It was a nod to the first avengers movie, I doubt they would actually do a rethread like that.
There are movies like that, such as Big Trouble in Little China, that combine action and humor in just the right mix. Since BTiLC was an original story, it could fit the stakes to the story and tone. Lo Pan isn’t the “god of death,” and he isn’t really intended to be scary.
I totally agree with you that Thor doesn’t work as dark material and I don’t want to be depressed by it either. I’m just saying that, you have the “goddess of death,” and she’s played well by KB but she’s not scary at all. People are getting slaughtered, but it doesn’t feel real or powerful in any sense. It just has no grit at all. For another example, see any Marvel movie with maybe the exception of the first Iron Man. For an example of the opposite that could still be seen as family-friendly, see the first two Tobey McGuire Spider-Man movies. The final battle with the Green Goblin in the first really has some edge and menace to it.
I don’t think the Hulk’s CGI ever looks good. I was surprised at how bad Mark Ruffalo was at selling the material this time around. I usually have been impressed by him. It just seemed lame.
Agreed, but my conclusion is different.
Hey, I had fun with it too. I was laughing out loud at some stuff. But plot and villains are weak links in most Marvel films, and they were here too.
…Umm… I’d bet a million dollars it comes back considering the next Avengers movies is entirely about Thanos getting the stones.
Loki wasn’t looking at the stones he was looking at the tesseract that he used in avengers 1. The only time they showed the stones was when Hela knocked off the gauntlet of infinity and said “Fake!” because they showed the gauntlet in the first Thor movie before the Thanos storyline was set in stone.
The Tesseract IS an Infinity Stone.
A saw it yesterday. I thought it was good but a little too light and jokey. It was basically a comedy which undercut any sense of tension or drama. A few thoughts:
Having the solution be to destroy Asgard was clever and unexpected. I liked it. It was a a very Thor answer.
That was Matt Damon playing in the play within the movie wasn’t it?
I would have loved if there was some way they could have hidden the fact that the Hulk was the champion. I know marketing makes that impossible but t would have been a great moment for the first people to see the movie.
I enjoyed the villain calling the Infinity Gauntlet in the vault a fake. It solves a contradiction in the MCU that goes back to the first Thor in a funny way.
I find it almost impossible Loki didn’t steal something (specifically the Tesseract but maybe more) from the vault. And if he didn’t it begs the question of what happened to all the stuff in the vault?
For some reason this movie reminded me of a cartoon. It felt like it should have been animated like the Heavy Metal movie or something.
…it was a hard call, but I think they made the right decision to show the Hulk. Compare that with the Justice League trailers, that are
trying to pretend that Superman is still dead.
I even feel silly putting that in a spoiler box: because *everybody *knows that Superman is in the movie.
The Thor trailers were all exciting, compelling, and funny. The Justice League trailers were all a bit (IMHO) meh. The Thor trailers threw down the gauntlet: destroying Mjölnir in the opening frames and revealing the Hulk in the closing frames and they basically went in with the attitude “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” I think thats refreshing: and I suspect that will be reflected in the box-office when Justice League gets released shortly.
I guarantee you that he stole the Tesseract (and probably everything else from the vault that he could carry). Getting the Tesseract out of Asgard before it was destroyed will feed into the Infinity War plot, I’m reasonably certain.
Yes, it was. “Play Thor” was Chris Hemsworth’s brother, Luke, and “Play Odin” was Sam Neill.
Also, Korg (the rock guy) was the film’s director, Taika Waititi.
Boy, what a lot of fun. Really great to see them recognize just how silly all this is, and totally embrace it.
Just got back. I’d give it a solid B/B+. Some nice Kirby-esque touches in the designs, nice cameo from Stan, fun physical throw-aways from everybody…all in all a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. I have to admit I jumped up in my seat with glee the first time “Immigrant Song” blasted from the speakers.
Oh, and it was very fun to watch Fenris get his ass kicked. 
Yeah, and now it is headed to earth. Did that insanely large ship in the end credit scene belong to Thanos?
That’s the way to bet.
I was surprised, too, at the deaths of those characters, and the fact that Volstagg and Fandral both died so rapidly. But, it presaged the wiping out of a lot of the Asgardian background for Thor.
