look back at the last 12 years of the MCU and think Kevin Feige doesn't know how to portray heroes??

 

 Ok.

 

Btw, here's an excerpt from a Stan Lee interview around the time the first Thor movie came out:

 

Lee’s literary approach — and his desire to depict his heroes’ private lives — profoundly altered comics. Spider-Man suffers a teen’s social travails. Iron Man battles his demon addiction. Lee says he was guided by intimate questions: “What did they do when they weren’t fighting supervillains? Where did they live? . . . What were their hopes, dreams, aspirations, as well as their frustrations?”

He believes passionately that many people like their superheroes to have depth, to have vulnerability, to have flaws — to be vexed beneath the spandex.

“For a long time, there was no personal involvement with some of the super­heroes,” Lee says. “I’d read books and Dickens always had interesting characters. Mark Twain had interesting characters — so did Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the greatest fictional character of all in Sherlock Holmes.

“I wanted to write the kind of dialogue that would give the character personality."

[Lord Liaden]

With all the talk dissecting MCU Thor, I thought a little palate-cleanser might be welcome.

 

 

[Greywind]

 

[zslane]

6 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Asgard was never developed to the same degree in the MCU.

 

I would argue that Asgard was not very developed in the comics when Thor first appeared in them either. It took a long time to develop Asgard and the rest of that pantheon of super-beings in the comics. Readers simply accepted Thor as he was without question for many hundreds of issues. But mainstream movie audiences don't have the same mindset that comic readers do, and so they demand something quite different from these characters. The need for (MCU) Thor to remain a viable solo "franchise" character put great pressure on Feige to pivot and make him funny and relatable so as to appeal to the masses, a problem Stan Lee never really faced with comic-book Thor.

[megaplayboy]

I've only seen the first two episodes of WandaVision, but I already have some theories, one of which is that the sitcom homage will "update" over time.  Already by episode two there's a transition at the end to color, much like sitcoms transitioned to color broadcasts in the mid-60s.  Perhaps we'll get a Normal Lear/Brady Bunch/70s homage later in the season.