My understanding is that the director wanted to have Sif in the film, but that Jaimie Alexander was unavailable, due to the shooting schedule for “Blindspot.” However, her absence from the film does make it feasible that Sif survived the destruction of Asgard, assuming that she was off elsewhere when Hela attacked.
…and Loki had been threatened by Thanos’ rep back in Avengers. Something like “if the Tesseract is kept from us, there is no place you can hide.”
I think Loki did take the Tesseract (the space stone, I think it is) and Thanos will be attacking the ship that Loki and the others are on, and destroying it. And the Guardians will happen across them, floating in space…
It’s been speculated that Thanos will hook up with Hela, so I figure they’ll meet when he goes to Asgard looking for the Tesseract (since Loki was last known to have it).
I saw that on the Trivia of IMDB, but he just mo-capped the guy right?
Now THERE’S a sex scene no one wants…
Mrs. Cups and I enjoyed the movie pretty well, we both thought it was really funny. My thoughts on the movie is that it’s Marvel’s version of an action comedy. Not that Guardians wasn’t action packed or funny, but it was a sci-fi movie. This was, to me, less of a sci-fi movie and more of an action comedy a la “21 Jump Street” or “Get Smart”.
I didn’t think the comedy undercut the drama because, well, there was no drama IMO. At this point, the Marvel movies have such an end in mind that I know nothing super-crazy is going to happen, so I just roll with it. Although Thor losing an eye is pretty significant.
How many more movies 'til Infinity War? Black Panther and Ms Marvel?
I actually agree with the criticism as you stated it here. While I don’t want my fun, family-friendly popcorn flick to remind me of real life tragedy, I do like it when the villain seems genuinely scary and threatening. While the movie conveyed that Hela was a powerful threat (by showing her kicking everyone’s butts with relative ease), the jokiness combined with the video-gamey-ness of the battles prevented her from feeling threatening in a more visceral sense. I really liked the movie, but I can still acknowledge that as a shortcoming.
In fact, my kid didn’t even realize that Hela had killed the Warriors Three, despite the fact that we had watched the first Thor movie a few hours before going to see the new one, so she ought to have recognized them. That just blended into “Hela is killing a bunch of generic Asgardians” for her. This worked out well for me, because my kid hates it when anyone dies in movies, but it probably shows that part could have been given a bit more weight.
Plus, the movie did the same thing all of these movies do in the last act – have the heroes spend a bunch of time fighting an army of faceless nobodies. I know it’s basically a genre convention that there be a big climactic battle, but I’d rather have more time spent on, say, Hulk vs. Fenris, and less on Thor punches CGI badguy #616.
While I’m criticizing, it also did the cliché “Thor needs to believe in himself before he can use his powers to the fullest”, even if it was averted a bit by the fact that this still wasn’t enough to defeat Hela.
Again, I had a great time, but it was by no means a flawless superhero movie.
All that said, there’s a segment of hard-core comics fans who seem to think “darker is always better”, and that attitude seems to have influenced the DC movies in particular, mostly to their detriment. So I’m predisposed to push back with “No, fun is better”, even while I agree that scarier, more imposing villains would be a good thing, and could be done in a way that didn’t ruin the fun. But in terms of errors the writers and director can make (where “error” means “deviation from perfect alignment with tim314’s personal tastes”, of course), focusing too much on fun is far less severe than focusing too much on darkness.
I wasn’t so much thinking about the CGI, I just liked the fact that Hulk (as opposed to Banner) had enough dialogue to give him a bit of a personality. There have been a lot of variations of Hulk in the comics, but almost all of them have been more verbose than the movie Hulk to date. The part where he was saying, basically, “Why should Hulk go back to Earth? Everyone there hates Hulk” sounded like the sort of thing the Hulk of the comics would say.
It made me laugh several times, it was fairly fun, and I find Chris Hemsworth enjoyable to watch. I thought it was a definite improvement in enjoyability compared to many of the recent ones, but I think I’m pretty much over the Marvel movies. I can’t point at exactly what has gone wrong for me, unless it’s just too much of a muchness.
Motion capture and voice, as I understand it. From Wikipedia: