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iamanartichoke · 3 years

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I wrote a Thing. It’s extremely long. I’d prefer it not be reblogged; I wrote this for my own catharsis and would prefer it not be circulated, bc of Reasons.

I changed my mind, okay to reblog. <3

Under a cut for (extreme, did I mention?) length.

So I got about 12 minutes of sleep last night, as you do, and around 3am or so I found myself - out of sheer curiosity - going down a meta hole of Ragnarok discourse, trying to figure out where this "satisfying redemption arc" for Loki happened. (I mean, there's a lot of things I would like to figure out, but I started there.) Because I could.

Basically I was looking for meta that went into detail about how Loki was redeemed in a satisfactory way. The ‘satisfactory’ is an important word here bc there is a redemption arc in the film, in that Loki starts off the film as an antagonist (kinda) to Thor and he ends the film as an ally to Thor, standing at Thor's side. In that sense, yes, there's a redemption arc. I didn't find much (and I had no idea how much people just despise Ragnarok "antis" [I really dislike that word] but that's another topic [that I don't particularly want to get into, tbh]) but I did find some. I read what I could find, and I read it open-mindedly, and overall I came away feeling like, okay, there are some valid points being made here and I can kinda see where they're coming from.

But it was a bit (a lot) like -- flat. Idk. The best comparison I can think of is that it’s like if a literature class read, I don't know, The Yellow Wallpaper for an assignment, and some of the students came away from it feeling like it was a creepy story about a woman slowly driving herself insane, and the other students came away from it incensed at the oppression and infantilization of women in the late 19th century -

- and neither side is wrong, but the former is a very surface-level reading and the latter isn't (bc it stems from looking at why she drives herself insane, why she was prescribed 'rest' in the first place, the context of what women could and couldn't do back then, etc; basically, a bit more work has to go into it).

[Note: I am not disparaging the quality of The Yellow Wallpaper. At all. It’s just the first relatively well-known story that popped into my head.]

In this sense, I can see the argument for Loki's redemption arc, but I don't think it's a very good argument. Not invalid, but not great.

I mean, for example, I think the most consistent argument I found variations of re: Loki's redemption is that Ragnarok shows Loki finally taking responsibility for his bad behaviour and misdeeds. This includes recognizing that his actions were fueled from a place of self-hatred and a desire to self-destruct in addition to bringing destruction on others. That he probably feels awkward and regretful of these things and doesn't know how to act around Thor, but he figures it out by the end, and decides that returning to Asgard is the best way to show that he's ready to make amends. His act of bringing the Statesman to Asgard is an apology. He allies himself with Thor and ends up in a better place, both narratively (united with Thor once again) and mentally (having taken responsibility and made amends for his past).

And setting aside that he had already made amends by sacrificing his life in TDW (and also setting aside that the argument is made that Loki redeems himself in IW by sacrificing himself to Thanos but if that's the case, wouldn't that imply that he hadn't achieved redemption in Ragnarok or else there would be no need to achieve it again in IW? Or, if you think he did achieve redemption in Ragnarok, then what the fuck did he give his life in IW for? What was his motivation there, and why did the narrative not make it clearer? I digress.)

- setting aside those two factors, I think this is a very fair argument. Loki is fueled by self-hatred, and he does want to self-destruct, and he does want to inflict that pain on others as well (particularly Thor). No lies detected here.

However, I also need to know where that self-hatred and desire for destruction (toward himself and others) comes from and for that, we need to go back to Thor 1.

Thor 1.

Loki starts Thor 1 out as "a clenched fist with hair," to borrow a quote from the Haunting of Hill House (that I tucked away in my mental box of Lovely Things bc it says so much so very simply). He's very used to bottling everything up, pushing it down; he slinks around behind the scenes, pulling the strings to this plot or that. He's "always been one for mischief," but the narrative implies that the coronation incident is the first time Loki's done anything truly terrible. And it all immediately pretty much goes to shit, so Loki spends the rest of the movie frantically juggling all these moving pieces while trying to seem as if he's got it all under control, every step of the way. That's how I view his actions.

But I always come back to that quote where Kenneth Branaugh tells Tom, of the scene in the vault, "This is where the thin steel rod that's been holding your mind together snaps." In other words this is where Loki discovering he's Jotun is just one thing too many. He can't take it. But though the rod snaps, his descent isn't a nosedive. It's a tumble. As the story progresses, the clenched fist starts to loosen, the muscles are flexed in unfamiliar ways (that feel kinda good, after being stiff for so long), and it culminates with the hand opening completely and shaking itself out. All of that repression, that self-hatred, that rage and jealousy just explodes so that, by the time the bifrost scene happens, Loki's already hit bottom. It's not just about proving his worthiness to Odin. He wants to hurt Thor, too; he, essentially, throws a tantrum. (That's right, I said tantrum.)

(Note: The word 'tantrum’ has negative connotations bc we normally equate it with a toddler stamping their feet and screaming in the aisle when their parent won't buy them the toy they want. But in itself, the word tantrum isn't infantalizing. It's an "emotional outburst, an uncontrolled explosion of anger and frustration" [paraphrasing from dictionary.com]. That's exactly what happens here [and why Tom called Loki's actions a massive tantrum, but people took that to mean Tom agreed it was childish whereas I doubt Tom meant it that way]).

He's been pushed past his limit, and he does bad things. He does really shitty things. He hurts Thor, he hurts his family. I'm pretty sure he knows this all along so this isn't, like, some revelation further down the line that "hey, those things I did were probably kinda bad." He got the memo already.

Ragnarok

Fast forward to Ragnarok, and we're introduced to a version of Loki who's had 4ish years to sit with everything that's happened. To sit with it and not do much else. The rawness of it has faded, and now it seems as though it's just become a thing, like when you move through life aware of your childhood traumas and have more or less just accepted them (and you probably share a lot of really funny depression memes on Facebook, which is kinda the equivalent of Loki's play, but that's probably just me).

Loki has, more or less, chilled out. He seems more bored than anything else; he's been masquerading as Odin for longer than he ever planned or intended to, so he's more or less ended up hanging out, letting Asgard mind its own business, and entertaining himself with silly plays. This is the version that starts out the movie as an antagonist to Thor - a version that is, arguably, in a much different place [and is a much milder threat] than the version who originally did those Bad Things.

And of course Thor is still mad at him, and of course they're going to butt heads, because that's what they do (and Thor's grievances are genuine, I’ll add, bc it's not really his fault he assumed Loki faked his death, nor can he be blamed for being pissed about Odin).

One argument framed this version of Loki as being a person who is facing the awkwardness of coming out of a dark place, which is fair. If we're going to frame his actions in Thor 1 as a tantrum, then Ragnarok would be the part where the toddler has been taken home, possibly has had some lunch and a juice box, and is now watching cartoons. They're over the tantrum, and would probably feel pretty silly about it if they weren't, yknow, toddlers. They probably can't remember why they even wanted that toy so badly. If they're a little older and self-aware, they might even be embarrassed for having melted down.

Like the word tantrum, this feeling isn't a thing limited to toddlers. I know I've had a few epic meltdowns as a grown ass adult, and I know I always feel deeply embarrassed afterwards - like, want to crawl into a hole and die. I've said things I can't take back. Adolescents and teenagers throw tantrums, mentally ill people throw tantrums, adults throw tantrums (I mean, my god, look at all the videos of Karens having screaming meltdowns - screaming! - over having to wear masks in order to shop at stores). Humans throw tantrums. And usually, after the feelings have been let out and the tantrum has passed, humans feel pretty regretful and awkward and embarrassed about whatever they did and said in the midst of their meltdown.

I get all of that and agree it's valid and that Loki probably feels it. By the time Ragnarok happens, Loki's had some time to reflect and think hmm, yeah, probably could've handled that one a lot better. The argument further goes that in order to navigate this awkward period, Loki must come to terms with what he's done, acknowledge that some things can't be unsaid or undone, and begin to make amends. Supposedly, some people feel that Loki becomes a better person because he does "own" everything he did wrong and, even though he feels like a jackass (paraphrasing), he sets that aside to become a become a better person by choosing to help Thor and Asgard at the end.

Thus, the overall arc goes like this. Loki, Thor's jealous little brother,

throws a tantrum of epic proportions bc Reasons

continues to act badly and make things even worse (Avengers)

has to face consequences for his actions (prison sentence)

ends up with a stretch of time in which he's free to contemplate and chill out

feels embarrassed and awkward about how he's behaved

sees an opportunity to make up for it and decides to take it

helps Thor, saves the day, and ends the film a better person.

Redemption achieved.

None of this is wrong. The film supports it. It's a fair interpretation. But it leaves. out. so. much.

To circle all the way back around Loki being "a clenched fist with hair," and his actions stemming from his self-hatred, you have to ask - how did he get that way? He didn't end up with all this self-hatred on accident. Generally, one isn't born despising themselves, it's a learned behavior. (I realize chemical imbalances are a thing, obviously, as I have Mental Shit myself, but for argument's sake I'm assuming that's not the case with Loki [at this point in time]).

Where did Loki learn it? From his family, from his surroundings, from his culture. We see examples of these microaggressions in the first, like, twenty minutes of the movie - a guard openly laughs at Loki's magic after Thor makes a joke about it (the tone of the conversation implies that Thor "jokes" like this often) and though Loki does the snake thing, the guard faces no real consequences. Thor doesn't acknowledge that anything went amiss. Not much later, on their way to Jotunheim, Loki's barely gotten two words out to Heimdall before Thor cuts him off, steps in front of him, and takes charge. Loki doesn't look annoyed at this; he looks resigned.

Then, for absolutely no reason at all, Volstagg decides to make a jab at Loki ("silver tongue turned to lead?") just because he can. The ease with which he makes this comment and the way that no one else blinks an eye at it implies that this isn't out of the norm. And Loki doesn't react, not really. In the deleted version, he delivers a particularly nasty comeback but he delivers it under his breath, without intending Volstagg to hear it. In the final version, he simply says nothing, though his expression can be read as hurt or stung. Either way, the audience sees an example of Loki being walked all over by Thor and his friends and bottling up his reactions instead of standing up for himself.

Microaggressions matter. They are mentally and emotionally damaging. They hurt. The implication that this is not unusual treatment for Loki means that Loki's probably gone through this for most of his life. It's like the equivalent of being, I don't know, twenty two and you're the friend who has to walk behind the others when the sidewalk isn't wide enough, and it's been that way since the first day of kindergarten. At this point, you're used to it, but that doesn't make it hurt any less when the jabs come seemingly out of nowhere, for no reason other than to make you feel bad.

(I personally identify a lot with this bc I experienced passive bullying in social settings for years. I was the 'doesn't fit on the sidewalk' friend; I hung around with people who'd pretend to be my friend and would be more or less nice to my face, but would laugh at me and make fun of me behind my back for whatever reasons. And often there'd be the random jabs at me, things that would come out of nowhere to smack me in the face, followed by the fake laugh and “just kidding!" so that I couldn't even get upset without being made to feel like I was overreacting and couldn't take a joke. I'd deal with this socially, particularly in middle school when girls are their most vicious, and then I'd go home and, because I was the only girl with a lot of brothers and because boys are mean and because I am who I am, the dynamic was that my brothers would just endlessly roast me to my face and sometimes it was a "just kidding!" thing, where I was the only one not laughing. But that’s beside the point; my point is that microaggressions, passive bullying, and consistent invalidation are harmful and that shit stays with you into adulthood.)

So, yes, Loki needs to be held responsible for his misdeeds, and it's valid to say that he recognizes those misdeeds and wants to make amends. I have never disagreed with that. But the problem with this interpretation is that it lets every single other character who contributed to Loki's self-hatred and mental breakdown (let's just call a spade a spade here, that's what it was; he was broken psychologically) get off scot-free.

First of all,

Odin is not held accountable for instilling in the princes a mentality of Asgard first, everyone is beneath us but Jotuns are benath us the most, they are literal monsters. He is not held accountable for pitting his sons against one another (even if it was unintentional, he still did it) with "you were both born to be kings but only one of you can rule" being the general tone of their upbringing. He's not held accountable for his favoritism toward Thor.

Frigga is not held accountable for deferring to Odin both in supporting the above things and in keeping the truth of Loki's origins a secret while doing nothing to discourage the "monsters" narrative.

Thor is not held accountable for his own tendency of taking Loki for granted (he assumes Loki will come to Jotunheim, he oversteps Loki constantly, “know your place,” etc.. He grants his implicit permission for Loki to be treated as the sidewalk friend in their “group,” a group which is loyal to and takes their cues from Thor as Thor continues to do nothing in his brother's defense).

[Note: Wanting Thor to be held accountable for things he's done wrong isn't vilifying him. Acknowledging that Thor benefited from Odin's favoritism and his own place as Crown Prince doesn't negate Thor also being raised in an abusive environment. I don't think anyone's saying that or, if they have, it's not something I agree with.]

Furthermore,

Odin is not held accountable for his cruelty in disowning Loki (”your birthright was to die” is never going to be forgotten, speaking of people saying things that can't be unsaid or taken back) and in sentencing Loki to a severe prison sentence (life! only bc Frigga wouldn't let him execute Loki) for crimes that are no worse than what Odin himself has committed (around which the entire plot of Ragnarok revolves! Colonialism (and subjugation) is wrong is, like, a major theme [that people rush to praise, even] here).

Thor is also never held accountable for not trying harder to understand what made Loki snap (fair enough, he didn't have a ton of time after returning from Earth, but certainly he had lots of time to sit around reflecting while Loki was being tortured by Thanos for a year). He knows Loki is "not himself" and "beyond reason" and accepts it at face value; he questions it once and then lets it go. He's fine with assuming Loki's just lost his mind, and isn't that a shame. (I realize I'm simplifying Thor's emotions but my point is that Thor could've tried harder to figure out that Loki was being influenced and/or not acting completely autonomously.)

Thor is also never held accountable for - if not facing consequences for his own slaughter of Jotuns - then at least addressing why Loki can't kill an entire race even though Thor tried to do that, like, two days ago. (Granted, it’s difficult to understand how Thor got from Point A ("let's finish them together, Father!") to Point B (this is wrong!), but that failing belongs to Thor 1 (which is not, by the way, a perfect movie).

The interpretation that Loki is fully redeemed because he took responsibility for his actions, returned to Asgard, and allied himself with Thor to save their people is all well and good - but, why is Loki the only one here who has to take responsibility for their actions?

What about all the loose threads in his story?

For example, how did he get from:

Point A (believing himself a literal monster, having a complete mental breakdown, getting tortured and further traumatized after that, etc)

Point B (Hey, yknow what would be fun? I'm going to write and direct a play about how I heroically died to save Thor and Jane, and I'll go ahead and have Odin say he accepts me and has always loved me. I'm going to do these things because Odin never said this in real life and instead of acknowledging my sacrifice, Thor left my body in the dirt, so someone has to validate what I've done right and that someone might as well be me. And hey, while I'm at it, I'm going to control the narrative on revealing myself as Jotun to Asgard, instead of living in fear of it being found out, and I'm going to do it in a way that they have to sympathize with me and revere me in death, bc they never bothered to do so when I was alive. And Matt Damon should play me, also.)

Point C (Yeah, I guess I feel kinda awkward about that whole tantrum thing, also I should help Thor and support him being king.)

The answers to these questions are handwaved and the audience takes that to mean they don't matter. Furthermore, framing Loki's redemption around an act of service (more or less) to Thor makes Loki's redemption about Thor. Does Loki make this decision for the sake of Thor and of Asgard, or does he make it for himself? It's not super clear to me, and I think arguments can be made for both. Which, again, is fine, but - whatever.

If we're going to collectively agree, as a fandom, that Loki is complex, that he's morally gray, that he's worthy of redemption and therefore arguably a good person who's done bad things, then why is it asking too much to have it acknowledged that Thor (also a good person who's done bad things) played a part in Loki's downfall and has shit to apologize for, too? Bc one can only assume the reason is that you're taking a very gray concept and making it black and white by saying Loki has to apologize and make amends because he is the villain, and Thor doesn't because he is the hero (and it's his movie). And it's lazy.

This is where the crux of the issue lands. There's more than one valid interpretation, yes. And no two people (or groups of people, or whatever) are going to consume and therefore interpret or analyze the source material in the same way. I think I saw a post recently about how studies have been done on this, in fact. But, there is a lot going on under the surface that tends to get overlooked when exploring Loki's redemption arc in Ragnarok, as far as I can see, and that’s why I don’t consider it satisfactory.

[I did read similar arguments regarding other issues that are often debated ('debated'), like Loki's magic and/or being underpowered, whether or not Loki's betrayal of Thor was the natural outcome of the situation on Sakaar or not, whether Thor actually gets closure with Odin [if he does, how does he reconcile the father he's idolized with the imperialistic conqueror he's discovered? Why doesn't he hold Odin responsible for covering up Hela's existence and the threat of her return, especially as he knew he was nearing the end of his life? Is Thor's "I'm not as strong as you" meant to imply that he acknowledges those shortcomings of Odin's and that he's okay with them, or that he's just overlooking them, or is he not okay with them but didn't have the chance to get into it bc he was in the middle of battle? T'Challa confronted his father on his wrongdoings in Black Panther; could Thor not have had at least one line that was confrontational enough to establish where he stands as opposed to this gray middle? Can someone explain to me how any of this equates to Thor gaining closure? Please?) but obviously I'm not going to go into all of them (well, I tried not to), bc this mammoth post has gone on long enough (I may not even post this tbh)]

- but my overall point to this entire thing is that when I say I'm critical of Ragnarok bc it's flawed, that Loki's arc was neither complete nor satisfactory, that many things went unaddressed and, due to all of these things, I do not think Ragnarok is a very good movie nor a very cohesive movie, this is where I'm coming from. I have not seen anything to change my mind to the contrary.

But I am not saying that anyone satisfied with it is wrong, or shouldn't have the interpretation that they do. I'm not vilifying Thor in order to lift Loki up, just acknowledging that Thor is arguably just as flawed as Loki without the stigma of being Designated Villain. I think a lot of these arguments get overlooked or dismissed, and that's fine, but it doesn't make the people who do engage with them hateful, or bitter, or trying to excuse Loki's crimes, or feeling like redemption means that Loki's crimes should be erased rather than reconciled.

And sure, yes, perhaps we are expecting too much and exploring all of these themes (or wanting them explored) means that somehow we think it should be Loki's movie (we don't). Loki is a supporting character, but he's still a character. And the movie itself doesn't have to delve into all these things - no one's saying that. (At least, I'm not.) We just want acknowledgement, from the narrative, that this stuff was an Issue.

This could have been accomplished with -

Some dialogue closer to the novelization (and original script), like Thor and Loki both acknowledging the harm they've done one another and their kingdom due to their Feels.

A single line of Thor confronting Odin, or even asking "Why?"

A narrative acknowledgement that Odin did both Thor and Loki dirty (”I love you, my sons” isn't an apology, because it doesn't acknowledge either that there's been wrong-doing or express regret for having done the wrong in the first place).

A little bit more nuance in the way Loki treats his own past (ie, instead of flippantly telling the story of his suicide attempt, maybe - if it must be flippant - talk about getting blasted in the face with Hawkeye's arrow or sailing through to Svartalfheim [And in that moment, I sang ta-daaaa!]) or whatever.

I recognize that wanting full, in-depth exploration on all of these issues regarding a supporting character is probably too much to ask or expect - but, I also feel like, if you're going to be professionally writing a narrative (or rewriting/improvising, as it were), it's not too much to ask that a little more care be taken in regards to all of the layers that have contributed to said supporting character's downfall and subsequent redemption arc. I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to want.

And maybe if there had been more nuance and continuity in how these things were portrayed on screen (ie, if TW had actually done as good a job as his stans think he did), the fandom wouldn't have divided and conquered itself over which "version" of the same character is more valid and whether or not the film did its best to close out a trilogy (not start a new one), to the point where everyone in this fandom space makes navigating it feel like walking through a minefield.

But, I mean

(Again, please don’t reblog if possible.)

Edit: Okay to reblog. <3

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krumbine · 3 years

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Horrible People Doing Horrible Things for Horrible Reasons (or: how that pain in my neck had absolutely nothing to do with The Suicide Squad -- but I can't say the same for the pain in my soul)

This isn't going to end well.

It was about thirty minutes into my viewing of James Gunn's "The Suicide Squad" (2021) when I realized there was something terribly wrong with my face.

For context, it was a little after nine o'clock at night. I was lying on one side of the couch and my girlfriend was on the other. Also, at the time, I had been suffering a pain in my neck of unknown origin, persisting for about two weeks. It was the kind of pain that haunts you after you mysteriously tweak your neck, resulting in an angry, knotted muscle that seems hellbent on murdering you. Failing anything fatal, the knot seems content to make you feel like an actor trapped in a bad Batman costume, unable to turn your head to the left.

Despite my physical ailments, I was actually excited about this flick. Even though I knew better, about twenty-four hours earlier I caught up on the trailers, realized King Shark was in this movie, and grew impatient with my girlfriend's work schedule because I was eager to put the flick on as soon as it dropped on HBO Max.

(I say that I knew better than to get excited because every time I foolishly look forward to one of these DC films, it's always a letdown. Surely this time would be different, right? Surely this time there would be more than just an awesome drumming octopus that saves the movie? Surely -- maybe? Jesus Christ, please don't eye-fuck my otherwise innocent brain soul -- is that too much to ask, James Gunn, is it?!)

My optimism for this film is already tempered by this interesting cultural intersection we've been living through -- where creative vision and studio interference have swung to opposite ends of the spectrum and studios have stepped way the hell back, sometimes to the detriment of the creative. Of course, this isn't always the case and creative freedom is important -- but sometimes guide rails (even harsh ones) can inspire creative leaps that would have otherwise never seen the light of day.

DC/Warner is the torch bearer for negative and damaging studio interference. "Justice League" (2017), the first "Suicide Squad" (2016) -- these are movies that were butchered to death because of the studios. Disney has a recent-mixed bag. Taika Waititi's "Ragnarok" is a brilliant example of a director working inside the guide rails while simultaneously dismantling them. "Solo" is a great (and greatly misunderstood) film shaped entirely by studio interference (although I would have loved to see the original!) and "Rise of Skywalker" is a hot mess of a liquid dumpster fire train wreck careening off a cliff into an erupting volcano -- exclusively due to studio interference, ad nauseam.

But just as we've seen the studios butcher "Justice League" and the original "Suicide Squad", we've also seen the studios take a step back -- certainly in Zack Snyder's case -- and say "do whatever you want". In quick succession, we got the director's original vision for "Justice League" (HBO Max, 2021) and "Army of the Dead" (Netflix, 2021). Both movies could have used SOME interference, because they are over-produced, style-over-substance, soulless bore-fests. A little positive studio interference could have honed these flicks into something far more palatable with perhaps an illusion of heart.

(Obviously there's an audience for these types of movies and I'm not it. If you like them, good on you. I'm just telling you why I don't like them.)

Let's get back to "The Suicide Squad".

I'm thirty minutes in and I realize that there's something very wrong with my face. I know, right? All this potentially misplaced optimism about the movie, all this positive hope over a pure creative vision ... and this screening is going to be ruined by an impending health crisis because a knotted muscle in my neck is trying to murder me?

I'll spare you any further dramatic tension -- as much pain as my neck might have been in (at that moment, not much), the problem with my face was that it had been stuck in a perpetual frown for half an hour.

Can you wrap your head around that? I stepped into this movie with two basic expectations: it was going to be funny (per the previews) and King Shark. I didn't even care what they did with King Shark, I was just hyped for some dope monster man-shark action.

And yet ... I was frowning so hard during the first thirty minutes of "The Suicide Squad", there was genuinely a brief moment when I thought something was wrong with my face.

"The Suicide Squad" (2021) was such soulless garbage that the "Suicide Squad" (2016) was actually a better film.

The Suicide Squad was so bad, if I wanted to watch a story about psychopathic murderers with no redeeming qualities, I would have preferred to watch a true crime murder doc (AND I FUCKING HATE TRUE CRIME MURDER DOCS).

Here's the problem with my face: the first thirty minutes of a film (ostensibly the first act, give or take) is supposed to sell you on the premise of the film. While the first ten minutes of this movie might have been clever (and that's me being generous) the rest of the first act goes downhill fast. And again, it's not like DC was at a particularly high point to begin with.

The movie and its director reveal themselves in all of their naked glory when the eponymous Suicide Squad (not the fake-out squad) penetrate the island and Bloodsport and Peacemaker engage in a murderous round of "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better".

Hell, everyone is killing -- the sequence starts with King Shark graphically gulping down one of the native militia. My gut was obviously trying to warn me about something (hence the perpetual frown painted on my face) and James Gunn drops a glaring clue as to the true nature of what's unfolding, right smack in the middle of this inglorious one-upmanship. As Bloodsport and Peacemaker trade killshots, callously slaughtering this militia camp, there's a blink-and-you-miss kill of a woman doing her laundry.

If you hadn't figured out the twist by that shot, don't worry -- it's spelled out a minute later when the Suicide Squad finds Rick Flag and discovers that the militia they've been murdering are actually the good guys.

This whoopsie is then played off as a joke.

Okay, it's time to get real: I'm obviously not the core audience of this film, but what exactly is the premise of this movie, anyhow?

Villains becoming heroes? Horrible people doing good things for bad reasons? Horrible people doing good things for GOOD reasons? The best I can figure it, "The Suicide Squad" is about horrible people doing horrible things for horrible reasons.

And here's the thing: antihero stories AREN'T FUCKING HARD. They're so goddamn mainstream that the idea of fucking up the antihero arc is actually hard to wrap my head around. Breaking Bad. Goddamn House, MD. You want a murderous, psycophathic antihero to love? Even Dexter is coming back to show James Gunn how it's done.

Here's the formula: horrible person does good thing for XXX reason. As long as the audience goes on a journey with the character, it doesn't matter how heinous their actions are, nor how good or bad their reasons are, we still CARE about the character. Walter White is a good person who becomes a bad person, doing horrible things for good reasons and then horrible reasons -- talk about a roller coaster of a journey, but as an audience, we're with him EVERY FUCKING STEP OF THE WAY. Dexter does horrible things for good reasons -- instant empathy!

Aside from Ratcatcher 2, all of the Suicide Squad are horrible characters with horrible motivations doing, ostensibly, horrible things until the very last moment -- but you lost me after the first thirty minutes, James Gunn, so I don't actually care what these psychopaths are doing in the LAST thirty minutes of this dumpster fire.

"But Krumbine: they're SUPPOSED to be psychopaths!"

I KNOW. And you'd think that would make them more interesting. But James Gunn goes out of his way to turn Bloodsport into a horrible father who doesn't care if his daughter goes to prison ... only if she maybe-possibly risks getting recruited onto a suicide run; King Shark is a graphic killing machine (but token FRIENDSHIP!); Peacemaker is genuine evil and a perfect reflection of current GQP accolytes. I'd love if these characters were redeemable, but that redemption (or any other reason to empathize) has to be seeded in that first act, otherwise they're all just ... well ...

Horrible people doing horrible things for horrible reasons.

That's not a fun movie. It's depressing. Joyless. Soulless. It's a sad commentary on the (hopefully tiny) core audience that this movie was made for and a terrible reflection of the real James Gunn, sans studio interference.

I want to root for bad guys doing good and earning their redemption (or at least murdering the BADDER guys). I don't want to root for the bad guys murdering innocent people.

A few quick hits:

- I think we can all agree that tokenism is just bad writing. We're used to token diversity, but "The Suicide Squad" does a truly remarkable job introducing token sympathy. Ratcatcher 2, in the context of this film, makes absolutely no sense. She's surrounded by murderous deplorables and why was she in prison? 'Cause she tried (and failed) to use rats to rob a bank? At least give her a some kind of crime that justifies her being thrown in with this lot of horrible people. She's a token good person that sticks out like a sore thumb -- because the empathy isn't earned or justified, it's only there to distract the audience from how horrible the rest of the characters are. And, also, friendship with the man-shark. But like, TOKEN friendship.

- Worst case scenario, I want to root for the bad guys murdering the badder guys. Starro, in the context of this film, is NOT the badder guy. Starro is categorically misunderstood, captured, and tortured. Starro, in the context of this film, is almost as innocent as the lady doing her laundry.

- Harley Quinn's roller coaster of cinematic characterization is fucking nauseating and this movie was a magnificently dolt-headed step backwards from Birds of Prey (which was a shit film in its own right). I wouldn't blame Margot Robbie for abandoning this role altogether with how the character has been treated across the DCEU.

- King Shark should have been an easy win but instead he got drowned out as yet another vector of senseless murdering of innocents. Hard to cheer for that.

- Polka Dot Man was the only bright spot of the film and a perfect example of Gunn's broken clock being correct at least once or twice. Here's a genuinely tortured psychopathic character with a compelling arc THAT WE GET TO EXPERIENCE WITH HIM. He does horrible things for iffy reasons, but at least we can empathize with how tortured he is -- it's something that is cleverly shown ("show me don't tell me") repeatedly through his visions of his mother. These are genuinely brilliant creative strokes by Gunn, David Dastmalchian, and the VFX team. A shame he had to die.

- The trailers were funny, but the movie wasn't. When all those jokes packed into a two-and-a-half minute preview are stretched out over a two-plus hour runtime and given ample time to breathe in the context of these soulless, psychopathic punchlines ... all the comedy fell flatter than that innocent woman cleaning her laundry after she was murdered by our so-called heroes.

- Finally, I love Peter Capaldi. I love the 12th Doctor. I absolutely head-cannoned that the Thinker was The Doctor living out some punishment in the multiverse. It was so nice to see Capaldi having a bit of fun on film, but such a shame that it was this pile of heartless shit.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve written and rewritten this blog about three or four times. I desperately need to stop talking about how horrible "The Suicide Squad" is so I can work on my Suicide Squad-inspired art piece (it has dinosaurs, so it’s okay).

Love, Krumbine

(This art piece is now complete -- check it out here!)

#thesuicidesquad #james gunn #king shark #blog #movie review

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untapanimedraw · 3 years

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Fall 2020, What I watched

Hot damn, this season was fucking packed. And next season is will only be more packed. Since there’re so many lets get started.

Completed

Jujutsu Kaisen (9) - Rating this now may be a bit premature since it’s a 2 cour show that’s actually airing back to back! So this season won’t finish until March, but damn this first half is absolutely fantastic.

DanMachi S3 (9) - Holy shit this season was amazing. Please watch it if you like the series.

Tonikawa (9) - Best romance anime I’ve ever seen. Married in the first episode. Fuck yeah. Absolutely adorable and now I really want an adorable wife of my own. I mean I’ve wanted that for a while, but this showed me how lonely I am... I mean this showed that there is hope out there in the world.

Irregular at Magic High School S2 (7) - I love this series but rating objectively, the pacing was a bit off this season despite the animation and action being quite good. Not quite as good as the first season for me, but I still loved it. Also you can now watch the movie with proper context after this season.

Haikyuu!! To the Top 2nd Cour (9) - This show just gets better and better.

Wandering Witch (6) - For some reason this show is generally rated higher than this, but no it’s not that good. It’s fine, but not spectacular by any means.

Our Last Crusade or the Rise of a New World (6) - I’m conflicted about this one. I read the manga before the show aired so I was pretty hyped for it, but the show just never seemed to live up to what I imagined it would be. Then it started changing some details and I realized it was basing the source material on the LN and not the manga. And then the show went past where the translated manga was up to date and it was good? So all in all, I think it was pretty good.

I’m Standing on a Million Lives (7) - This one was quite a surprise. It started out a bit generic but then it built into something quite interesting by the end. Then there was the surprise announcement that it’s getting a season 2 in Summer 2021 so actually I’m quite looking forward to that.

Noblesse (5) - Is this good? I honestly don’t know. I think it’s actually been an ok show so far, but I’ve heard that there’s been a lot of chapters skipped and the story is fractured.

By The Grace of the Gods (10) - This is an Iyashikei anime, a healing anime. It’s just supposed to be chill and good things happen and you just feel good about things. I read the manga first and then watched the show and it legitimately put my soul at ease.

The Day I Became a God (5) - Damn, Jun Maeda letting us down in the last episode again...

Akudama Drive (9) - Holy shit. So this is going up against Deca-Dence for best original of the year and it will be a tough fight.

Talentless Nana (8) - MHA meets Assassination Classroom meets Death Note. I did not expect this at all and it ended up being much more interesting than the synopsis lead you to believe.

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear (6) - Reminds me of Bofuri except there’s very little struggles and difficulties. That doesn’t make it bad or completely boring, but it was definitely low-stakes.

Higurashi GOU (6) - I never saw the original so I’m watching this one on its own and so far that seem to be fine you don’t need to know anything about the original for this to make sense.

Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle (7) - Absolute surprise of the season. This was hilarious and cute and adorable and just absolutely fantastic.

Adachi and Shimamura (8) - This is the building of emotions and relationship to Tonikawa’s already married gotta go from here. It’s two girls struggling to figure out where they fit into life and what their own feelings mean. Yuri and adorable.

Golden Kamuy S3 (8) - Fantastic season. You know what you’re getting.

Iwakakeru Sport Climbing Girls (6) - Girls do rock climbing. Pretty decent.

Assault Lily: Bouquet (5) - Had lots of promise, but kinda failed to live up to the promise. Loads of cute girls and thigh close-ups with good action animation.

Warlords of Sigrdrifa (7) - Tags: Norse Mythology, Ragnarok, Cute Girls, planes, sadness, cute girls.

Dogeza (4) - 3 minute episodes of a guy kowtowing and begging to see boobs and panties. It’s fantastic.

The Gymnastics Samurai (8) - Just watch this.

Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club (7) - An actually good Idol anime! A Love Live that isn’t completely drama with some singing and dancing, but singing and dancing with girls who learn about their own personal struggles and no unnecessary drama.

Hypnosismic (5) - Bishi boys rapping against the Matriarchy. It’s quite the show, check it out.

Dropout Idol Fruit Tart (7) - This show is way more horny and yuri focused than it presented itself and it is amazing for it.

Completed 26

Favorite show of the season: Jujutsu Kaisen.

#anime #anime fall 2020

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fuckheadwitha · 4 years

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Listening to Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of All Time

Rolling Stone released an updated list of their top 500 albums of all time and being trapped in the purgatory of covid quarantine this seems like the perfect moment to tackle what an almost completely irrelevant former counter-culture institution has to say about music (we can’t actually blame Rolling Stone for this list, a huge number of musicians and critics voted to make it). I am going to listen to every single one of these, all the way through, with a level of attention that's not super intense but I'm definitely not having them on in the background as simple aural wallpaper. Two caveats though: I can make an executive decision to skip any album if I feel the experience is sufficiently miserable, and I'm also going to be skipping the compilation albums that I feel aren't really worth slots (best ofs, etc.). In addition, I will be ordering them as I go, creating a top 500 of the top 500 (it will be less than 500 since we've already established I'm skipping some of these).

Here are 500-490:

#500 Arcade Fire - Funeral

I can already tell I'm going to be at odds with this list if one of the most important albums of my high school years is at the bottom. That being said, I haven't actually given this whole thing a listen since probably the early 2010s, before Arcade Fire fatigue set in and the hipsterati appointed band of a generation just kinda seemed to fade from popular consciousness. I actually dreaded re-experiencing it, since the synthesis of anthemic rock and quirky folk instrumentation which Arcade Fire brought mainstream has now become the common shorthand of insufferable spotify friendly folk pop. Blessedly, the first half of the album easily holds up, largely propelled by dirty fast rhythm guitar, orchestration that's tuneful rather than obnoxious, and lyrics which come off as earnest rather than pretentious. The middle gets a little sappy and “Crown of Love”, a song I definitely used to like, really starts the grate. And then we get to “Wake Up”, whose cultural saturation spawned thousands of dorky indie rock outfits that confused layered strings and horns with power and meaning. This song definitely hasn't survived the film trailers and commercials which it so ubiquitously overlayed, but the line about "a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust" still attacks the part of my brain capable of sincere emotion. This album is probably going to hold the top spot for a while, because although so many elements of Funeral that made it feel so meaningful, that made it stand out so much in 2004, have been seamlessly assimilated into an intellectually and emotionally bankrupt indie pop industrial complex, the album itself still has a genuine vulnerability and bangers that still manage to rip.

#499

Rufus, Chaka Khan - Ask Rufus

Before she became a name in her own right, Chaka Khan was the voice of the band Rufus, and it’s definitely her voice that shines amongst some spritely vibey funk. That’s not to say that these aren’t some jams on their own. “At Midnight” is a banging opener with a sprint to the finish, and although the explicitly named but kinda boring “Slow Screw Against the Wall” feels weak, this wasn’t really supposed to be an album of barn burners. This was something people put on their vinyl record players while they chilled on vinyl furniture after a night of doing cocaine. “Everlasting Love” is a bop with a bassline like a Sega Genesis game, and the twinkling piano on “Hollywood” adds a playful levity to lyrics that are supposed to be both tackily optimistic about making it big out in LA and subtly realistic about the kind of nightmare world showbiz can be. “Better Days” is another track that manages to be a bittersweet jam with a catchy sour saxophone and playful synths under Chaka Khan’s vamping. This album definitely belongs on a ‘chill funk to study and relax to’ playlist.

#498

Suicide - Suicide

We’ve hit the first album that could be rightly called a progenitor for multiple genres that followed it. Someone could say there’s a self-serving element of this being on a Rolling Stone list (the band was one of the first to adopt the label ‘Punk’ after seeing it in a Lester Bangs article) but the album’s legacy is basically indisputable. EBM, industrial, punk, post-punk, new wave, new whatever all have a genealogy that connects to Suicide, and it’s easy to hear the band in everything that followed. But what the band actually is is two guys, one with an electric organ and one with a spooky voice, doing spooky simple riffs and saying spooky simple things. Simplicity is definitely not a dis here. The opener “Ghost Rider” makes a banger out of four notes and one instrument, and the refrain ‘America America is killing its youth’ is really all the lyrical complexity you need to fucking get it. “Cheree” and “Girl” have almost identical lyrics (‘oh baby’ vs ‘oh girl’) but “Cheree” is more like a fairy tale and “Girl” is more like a sonic handjob. “Frankie Teardrop” has the audacity to tell a ten minute story with its lyrics, but of course there is intermittent, actually way too loud screaming breaking up the narrative of a guy who loses everything then kills his family and himself. The song is basically a novelty, and I think you can probably say the whole album is a novelty between its brevity and character. But for a bite sized snack this album casts a huge shadow.

#497

Various Artists - The Indestructible Beat of Soweto

The fact that this particular compilation always ends up in the canon has a lot to do with the cultural context it existed in, being America’s first encounter with South African contemporary music during the decline of apartheid (it wouldn’t end until a decade later in 1994 with the country’s first multi-racial elections). Music journos often bring up the fact Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the all male choir singing on the album ender “Nansi Imali”, sang on Paul Simon’s Graceland like their virtue is they helped Paul Simon get over his depression and not, like, the actual music. But also like, how is the actual music? Jams. Ubiquitous, hooky guitars propel the songs along with bright choruses over low lead vocals, but I didn’t expect the synthesizer on the bop “Qhude Manikiniki”, nor the discordant hoedown violin on “Sobabamba”. “Holotelani” is a groove to walk into the sunset to.

#496

Shakira - Donde Estan los Ladrones

So this is the first head scratcher on the list. It’s not like it sucks. And I think I prefer this 90s guitar pop driven spanish language Shakira to modern superstar Shakira. But I mean, it’s an album of late nineties latin pop minivan music, with a thick syrupy middle that doesn’t do anything for me. The opener and closer stand out though. ‘Ciega, Sordomuda’, one of the biggest pop songs of the 90s (it was #1 on the charts of literally every country in Latin America), has a galloping acoustic guitar and horn hits with Shakira’s vocals at their most percussive.

#495

Boyz II Men - II

So, if you were alive in the 90s you know Boyz II Men were fucking huge, and the worst song on the album is the second track “All Around the World”, basically a love song to their own success, and also the women they’ve banged. You can tell it was written specifically so that the crowd could go fucking wild when they heard their state/city/country mentioned in the song, and I’m not gonna double check but I’m sure they hit all fifty states. Once you’re over that hump though you basically have an hour of songs to fuck to. “U Know” keeps it catchy with propulsive midi guitar and synth horns, “Jezzebel” starts with a skit and ends with a richly layered jazz tune about falling in love on a train, and “On Bended Knee” has a Ragnarok Online type beat. Honestly this album can drag, but you’re not supposed to be listening to it alone in a state of analysis, you’re supposed to have it on during a date that’s going really, really well.

#494

The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes

A singles compilation of the Ronettes, the only ones I immediately recognized were ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘Going to the Chapel of Love’, the latter of which I didn’t know existed since the version of the song I knew was by the Dixie Cups, which was apparently a source of drama since the Ronettes did it first but producer Phil Spector refused to release it. I feel like as a retro trip to sixties girl groups it’s full of enough songs about breaking up (for example “Breaking Up”) getting back together (for example “Breaking Up”) and wanting to get married but you can’t, because you’re a teenager (“So Young”).

#493

Marvin Gaye - Here, My Dear

This album only exists because Marvin was required by his divorce settlement to make it and provide all of the royalties to his ex-wife and motown executive Anna Gordy Gaye. It’s absolutely bizarre, phoned in mid tempo funk whose lyrics range from the passive aggressive (“This is what you wanted right?”) to the petulant (“Why do I have to pay attorney’s fees?”). There is a seething realness here that crosses well past the border of uncomfortable. I don’t think it’s an amazing album to listen to, but it’s an amazing album to exist: Marvin Gaye is legally obligated to throw his own divorce pity party, and everyone's invited.

#492

Bonnie Raitt - Nick of Time

I have never heard of Bonnie Raitt before but apparently this album won several grammys including album of the year in 1989 and sold 5 million copies, which I guess goes to show that no award provides less long term relevance than the grammys. The story around the album is pretty heartwarming, it was her first massive hit after a career of whiffs, and Bonnie Raitt herself is apparently a social activist and neat human being. I say all this because this sort of 80s country blues rock doesn't really connect with me, but the artist obviously deserves more than that. I unequivocally like the title track though, a hand-clap backed winding electric piano groove about literally finding love before your eggs dry up.

#491

Harry Styles - Fine Line

I do not think I have ever heard a one direction song because I am an adult who only listens to public radio. I’m totally open to pop bands or boy bands or boy band refugee solo artists, but I don’t like anything here. It’s like a mixtape of the worst pop trends of the decade, from glam rock that sounds like it belongs in a car commercial to folky bullshit that sounds like it belongs in a more family focused car commercial. This gets my first DNP (Does Not Place).

#490

Linda Ronstadt - Heart Like a Wheel

Another soft-rock blues and country album which just doesn’t land with me. But the opener “You’re No Good” is like a soul/country hybrid which still goes hard and the title track hits with the lyrics “And it's only love and it's only love / That can wreck a human being and turn him inside out”.

Current Ranking, which is weirdly almost like an inverse of the rolling stones list so far;

#rolling stone #500 greatest albums of all time

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mitamicah · 4 years

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My headcannon for Magne in Ragnarok - spoilers ahead for the series

First I was not going to post this but seeing such a big support for my Ragnarok drawing I thought I might as well try :’D (thank you for all the support btw)

In my mind Magne is not Thor. Reincarnated or otherwise. I know the story tries to let us to believe this is the case but the idea doesn't feel right to me.

I do think he is related to the thunder god however. In fact my headcannon/theory is that Magne is Thor's son. (I am not sure I can call this a headcanon though since I find there's too many coincidences that line up but in lack of a better word that is what I'll call it :'D)

I have a few reasons to believe this is the case - I will separate them into two categories: reasons found in the myth of Ragnarok (aka the myth the series is based on) and breadcrumbs found in the show

(Also I would like to add I am using the Danish names for the gods so they might sound/look different form the Norse or English spelling)

First - the myth

As with many myths there's a few different versions of the apocalypse in Norse Mythology. The one I know sees the gods fight the jutton(Danish: jætte) which will be the downfall for most but not all Gods - the god of light, Balder and his blind brother Høder are said to survive. So is two of Thor's sons that is now in possession of his hammer, Mjølner. Now one of these sons are called Magni and If you've watched the show or the trailer you probably know where I am going with this - more info will arrive under the series breakthrough

Another important note to make about Ragnarok the myth - and Norse mythology in general - is that the world and time along with it is circular eg. a known symbol within Norse mythology is the snake eating its own tail. In short while Ragnarok is said to be the end of the gods (the aesir/ Danish: aser) it doesn't mean it will be end of all: the version of the myth found in the Edda tells that when Ragnarok is over the world will be born anew to be godless and ruled by nature. This would make sense in the story since the world is our modern one, one where nature indeed ruled until mankind tamed nature.

If saying this is the case I believe this is not meant to be the first Ragnarok that we see: maybe not even the second since everything repeats itself

Secondly - the series

To sum the series in one sentence it follows young Magne (this is especially close to Magni if you say the name as an English person) and his brother moving into an old town in a little Norwegian city by the name of Edda (the importance of this city will arrive later).

We are told that the hammer that Magne throws in anger is in fact his dead father's hammer. Now it is also important to note here that Magne does indeed inherit this hammer like Magni did in the myth which might explain how he may as well have inherited his father's powers - if we say for argument sake the father is indeed Thor - as well.

While I believe we are told how Magne's father died (I've only watched the series once bear with me) the fact that Vidar compares Magne to his father before killing him makes me believe that the jutton was really the one killing of Magne's father. This - while not being 100% accurate since in the myth Thor is killed with the world serpent - would make sense if indeed Thor was Magne's father killed off by juttons in the previous Ragnarok

I also find it very curious that Magne first sees his abilities manifest when he meets with the old lady we later learn to be a völva (Danish: vølve) - a fortuneteller in Norse Mythology who phophecized the comings of Ragnarok - in the city of Edda. To those of you who don't know Edda has given the name to the most famous of texts about Norse Mythology - that I also mentioned earlier - the Edda, sometimes grouped into the Old and New Edda.

Going back to Vidar and his family of juttons I cannot help but wonder about the fact that they call Magne one of the old ones talking about how long it has been since they'd met any of his kind and thought them extinct. Following my theory this could refer to the fact that previous Ragnarok has happened a long time ago and since then Vidar, Ran and their kids has not met or interacted with any aesir.

This also feeds nice into the idea of the world being the one after Ragnarok since the problems tackled in the show have to do with nature, polution and global warming

So by having Magne as the only one of the old ones - and I do believe he is deep down at least a bit aesir - it makes sense that he when the juttons speaks Old Norse to Magne at one point he understands and speaks it fluently although we learn within the first ten minutes or so of the show that Magne is dyslexic and over all he not good with language :'D

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk x'D I hope I didn't bore you too much giving my take on why I believe Magne is meant to be Thor's son Magni x'D

Although I do not see Magne being Thor I kind of like the idea of Lauritz being Loki/Loke - it could even work in this context since Loki is known as the trickster god and my brain seem to forget how he is meant to die at Ragnarok so let’s for fun say that Loki found a way to trick his death we would now still be alive and/or reincarnated into the Seier family; maybe without Magne even knowing that his brother is a three thousand + year old god

#if anybody even read this post thank you for taking the time I know it is long and probably nerdy and boring #ragnarok headcannon #netflix ragnarok #ragnarok #ragnet #magne seier #lauritz seier #headcannon #long ass text #long ass post #ragnarok spoilers #spoilers for ragnarok #spoilers for netflix ragnarok

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sagebaileyspeaks · 4 years

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Strap in folks, this is gonna be a long one

Please be warned that the following review is going to be filled with spoilers.

With every review, I try to provide a bit of context as to how I approach a subject. In the case of Rise of Skywalker, it's really only important to know two things about me

1) While I have seen The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, I am not a fan of Star Wars. I am aware of Star Wars because of how embedded it is in American culture, but on a personal level it holds no emotional significance

2) I show up for endings. When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2. came out, I saw it in theaters even though at that point in my life I had never read the books and knew very little of the story aside from the basic Voldemort wants Harry dead, Harry = chosen one. I also saw Infinity War opening weekend even though the only MCU films I had seen up to that point were Civil War and Black Panther. Retroactively, I went back to watch the first two Avengers, Ragnarok and Winter Soldier, but I went into Infinity War knowing next to nothing.

Those two things established, Rise of Skywalker was a painful movie-going experience. I was bored out of my mind and the film seemed never-ending and more damning, I realized that when Rey has her "I am Iron Man" moment, that I did not give a single damn about what was going on in front of me.

This is a movie that is supposed to be about the end of a war but it has no stakes. Chewie's dead! No, there was a second ship. C3PO (I think his name is) will have his memory wiped! No, R2D2 has a backup. Kylo Ren is dead! Nope, nevermind. Rey is dead! Well...actually. This isn't helped by the fact that there are multiple instances where Rey and co are captured or right in front of Kylo Ren and they just...get away. I think there are three instances in this movie alone where they are in handcuffs or surrounded by Stormtroopers and they get away in time to find the next mcguffin making everything pointless.

Compare this to Endgame which started low stakes - Thanos is dead and the world has moved on - and gradually built to higher stakes: 2014!Thanos is onto them. Old Nebula has hidden in their ranks. She brings Thanos to the present. As an audience, we know that Thanos is capable of wiping out life. We saw him do this with and without the Infinity Stones. If Thanos gets his hands on them our heroes are dead and all hope is lost.

And speaking of Endgame, there were many callbacks to prior movies ("on your left," "I can do this all day" the first Avengers group shot) but it never felt cheap. Every callback had weight. Rise of the Skywalker felt very lazy and like it was going out of its way to retread the same ground. After The Last Jedi, I did not give one shit about Rey's parents. I thought it was very well established that we can't hold to the past and need to move forward with who we are and who we want to be. But this movie has Rey stalking around wondering about a legacy like it's the most pressing issue in the galaxy.

Not only that but having her go to Luke's island and literally have Luke retcon the last movie by catching his lightsaber and saying "I was wrong, you should respect your weapon" is so...frustrating in its desire to appease.

Also, on the topic of Rey, she is bland as all hell. I didn't like how she just kept taking off and leaving her team, I hated how they had Finn constantly chasing after her. The entire movie she isn't driven by a desire to end the war and aid the rebellion but rather discover who she is and become all she can be which is so...selfish.

Kylo Ren is also bland as bread. In the first movie, it was interesting to see a guy who had turned against his mother and was conflicted about following in his grandfather's footsteps. In the second movie, it was interesting to see a guy who wanted to "let the past die" and move forward. But in this movie, you have the same conflicted "I killed my dad and am hunting down my mother, do I feel bad about that" drama and it's boring. It is BORING.

Not to mention, him suddenly deciding to be Ben Solo because Rey saved him is SO LAZY. Walking around not being sure you want to kill your parents is NOT an indication of goodness. It doesn't erase the terrible things he's done and the murders he's committed and for the movie to agree with the sentiment that, "he's sad and sorry and therefore redeemed" really annoys me. Kylo Ren did NOTHING to earn redemption and his constant pursuit of Rey, insisting that he will turn her to the Dark Side is incredibly troubling because this movie rewards this by validating his manipulative and evil behavior by having Rey kiss him.

Just because a man and a woman look at each other in a movie DOES NOT mean they are meant to be together and fated across the stars. It is LAZY. And this ending...not only are there no stakes it ripped off Endgame so much that it made my eyes roll. Poe's speech as they prepare to leave, that "this is it, this is our fight for the galaxy," is basically the same thing Cap says before they go to retrieve the Infinity Stones. Poe saying, "I don't know what to do, we're alone" and then Lando coming with reinforcement is so much of a ripoff of "on your left" that my SEVEN YEAR OLD pointed it out as we were leaving. But let us not forget:

"I am all the Sith" / "I am inevitable"

"And I am all the Jedi" / "And I am Iron Man"

I mean come ON.

A story is only as good as its ending and the story of this trilogy is disjointed. I don't know what they wanted to say, what points they were trying to get across only that the Skywalkers are the most important even in a galaxy full of other people. Specifically speaking about this movie, it felt longer than Endgame and frustratingly convoluted. Even the lightsaber fights became tiring because it was the same catch and release throughout the movie and honestly, I would have rather gone to see Cats again than sit through this mess. And I'm glad that there will be no more Star Wars movies that my son forces me to see.

Rise of Skywalker gets ⭐⭐ out of five.

P.S. Finn and Poe should’ve been a thing. They were so adorable and they went out of their way to give Finn and Poe other love interests.

#rise of skywalker #rise of skywalker spoilers #tros #tros spoilers #star wars #finn #poe #rey #kylo ren #ben solo #avengers endgame #endgame #marvel

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seyaryminamoto · 5 years

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I know this isn't your primary fandom, but I'm curious. What would you say are the problems with Thor: Ragnarok? For me, personally, it was the worst Thor movie. Completely unfaithful to the source material, bleeding of convenience writing and full of shoehorned bathos that killed any 'serious' moment.

Ha.. ha.. ha… ha…

I kind of was grateful no one had asked me this on Tumblr, but you just had to go for it, huh, Anon? Yeah, yeah you did, and now I have to do this. Now I have to rant. And risk getting a ton of people yelling at me for my controversial opinions.

But you know what? Quoting my good old buddy Oghren, “sod it”. This movie deserves it.

I think Ragnarok has no saving graces. It’s really that simple. I will of course elaborate on why throughout this post, but I’m really glad you believe it’s the worst Thor movie because so do I. In fact, I think it’s the worst of all the MCU, I can’t think of any I disliked more. Even the very controversial Ultron has more to its favor than Ragnarok, and that’s saying a lot.

So, where should we begin?

You’re quite right about it not being faithful to the source material, convenience writing oozes out of the screen all the time, it’s guilty of terrible humor worthy of a 14-year-old in the throes of puberty, and it’s incapable of keeping true to the previous established films in the same cycle. But there are explanations for all of this, of course.

First things first: when Thor: Ragnarok was announced, everyone was horrified and for good reason. No one who cared about Thor’s story and characters wanted to watch a horrible, nitty-gritty movie that would kill all the characters they’d grown to love over time. That’s what Ragnarok promised, initially. Remember the original design for the logo, when the movie was first announced?

Yes, it looked dark. Extremely dark. It sounded like it was going to be an angst fest. And nobody likes an angst fest (not true, a lot of people do, but not enough to make up for the tickets that wouldn’t have been sold if the movie had been dark instead of humorous).

So, after promises of making this movie the be-all, end-all for the Thor franchise, suddenly the executive team behind it was changed. That’s when the very acclaimed Waititi came into the picture. Not only did he scrap everything that had been prepared for the movie, but he did so by outright removing reported elements that could have genuinely made the movie better than its predecesors.

By this I mean, there was a lot Ragnarok could have, and should have done, to improve on what the previous movies did wrong. The first of such things was creating a better bond for the audience with Asgard, with the asgardians, with the people whose world we were about to see destroyed. This bond was not entirely absent for a large portion of Thor’s fanbase: there were people who liked Thor’s friends, the Warriors Three and Lady Sif. People complained about Frigga’s fridging, not only because it was unfair that she was relegated to that kind of writing in The Dark World, but because they liked her character too.

Were Thor and Thor: The Dark World less than stellar at the box office? Okay, sure, let’s say they were. Let’s not deny that. But…

The only MCU-related franchise with more content on FF.net than Thor is the Avengers. Thor has more fics on FF.net than Frozen. And if you think these fics are all from Ragnarok’s era, you’d be sorely mistaken: Thor Ragnarok came out on October 10th, 2017. I went back on the list of fics, turns out there are 422 pages: October 10th, 2017, is only the 56th page. The 56th. Please, let’s let that sink in. THAT is how much content was made for Thor before this damn movie even came along.

Don’t care for FF.net, though? I know a lot of people don’t. Do we really think AO3 will yield a considerably different result?

The “Thor (Movies)” tag features a total of 38,932 fics today. That’s thrice as much as what FF.net features. A total of 1947 pages. October 10th is at the 658th page. Again, more than half the content was written BEFORE Ragnarok. Not only this, but a lot of the content post-Ragnarok is quite likely not canon-compliant, as is typical in fanfiction (I saw quite a lot of Loki/Jane stories written after Ragnarok happened, and as anyone would know, Jane has been written out of the MCU so far, ergo the 2017-owards stories aren’t even necessarily taking Ragnarok into consideration).

Therefore, was the Thor franchise a box office failure? Man, I can’t even say if it was or wasn’t. But the fan response for Thor far outdid most everything else in the MCU. The thing is, it wasn’t the fan response Feige and the Marvel people were after. It’s basically the same concept as why Young Justice was cancelled back in the day: the target audience wasn’t responding to it as much as the audience they were actually reaching. Thor resounded the most with women, with an audience that saw a romantic hero where Feige and his cronies wanted a big buff moron who smashed on par with the Hulk. And that just wasn’t acceptable for these big executives.

Honestly, considering that the original Thor earned $449.3 million, and The Dark World earned $644.6 million, I don’t even know why they’re talked about as box office failures. Were they not as big as the other Marvel movies? I assume as much because of how people talk about them, and yet box office results that triple a movie’s budget should be far from failure. These movies were not flops. They may not have been the most successful with the critics and with a large portion of the audience, but like I said above, they generated a HUGE fan response. Bigger than many other fandoms related to the MCU (over at AO3, only Captain America beats Thor, from what I’ve seen).

So, my point is… would it have been THAT BAD to have a third movie that followed up on the previous two? Would it have been a box office flop? Considering that Marvel has a huge fanbase that watches every single movie they release without really caring about what’s in it, just because it’s Marvel, I don’t think it would have been a flop at all. Having Thor’s franchise as a less successful side of the MCU in terms of money, but more successful in terms of fanbase, would have been just fine, as far as I can tell.

But what do Feige and his buddies want? Money. And that’s why they went to Waititi.

Oh, people will say that Waititi was only an indie filmmaker, how could they know he was going to make a movie this big?! Well, the thing was, James Gunn was busy, so they had to find someone who was willing to make of Thor the same success Guardians of the Galaxy was and Waititi offered to do just that for them. Because, let’s be real: Ragnarok is practically a rip-off of Guardians of the Galaxy. Not only because of the style of the movie, not only because of the humor, but even because it’s fundamented on the notion of “unlikely team-up between different and damaged people united for the common goal of saving the world!”, which yes, you could say is the same notion that made Avengers what it was, but in Avengers there’s an actual effort to get the team together. S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted these specific superpowered people to work together to stop Loki. Here? It’s the same concept as Guardians of the Galaxy because a twist of fate, pretty much, brings all these people together by chance and they team up to put an end to a nasty threat. So, yes. Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off.

Why was it bad to recreate Thor as Guardians of the Galaxy, though? That’s what a lot of people might ask. Well, here’s the deal: you don’t expect Captain America to feature in something that feels like an Antman movie. You don’t expect Ironman to star as the protagonist in something more befitting of a Black Panther movie. Marvel movies are all largely similar in terms of how formulaic they tend to be, but they usually have their independent contexts, their IDENTITIES, and those identities aren’t easily replaced just like that.

Thor had its own identity. That identity was marked by Kenneth Branagh’s original Thor movie: it was practically Shakespeare in space. The development of the characters, its character-driven-storytelling, the organic unfolding of each situation, the understandable motivations of each characters, both heroes and villains, all of it made the original Thor something DIFFERENT in the early MCU. Ironman was the flagship of the MCU at the time, and Thor came out as a completely different story with ONE link to Ironman, in the form of Agent Coulson. Ergo, Thor stood on its own. Did it not stand as tall as the others, like I said? Big effing deal. It was its actual own thing. You could watch Thor without watching anything else and you would still get a fully-rounded movie.

Oh, but apparently it was a snoozefest for a large portion of the MCU fanbase who came here hoping to find the ten thousand action sequences from Captain America: The Winter Soldier or so. Shakespeare in space? That’s just lame! That’s just boring! Character-driven storytelling isn’t cool unless you have explosions on par with a Michael Bay movie!

Well, to such “critics”, I’ll just say: Ragnarok wasn’t exempt from making people fall asleep either. I already have heard of several people who fell asleep halfway through, and my own mother couldn’t even finish it in a single sitting because of how utterly boring and annoying she found it. She ended up enjoying Deadpool better and she usually hates gratuitous violence on principle. Enough said.

Alright, so moving on: what else comprised Thor’s original identity? Humor. Oh, sure, it wasn’t “14-year-old boy in the midst of puberty” humor, but it was still humor. How many jokes have been made about Thor’s mug-smashing? How about him asking for a large enough dog to ride? Darcy made a lot of people laugh too. Are we really going to pretend none of that happened because “Ragnarok is funnier”? Or is it everyone just forgot about those things, quite conveniently? Thor was hardly a dry, dark and gritty franchise. It’s never been like that. Pretending otherwise to justify Ragnarok’s complete shift of tone and character is absolutely ridiculous.

The Dark World borrowed from Thor’s original identity and built up from there and Avengers to create a story largely disliked by fandom and critics and pretty much everyone, apparently. Still… it had a ton of jokes. If humor was all that mattered, why the hell was The Dark World not as successful? :’D Thor hanging the hammer on the rack, Darcy tossing the keys into the crazy dimensional portal, “How’s space?” “Space is fine”, Loki’s entire prison break sequence, just about everything with Selvig? Don’t come at me now and pretend nobody found any of this funny because there were posts, memes, EVERYTHING, going around about all this. Ergo, why exactly is it that HUMOR was deemed as the one thing this franchise needed when it was ALWAYS THERE?

Thor’s franchise had its failings here and there, perhaps. Maybe they could have handled things better, like I said above. But the failings were not what Feige identified, as far as quality goes. Again, though, what we really were facing was a big ole money-grabbing scheme from a big businessman. And all the audience fell for it like lemmings leaping into nothingness.

What exactly did Ragnarok do, then, to garner my rejection, spite and absolute disapproval?

First things first, like I said above, Waititi did away with everything that gave Thor’s franchise an identity. I’m going to get this first thing out of the way, but keep in mind that this is just the start: Waititi’s movie started to make mistakes I could barely forgive it for by doing away with TWO female characters who, as I proved with the link above, one of them (Sif) was reported to have an important role in the movie before Waititi came along. The actress for the other character, Jane, had said she was “done with Marvel”, but this was misunderstood and misinterpreted by fans as “Oh Natalie Portman HATED working in Marvel SO FUCKING MUCH, that’s why they got rid of her!”, when in truth…

“As far as I know, I’m done,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know if maybe one day they’ll ask for an Avengers 7, or whatever.” She continued by saying that Thor “was a great thing to be a part of.”

Thor was a great thing to be part of. Was it just courtesy? Was it just for the press? Who the hell knows, but this hardly sounds like the VERY MUCH WORSE stuff Idris Elba said about filming the Dark World, that still warranted him returning roles in Ultron, Ragnarok and Infinity War:

“I’d just done eight months in South Africa. I came to England and the day I came back I had to do reshoots on Thor 2.” He raises an eyebrow. “And in the actual scene my hair was different, my…” He stops and gives an exasperated sigh. “I was like, ‘This is torture, man. I don’t want to do this.’ My agent said: ‘You have to, it’s part of the deal.’ ”

Idris Elba says outright, on a published interview, that working on The Dark World, that working for Marvel, is torture. And he’s still been in FIVE movies of the MCU. Please, let that sink in.

Back to the subject at hand: Natalie Portman’s reported willingness to return to the franchise implies that the popular myth that Portman didn’t want anything else to do with Marvel, as an explanation for why she was no longer involved with Thor’s franchise, is nothing but rumors without real basis. It means, ultimately, that she was kicked out just because making Thor a more romantic hero than the rest was just not the angle Feige wanted. Likewise, Thor’s other potential love interest, who was never explored as one by the movies and honestly didn’t have to be, was similarly given a very shitty deal in Ragnarok:

“I was asked, but the timing of when they were going to shoot and when Blindspot was gonna shoot — it was pretty much the same time,” Alexander told Yahoo. “So there was a conflict there.”

Things might have worked out though if Marvel had given her more lead time. “I was hoping for more of a notice from [the studio] so I could make it work, but it was a short notice thing,“ Alexander said. “They called and said, ‘Hey, by the way, would you come do this?’ I said there is no way I can make that work that fast.”

Alexander did try, but ultimately “It couldn’t happen. They were on a different continent!” For reference, Thor: Ragnarok was filmed in Australia.

For further reference, Jaimie Alexander’s show is filmed in New York. As far as I can remember, that was where she was when the Ragnarok call reached her. And all things considered, she was better off not showing up, seeing as the Warriors Three just died within less than five minutes of screentime for each of them. There’s absolutely nothing to say the same thing wouldn’t have happened to Sif.

Why were they absent, then? To please a large crowd of movie-goers who were very consistent about how much they disliked Jane’s character, how much they wanted her to die, how she ruined Thor entirely, and the stories go on and on. Turns out that, the one time Marvel decided to listen to their audience, they got rid of one warrior lady and one female astrophysicist. Funny how this time no feminists gave a shit about that, because Valkyrie suddenly was the strong female character they wanted for the franchise (particularly because she was POC and bisexual, I assume).

But alright, alright. These characters weren’t the most essential part of the franchise, and a new movie could have done without Jane no problem… she didn’t really have to be involved with Ragnarok, and I get that. She also didn’t need to be broken up with Thor just for this, though. Especially broken up without any onscreen evidence that their relationship was doomed or bad or unpleasant. The last we heard, Thor was absolutely proud of her: suddenly she’s just not with him anymore and he’s just fine with it, apparently? Just… why? How? Couldn’t they just ignore Jane altogether instead of breaking them up with a single line in such a stupid and insignificant way?

Either way, accepting Jane and Sif are gone is relatively bearable, despite I really don’t like this, despite it means taking away one character who was essential to the two original movies and another who was meant to finally have her turn to shine on this one. But heh, that’s only the tip of the Ragnarok iceberg.

Finally getting into the movie’s content: my first question is how was Thor in Musspelheim? How did he get there? When? Why? The movie asks these questions for humor. It expects you to laugh at Thor’s monologue just because, but it doesn’t really stop to consider that maybe it SHOULD answer those questions. That maybe the last time we saw Thor, in Ultron, was A LONG TIME AGO. And within that time, he allegedly returned to Asgard because he left through the Bifrost and he should have found Loki impersonating Odin ever since, especially if Loki is so obvious about what he’s doing.

But nothing indicates Thor really had been in Asgard since then. Not at all, because when Thor returns to the Observatory, he runs into Skrull or whatever Eomer was called here. Skrull isn’t a newcomer, he’s not only just taking the job: he’s been here long enough to fill the place with shit he stole from all over the world by using the Bifrost (something worth wondering about, since who the fuck was opening and closing the Bifrost for him when he went on these trips, exactly?), but also by using his new position to appeal to women. Thor is surprised and confused because where is Heimdall? Well, Heimdall’s been gone for a while. And Asgard’s become a big ole’ shrine to Loki. This, then, proves Thor hasn’t been home for a while or else he would have at least seen the building of statues and the sudden shift in the population into Loki worshippers. Where the hell did the Bifrost take Thor after Ultron, then? If it was indeed Asgard, how is it he only realizes NOW that Loki is the one ruling when Loki has already spent a few years on the throne and, if this is his way of ruling, it should have been fucking obvious he wasn’t Odin since day one, according to this characterization? (This, despite we saw he was pretty good at his impersonation of Odin in The Dark World, he only made a tiny mistake that Thor was unable to notice anyhow, so he should’ve fooled Thor just fine)

So, first plothole, first inconsistency, first example of convenience writing and it happens barely ten minutes into the movie. But alas, I need a detour. I really do.

Loki’s a complete and utter idiot in this movie. There’s no other way to describe him. I’ve always thought part of Feige’s frustration with the Thor franchise was Loki’s massive popularity compared with Thor’s. Not that Thor wasn’t popular, but Loki was the first villain to actually warrant a fanbase in the MCU (and although Killmonger more or less got a fair share of people fawining over him, I honestly don’t think it was on par with the Loki phenomenon). Loki committed a crime for a MCU movie: he wasn’t there just to build up the hero’s legacy, he was there to tell his own story. We saw Loki develop from an uncertain ally of Thor’s to an outright enemy, to a begrudging ally, all over the span of Thor, Avengers and Thor: The Dark World. Which Loki do I prefer? The first one, of course. Avengers didn’t do him many favors, and The Dark World also could have handled him better.

But here’s the funny thing: Avengers built him up as a villain to defeat, but that meant Loki had to be menacing, had to be smart to some degree, he had to be respectable. He was smarter in the original Thor, yes, and he’s smarter in the Dark World too, but still, he was worthy of a certain respect in all three movies in terms of how he was built as a character.

Ragnarok obliterated all that respect. Ragnarok reduced Loki to a joke, a really bad joke, about how narcissistic and egotistical he was. He wasn’t smart, he wasn’t competent, he was constantly outdone by Thor in just about every regard, and there was nothing for him to do other than provide the audience someone to laugh at, and someone to project all their LGBT headcanons on, after the way they built up his situation with Jeff Goldblum’s hedonist character. Not that they needed to do that for Loki to be interpreted as LGBT, the fics I referenced above pretty much establish he’s been interpreted as of every sexuality you can think of, all because the original myths did establish him as someone with a very complex sexual identity.

But the point is, people told me Loki was amazing in this movie. I heard so much about that, how he finally got what he deserved… he got to be a laughingstock? That’s what he deserved? Oh, wait, he got to play second fiddle for Thor and accepted that as his place in the world. Was that it? I don’t even care if Loki doesn’t get to fulfill all his ambitions and dreams of recognition: I do care that he’s reduced to nothing but that, when his character was ALWAYS MUCH MORE COMPLEX THAN THAT IN EVERY OTHER MOVIE HE SHOWED UP IN. Being told that THIS is how Loki should be handled? It’s the same as being told the Avatar comics did a brilliant job at characterizing Azula, when I’ve written a fuckton of critical posts that prove that’s not the case.

So, when you give me a Loki whose entire purpose in Asgard is to turn it into Lokiland? You give me a joke. You give me a laughingstock. You give me something unworthy of the previous stories that established his character, amidst many things, as a man desperate to find a place where he belonged, desperate to the point where he could commit heinous acts to fulfill his quest, which is what made him a villain in the original film. And why, oh, why would anyone do such a thing?

Well, that’s because Taika Waititi had the brilliant idea of making Thor: Ragnarok as a standalone movie. I’m not kidding, it’s all right here:

“To be honest, what I did was I tried to approach it as if there were no other films.” Waititi explained. “I wanted to make this a standalone film. I loved Thor 1and Thor 2, but if I was going to make this film my own, I couldn’t have come in and tried to make a follow up movie, to try to make the next episode. I wanted to do my own thing.”

He says he loved the first two movies, but I question that’s true. Someone who loved the original movies would have likely avoided a fuckton of mistakes Waititi made in Ragnarok, mistakes that anyone who actually gave a crap about the first movies would have considered utterly ridiculous. When Waititi decided to build Ragnarok as a standalone, he did away with EVERY SINGLE CONCEPT ESTABLISHED FOR THOR IN THE MCU.

EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

First Thor movie: Thor’s character is established as an arrogant guy who would send his world to war just because his pride was injured. This arrogant guy gets his power stripped away from him, as punishment for his irresponsible behavior, and it’s not until he reflects on his actions and eventually takes a step forward to stop the Destroyer when he was at his most vulnerable, that Thor finally becomes worthy of his powers again. His attempt to reason with Loki works, but he pays for it with his life, pretty much, until his powers return to him.

So… how is this situation soooo different from Ragnarok’s big fight against Hela? I’ll tell you how: Thor actually displays vulnerability in the original movie, something that hits home much deeper than “OMG I HAVE UNLIMITED POWER INSIDE ME, I DON’T NEED MY HAMMER!”. His pleas to Loki have the intent to SPARE his friends, to spare an entire town of people who don’t know him and probably never will. His fight with Hela has no pleas. He just gets his eyeball plucked out and is forced to watch Hela destroy his city just so he can rage into talking with Odin (if I recall right) and then go Super Saiyan. Because, uh, the power was always inside him!

After an original movie where the power was in choices, in the choice of sacrificing himself for everyone else, Ragnarok is a movie about obtaining literal power to smash your enemy with. You tell me which is more complex and compelling for an intelligent audience.

Oh, but was it deeper in other senses? The talk about colonization and culture erasure and all that was something so new to this franchise!!!

No. It fucking wasn’t.

Movie one opens with a story about the Frost Giants terrorizing the humans and the Asgardians taking them down. The story didn’t end there, though: the story continued when we visit Jotunheim with Thor to discover it’s a completely nasty ruin, as though they haven’t recovered at all from the war and everything Asgard took from them, including a treasure as valuable for them as the Casket of Winters or whatever it was called. And amidst what Asgard took is Loki: how much clearer can the message get? Odin STOLE Jotunheim’s prince for the chance of using him to broker peace between the realms when he deemed Loki ready for said task. He took Loki as a baby and yes, raised him, but he saw that child and thought he was looking in the face of an opportunity. You’re going to tell me that’s not more meaningful, that doesn’t drive in deeper the message about how harmful this sort of colonialist and supremacist culture is (Loki was raised to think his own people were monsters, driven to madness to the extreme where he was going to exterminate his own people just to show his father that he was a worthy son? Seriously, how were there no attempts to interpret this from a post-colonialist point of view, but there are for Ragnarok?), than some dumbass exposition scene with some old paintings in walls where oh noes, turns out Odin KILLED PEOPLE?!

BIG FUCKING DEAL!

WE’VE KNOWN THAT SINCE THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF THOR’S ORIGINAL MOVIE!

Just, how the hell is this a big damn surprise to ANYONE? ESPECIALLY TO THOR! He was willing to destroy Jotunheim because they ruined his parade: HE WAS DOING IT TO FOLLOW ODIN’S EXAMPLE. THE ORIGINAL MOVIE NEVER SHIED AWAY FROM THIS.

Oh but the surprise is that Odin had a daughter he locked away and hid from the world because he was ashamed of what he’d done? Just… how was he ashamed? When did we see Odin ASHAMED in the previous movies? As much as they tried to portray him as mellowed out, he always acted like everything had been necessary for peace. He outright says in The Dark World that he will immolate Asgard in its entirety if need be to defeat the Dark Elves. Please, how are we genuinely pretending NOW that Odin was hiding any of what he’d done, any of what he was capable of, from Thor or from Loki or from just about anyone?

This is also the part where the original myths and themes of Norse Mythology start to debunk Ragnarok with astounding ease. Original myths that, surprise surprise, the first two movies abide by with much more respect than Ragnarok ever could.

Norse mythology is complex and rich and arguably the second most recurrent mythology in popular culture right after Greek mythology (I reckon Egyptian used to be the second but has dropped in popularity in recent years). I am far from an expert with Norse mythology, I actually am most confident with Celtic mythology, in particular the Irish Mythological Cycle, but that’s not the point: anyone who hears about Norse mythology is likely to have heard about the characters we met in Thor, and about the afterlife according to these myths.

Death in Norse mythology can lead people to different places, not too differently from how it is in other mythologies. Let’s see what the lands of the dead are like:

Valhalla is an afterlife destination where half of those who die in battle gather as einherjar, a retinue gathered for one sole purpose: to remain fit for battle in preparation for the last great battle, during Ragnarök. In opposition to Hel’s realm, which was a subterranean realm of the dead, it appears that Valhalla was located somewhere in the heavens.

Hel’s realm is separated from the world of the living by a rapid river across which leads the Gjallarbrú that the dead have to pass. The gates are heavy, and close behind those who pass it and will never return again. Hel is the final destination of those who do not die in battle, but of old age or disease.

As these two are the only ones that matter for this movie, I figured I’d bring these up. There are of course thousands of various interpretations on how these afterlifes work, and some people say it’s not so cut and dry, but in general, it’s understood that Valhalla is pretty much an honor.

This honor was extended to Frigga in The Dark World. The only good thing about her death in that movie was that it established HOW death works in the MCU’s Asgard. She died in battle: she was given the greatest honor and sent to rest in Valhalla. The land of heroes who die in battle, fighting for their own.

Hel, on the other hand, should be the afterlife for those who die in less worthy ways, meaning, not in combat. Death in combat is considered one of the greatest honors in Norse culture, from what I’ve understood from all the stories I’ve seen that are set in Norse or Viking settings, and not dying in combat wasn’t a favorable prospect for just about anyone. Deaths outside of combat are, of course, accidental deaths, diseases, old age, you name it.

Hel should be connected to Hela, the character from Ragnarok. Hela should preside over Hel, the unwanted afterlife for so many people who would rather die in a much worthier way.

Hel showed up once before in the MCU, by the way. In the very controversial and despised Ultron. And no, I’m not talking about Thor’s weird-as-fuck delirium about Asgard. I mean in this particular dialogue…:

Natasha Romanoff: Thor, report on the Hulk?Thor: The gates of Hel are filled with the screams of his victims.[Natasha glares at Thor and Banner groans in despair]Thor: Uh, but, not the screams of the dead, of course. No no, uh…wounded screams, mainly whimpering, a great deal of complaining and tales of sprained deltoids and, and uh… and gout.

Gates of Hel. That’s a direct reference to actual mythology. He could have said that Hel was full of Hulk’s victims, just like that, but he outright references the GATES. Ergo… Thor knows Hel exists.

PLEASE LET THAT SINK IN.

When you arrive at Ragnarok, Hela is a complete mystery for Thor. Oh, you can come up with whatever in-world explanation you care to, I honestly wouldn’t bother making up one to begin with: Ragnarok is built on the premise of defeating Hela, Thor’s scary sudden sister he had no notion of, who was locked away in some weird ass prison and who happens to be called Hela, but has no connection with Hel.

None.

Why do I say this?

Because her powers allegedly are connected to Asgard.

Allegedly.

Can someone please explain why should Hel’s powers have a connection with Asgard when there was such a bloody obvious possibility in making Hel the realm she’s connected to? She’s the goddamn REGENT of Hel! That’s not even up for debate in Norse Mythology, out of all the things that can be debated! But instead her power comes from the LIVING? It comes from VIOLENTLY KILLING WARRIORS WHO FIGHT AND DIE DEFENDING THEIR HOMELAND HONORABLY?

I’m going to outright say it: Hela should have gained NOTHING from a militaristic approach at attacking and destroying Asgard. If the plan was to make Hela a big shock for everyone, a plot twist… she should have spread disease and old age through Asgard. And then people die dishonorably.

And they end up in her realm.

And she could enslave them and use their souls to fuel her own power or so.

Please, do tell… how is this not a much more myth-compliant approach than “Oh lookie she’s just this SUPER BADASS FIGHTER! And she can take down ENTIRE ARMIES all on her own by FIGHTING!” How isn’t this more consistent with what was already established by the MCU? (oh wait, Waititi doesn’t care to keep things consistent, I forgot…)

Man, I’ve played Dragon Age: Origins a fuckton of times by now and one of the saddest and truest things I’ve seen in it, which connects with my own reality, is one of the riddles on your way to the Urn of Andraste: how did Andraste and the Maker destroy the Imperium’s army? Through FAMINE. Through HUNGER. What’s more disgraceful than living to EAT? Nothing feels more dehumanizing, and I can tell you that just fine considering that in hyperinflation that’s EXACTLY what venezuelans like myself live like right now.

Why didn’t Hela starve Asgard, then? Why didn’t she do something that Asgardians simply couldn’t FIGHT against, seeing as that’s all they know how to do?

Oh, again, because Thor is an ACTION HERO! That is the identity Feige and Waititi HAD to build for him! That’s what he ALWAYS was supposed to be!

I’m going to share now one of my favorite things about both Thor and The Dark World: the way Thor finishes his final battles.

In the first film, Thor defeats Loki by destroying the Bifrost. He uses Mjöllnir to destroy someTHING, not someONE. Hammers can be used to build and destroy, Thor used it to destroy at that particular point in time. By destroying, he stopped the chaos Loki was unleashing with the Bifrost and saved an entire realm.

The Dark World? Thor isn’t the one who comes up with the way to defeat Malekith, since it’s Jane who makes the wacky portable portals stuff. Nonetheless, Thor is the one out in the fray, fighting the big bad… but how did he take down OP Aether-addled Malekith? Not by shoving a fuckton of lightning into his face, he already tried that and failed. Nope: he nailed the device Jane built. He nailed it right into the motherfucker’s chest. And then Malekith gets portaled away and killed by his own ship. Again, it’s not Thor using POWER to kill his enemy, it’s Thor using a hammer’s natural damn use to his favor. It’s Thor using his BRAIN.

THOR.

USING HIS BRAIN.

THINKING SHIT THROUGH.

USING HIS AVAILABLE RESOURCES TO FINISH A FIGHT EFFECTIVELY.

NOT POWERING THROUGH EVERYTHING LIKE A DURACELL BATTERY ON DRUGS.

People out there who complain about how Infinity War gave Thor an axe instead of letting him be powerful all on his own piss me off, I won’t lie. Because Mjöllnir was NOT a crutch for Thor. It was a tool, in all senses of the word. It’s like pretending Doctor Strange’s cloak is the secret to all his powers. The entire first movie is about showing Thor that the hammer, that POWER, does NOT define him: why the FUCK did he have to lose it in Ragnarok, and suffer about it like he’d never been parted from the hammer when it happened just the same in the first damn movie? Hell, the first movie stole ALL his lightning and thunder-related powers and he STILL managed to find true worth in who he was after that! He still learned what he needed to learn to be worthy of his hammer again! This movie, though? It rewards Thor for losing Mjöllnir, ZERO GROWTH OR DEVELOPMENT NEEDED BECAUSE FUCK IT, HE DIDN’T LEARN A DAMN THING IN THIS MOVIE by making him superpowerful just because it could. And Thor ends up winning the day without using a hammer in the way a hammer should be used, breaking with the pattern of the two previous movies: again, the identity of the original movies gets tossed away completely.

It’s not cool. It’s not amazing. It’s devoid of all meaning. Thor losing his eye just like his daddy before him? Another piece of crap devoid of meaning. Thor didn’t need to lose a goddamn eye to be “parallel” to his father, because he’s already in the position where he has to take charge of Asgard to become king, and nothing’s a more apparent parallel than that.

Funny comparison time: did you watch Lion King 2? A lot of people think it sucks but when I was little I looooved that thing with the force of a thousand suns. Now, if you did watch it, remember Kovu? Remember the part where Zira scars him, leaving him to look just like Scar? The drama at that point is that Kovu has been groomed all his life to kill Simba, just like Scar killed Mufasa. He was “chosen” for the job, and all his similarities with Scar not withstanding, Kovu’s growth pushes him to NOT WANT TO FOLLOW ON SCAR’S FOOTSTEPS.

So, when he gets the same scar but acts entirely differently from how Scar would have? When he chooses to love rather than to hate? When he takes a stand for peace rather than to further stir up war? He’s choosing to be different from the lion whose example he’s been forced to follow all his life!

When Thor fights Hela… what does he do that is in any sense different from what Odin would have done, in his shoes? Could someone perhaps enlighten me? He fights Hela, he doesn’t extend a hand to her and offer her a second chance. He fights to defeat her, he gets Loki to unleash Surtur on Asgard and destroy it with Hela in it. Oh, wow, he distanced himself SO MUCH from Odin’s legacy by, uh, destroying his homeland and killing his sister. That’s not so different from locking Hela up for eons, let alone so different from saying that he would sacrifice as many asgardian lives as were needed to end the threat of Malekith.

Oh, but Thor saved lives, didn’t he? Sure he did!

No, he didn’t. Fucking Heimdall was the one worried about protecting people. Who the hell would have saved them if Heimdall hadn’t been there? Who the hell would Thor have saved if Heimdall hadn’t protected people and created that weird underground refugee site? If Thor had arrived and Heimdall and his people had been caught all along, who the fuck would he have saved? NO ONE.

Also, this concept of “Thor saving a few civilian lives WHILE MILLIONS GET SACRIFICED” might as well apply to Odin’s destruction of other cultures because of how they threatened Asgard too. Heck, Bor’s destruction of the Dark Elves is presented in the same light too in The Dark World. Ragnarok attempts to make people feel bad about all the deaths in the shallowest way I’ve seen, because for one thing, it tries to criticize the previous movies by being oh so shocked by Odin’s massacres when everyone and their uncle KNOWS that Odin’s been killing cultures and worlds and things since day fucking one. But it basically spits upwards when it says “Asgard is its people, not a place” and… kills the majority of the people, along with the place. Just… what the hell was even the point of pretending Asgardians would be refugees rebuilding elsewhere when, on top of it all, they all died in Infinity War anyhow?

Now, let’s think about it: how many named asgardians do we know who survived Ragnarok? We know Thor, Heimdall and Valkyrie. Loki is a honorary asgardian, I suppose, so let’s say he counts. Who else? Oh, damn, no one. I’m all out.

And THIS is where Ragnarok was always supposed to improve on the rest of the Thor movies. THIS. Because in a movie that was going to kill the Warriors Three, Sif, Odin and as many asgardians as they could, you had the reasonable obligation to make the audience GIVE A SHIT. Constant criticism for the original Thor movies by less passionate fans is that they didn’t care about any characters aside from Thor, Loki and Heimdall (cue my surprise when they all survive Ragnarok, it’s almost like it was fanservice, oh my!), and that Asgard was BORING.

Ragnarok should have tried its best to make Asgard less boring. It should have tried to make the less popular characters relevant, interesting, valuable…

What did it do? Killed them all. Every warrior dead. Sif would be dead too, if Jaimie Alexander hadn’t been too busy to go to Australia. Every last one of them would be dead. And as for Asgard? As for the place we should see Thor cares about soooo much?

We saw more of Asgard in The Dark World, of their customs, of their complexities, and the majority of the movie is spent elsewhere. We saw more of Asgard, obviously, on the original Thor, where half the movie is spent there. Ragnarok’s response to that, though, is to practically spend the entire fucking movie in a literal trash planet, because getting out of there was so very vital to the movie! When, uh, ending up there was already a fucking pointless waste of time in the first place.

Let’s think about it: why exactly did we need our heroes to end up there? Hulk could have crash-landed somewhere in Asgard. Valkyrie could have been an actual Valkyrie, not a cast-out drunk trying to forget her days of glory and misery. We could have seen THE Valkyries in action, gearing up to fight a serious threat, and people would be fawning about such a huge damn female army, on par with Wonder Woman’s amazons…!

But no. We went to a trash planet instead, all to make a shitty version of Planet Hulk, which yes, I haven’t read, but the people I know who did read it say it was a complete disservice to a story that was so much more complex and serious than the trash heap we were given through Ragnarok.

And, most importantly… all to make the movie FUN. All so Thor could have something else to do while everyone died in Asgard. All so he could indeed be incompetent as defender of his realm because in the end he couldn’t save most of them. And it didn’t even matter to him that he didn’t, that’s yet another thing that pisses me off: he mourns his father a lot, spends the movie bitter and angry that Odin had died just so he can have an understandable reason to be pissed at Loki, and sure, he wants to go back to Asgard and save his people from his sister. But I can’t remember him seeming genuinely concerned about what fate awaited his friends and the people he ruled. Of course, neither did Loki, but as Loki was portrayed as an egotistical maniac the whole movie, it’s no surprise. Our hero, though, should have a bigger heart than this, right? He did before, didn’t he? He did everything in his power to get Malekith to leave Asgard alone, including risking the life of the woman he loved, no less!

But naaaaah, in Ragnarok he did a lot for his people, uh-huh, sure as fuck. That’s why he spent all his time in trashland making jokes and having fun except for most the time he was dealing with Loki, because by then he got pissed because Odin’s death is all his fault. Just like Frigga’s death. Just like everything because Loki sucks and Thor is forever mad at him. Thing really is, he has pressure to leave, but you don’t really feel it going by his attitude. If everyone you knew and loved were about to die by the hand of your unknown sibling, would you be chill, trying and failing to flirt with a girl by tossing a ball to a wall so it can hit you right back?

Thor’s entire character in Ragnarok is cringeworthy. This isn’t just because he was so vastly different from who he was back in the other two films, it’s because of how he acts, how he behaves. How he takes next to nothing seriously, starting from Surtur, all the way to Asgard’s destruction. This is the man who was actually characterized for FOUR films as someone with a sense of humor, but with a strong sense of duty and honor that makes him an even better man than Steve Rogers (reminder of the hammer scene in Ultron, Rogers can’t quite lift the hammer yet, Thor’s supposed to be a worthier man than him, according to whatever criteria Mjöllnir uses). And here? Here he just jokes around, he wastes his time, he acts like a complete bufoon as he has stupid arguments with Hulk and deals with Jeff Goldblum, and flirts with Valkyrie, and outsmarts Loki (hell knows how, considering how incredibly idiotic Thor felt through this entire movie, but that’s how stupid Loki was in it too).

The ideal way to compare how Thor was written in the original films and in this one is the romance. Where in the previous movies Thor is charming, confident, treats women with respect (he supported Sif in her efforts to prove herself on par with any man, he encourages her to survive and live to tell her stories herself, he listens to Jane’s explanations about space and offers his own stories when she wants to hear them, and so on), in Ragnarok he meets Valkyrie and acts like, again, a 14-year-old fanboy who just met the celebrity he faps to every night in his bedroom. He’s nervous, he’s giddy, he’s trying, TRYING to impress her! Before anyone chimes in to say he’s meeting his hero, of COURSE he’d be nervous… please, no. Thor is a goddamn prince, as good as a king already. Thor has met countless people in his life and treated them all with the same amount of respect. He has NO REASON to dumb himself down and behave like a fanboy with Valkyrie. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t funny. It was absolutely out of character, that’s what it was. For he wouldn’t be trying to flirt with her, let alone so poorly, even if he’s interested in her romantically. No, he would respect her, first and foremost. He would admire her without seeming a complete idiot in the process, the same way he did with Jane. He wouldn’t be trying to impress her by acting like he’s cool, but coming off as an idiot, because he supposedly grew out of his stupid arrogance all the way in movie 1. But naaaaah, not when he meets VALKYRIE! Nope, because she’s SPESHUL!

Give me a break.

I’m sure there’s more about Thor, but I think I’ll leave him alone for now. I already did my piece on Loki earlier, so now… two newcomers.

Valkyrie bothers me. No, it has nothing to do with Valkyrie breaking the stereotypical blonde warrior aesthetic that people expect from Norse mythology stuff, because hell, Heimdall doesn’t bother me and never did just because he’s not aryan. Honestly, it doesn’t matter in the least what color they are.

What does matter with Valkyrie is that her change of heart and motivations make absolutely no sense.

When we first meet her she’s just scavenging trash to drag to Jeff Goldblum. She’s drunk, but she’s tough as nails and she gets everything done anyways. Is it ideal? No. It feels insulting, even, considering this is how the movie chooses to portray a valkyrie and its only heroic female character. But whatever, let’s move forward…

When Thor realizes what and who she is, he goes fanboy mode. Valkyrie dismisses all reminders of her past life, and as far as I can remember, she did that at least twice. Maybe thrice, I can’t recall that much. When Thor asked her why she didn’t want to help him save Asgard, her answer directly implies she remembers perfectly well what happened the last time she dealt with Hela and she is still too grief-ridden about it to bother fighting her again. Thor throws a tantrum, Valkyrie still refuses to go along with him, all ends just like that.

But when Loki does the ONLY useful thing he did in the entire movie, as in, hi-jacks Valkyrie’s memories and makes her relive everything, she changes her mind. Why?

Oh, because she reclaimed her past? Because she had forgotten it? BULL.FUCKING.SHIT. Valkyrie didn’t forget JACKSHIT about her past! The answer she gives Thor, initially, shows very clearly that she remembers EVERYTHING and refuses to go back anyhow. Because Hela is too powerful for her to defeat. But one forceful blast to the past makes Valkyrie not only NOT feel violated, which honestly blows me away, sure she hit Loki afterwards but I wouldn’t exactly be so chill after someone got inside my head and forced me to relive my worst memory, but it makes Valkyrie decide that she wants to help Thor now.

WHY?!

There is NOTHING reasonable that has changed since she told Thor what she did. NOTHING! She didn’t come to a conclusion such as “well shit my life sucks badly enough here, I might as well go die”, nor does she have a heartfelt conversation with Thor about how hard this is for her but that maybe she can correct the mistakes of her past if she helps him out now. No, man, this movie doesn’t need anyone to have believable behaviors or motivations, because Valkyrie needs to join Thor so she can play the Gamora to his cheap Peter Quill, and if her brain needs to be bent backwards to join this team, so be it.

Again, let’s put things into perspective: was there ANY need for Valkyrie’s character to be exactly what it was? Why couldn’t she be the only line of defense in Asgard to endure against Hela’s attack, for instance? She’s presented to us as the only representative of this really cool elite group of fighters… and she’s just doing Jeff Goldblum’s dirty work. Please… can someone tell me what was the point of doing this?

Ah, wait, I know: COMEDY. Because that was the priority established by Waititi and who knows who else, because that’s what mattered most. So, was it fun to have a serious warrior lady kicking ass in Asgard? Nah, it was fun to make her a drunkard who’d fall over sideways when collecting Thor for Goldblum because she’s drunk. Haha. Funny.

Valkyrie is wasted potential. That’s the truth of it. She could have been amazing, but as it is, I find Sif a thousand times more interesting than Valkyrie because at least with Sif I can see where she’s coming from, I can understand her storyline even without her ever being at the forefront of any movie. Question now, why did it have to be Valkyrie? Why couldn’t Sif be the one helping Thor in Ragnarok? Fucking hell, why couldn’t it be BOTH of them? Aside from the obvious “we forgot Sif existed until ten seconds before filming the deaths of all of Asgard’s warriors” explanation, it’s because you can’t make the Guardians of the Galaxy formula work with well-rounded individuals, Nope, you need broken people. And what’s more broken than a warrior who lost her will to fight? Who lives to drink, like my good buddy Oghren who I mentioned back when this post began?

Valkyrie, then, is not a full-rounded character. She’s more convenience writing. She’s a happy coincidence for Thor, because woah, what are the odds that the ONE PERSON WITH ASGARDIAN PAST would find him in trashland? They’re not good. In fact, they’re pretty bad. But that’s what the movie needed, so that’s what the movie got. And how do you get her to change her mind about fighting when she’d given up? By convenience writing. Not even a pep talk, like what Jyn Erso got in Rogue One from her dad, which made her switch flip completely and she did a 180° regarding her opinion of the war and battles between the Empire and Rebels. I complained a bit about Jyn changing her mind so easily… but compared to Valkyrie? Jyn made a fuckton more sense than that. At least you could see where she was coming from when she changed her mind. At least you could say a fiber of her being was touched by her father’s words. Valkyrie was touched by Loki’s invasion of her mind? By what, exactly? By Waititi twisting her character over because otherwise his GOTG team-up wouldn’t work?

The absolute worst part of Ragnarok is realizing that, as a cheap rip-off of GOTG, it failed not only to hold up the identity of any Thor film before this one, it failed to imitate GOTG properly. GOTG felt organic, this feels forced. GOTG felt like a good story to tell, because it was a group of renegades, pretty much, saving the entire galaxy even though they’re nobodies, even though they’re as good as mercenaries, even though they’re a team brought together by what feels like random factors (but it’s not that random because, as a reminder, all of them minus Drax were after the Orb, and in the break-out Drax joins them because he hopes they can help him fulfill his quest for revenge). Everyone in GOTG has reasons to fight, though, reasons to work together. They seem to barely stand each other, but they’re convenient for one another at the start and they bear with it.

Ragnarok fails to achieve GOTG’s success in terms of storytelling because Ragnarok featured Thor as good as begging everyone to help him. Reluctant team-ups like GOTG’s are achieved by having two or more characters work together for a common goal, or for goals that they can only achieve with each other’s help (I have used the same resource in writing in the past plenty if times as it is). But when you have to feature a character BEGGING others to work with him, this formula doesn’t elicit the same feeling. It doesn’t result in “wow, look at all these unlikely heroes working together”, it results in “aw look at ‘em helping the little guy who needed them”. Thor offers everyone a chance to fight a battle that, in general, doesn’t concern them. Hulk has nothing to gain from fighting Hela. Valkyrie has no reason to fight her again, as she’d given up and displays no believable motivation to go for a rematch. Loki does have reason to fight, but Thor doesn’t trust him and it’s not until the last 10 minutes of the movie that Thor finally trusts Loki again, just because Loki is doing exactly what Thor wanted him to.

Give me a Valkyrie who has spent AGES looking for Hela through the universe, hoping to fight her, and upon hearing she’s back, she wants revenge. Give me a Thor who tells her “hey, maybe you can avenge your fallen comrades, but there are a lot of people who are still alive that we have to save too. Maybe revenge isn’t the only thing that matters”, and then Valkyrie reasons with what her motivations had been. Give me a more HUMANE Valkyrie, and that way she won’t be here merely to fulfill the typical and criticized “strong female character” trope, whose entire character arc revolves around being a cool fighter and being the object of admiration/affection/love interest of the main character, because newsflash, that’s what happened with her. The so very despised trope of “strong female character”, right here with Valkyrie.

Was Sif any better? Why, yes, I’d say so. Because Thor didn’t want her. Because she was only friends with him, because her life as a warrior took priority over any romantic interests she might have. Because her eagerness to go down in history in GLORY makes her near suicidal in movie 1, to the point where Thor has to make her snap out of it and force her to understand her life is worth more than the stories she wants people to tell about her in death. THAT is a character. THAT is a genuinely interesting female character, who got snubbed in all the films she featured and even in the one where she didn’t, precisely because she didn’t. Because her strength has flaws, because she’s not invulnerable, because she’s prone to failure, because she has loyalties, because she lives to serve her people. Sif is Valkyrie done right. Valkyrie is, like I said, a “strong female character”. And no, that she’s bisexual makes no damn difference, especially when said bisexuality is only known to people who follow Tessa Thompson on Twitter and general fans who look for information on characters outside of the movies themselves. Either way, if she had been shown making out with a girl onscreen that wouldn’t make a difference: she’s still only here to beat people up and to be a potential love interest for Thor, because if she’d had believable, understandable, EXPLORED motivations, she’d be more than that. But she doesn’t. Her entire character revolves around those two things. And that’s a failure in my eyes.

Finally… Hela. Why is Hela a terrible villain, on par with losers like Obadiah Stane, Malekith, the cheap excuse for Baron Zemo from Civil War, Darren Cross… honestly, spare me naming them all because frankly the only ones I wouldn’t lump together with the bulk of Marvel’s villains are Loki and Vulture, but my point is, Hela was all about appearances, all about the acting pedigree of Cate Blanchett, and nothing about making her into a decent villain. Why’s that?

I’ve talked in the past about why Marvel’s villains generally fail, and it’s because they’re not built to be characters but foils. Marvel’s not so subtle approach at storytelling holds a certain principle at its very highest, and said principle is that the story is about the HERO. The villain can’t be more developed than the hero, else you’re failing the movie’s purpose. Only a few of their movies failed at this (I can only think of Thor and Black Panther as examples of not keeping true to this precept), everything else does it just fine. Why, though? Because the villains are completely generic. Because they’re here to further someone else’s storyline, and not to have one of their own.

Loki had his own storyline in his first movie. You watch his ENTIRE thought process through Thor, you see that he didn’t start off with the “I’m going to annihilate Jotunheim!” idea, it’s something that builds up as the story unfolds. You meet Loki as a troublemaker, capable of very chaotic messes such as what happens during Thor’s failed coronation, but he’s not stupid. He’s not trying to cause a war, he’s just sabotaging his brother because, curiously, Loki is right about Thor at this point in time: Thor is NOT fit to be king, and Odin agrees eventually. The simplest provocation caused Thor to wage war on an entire realm, just because he wanted to rule Asgard RIGHT NOW. Loki’s mischief revealed this about Thor, but it wasn’t done with the intent to completely ruin Thor’s life: Thor’s reaction to Loki’s scheme is what reveals that he’s not ready to rule at all.

It’s especially clear when you recall that Loki ends up facing the truth about himself during the fight in Jotunheim: Loki has no idea what his true heritage is. He knows he’s been sidelined and treated differently, but he has no clue what’s up. Where Black Panther features a Killmonger who has already come to terms with his heritage and his connection with Wakandan royalty, Thor treats us to the ENTIRE PROCESS of Loki’s slow but certain collapse. He starts off fine, but he ends up losing all sight of who he is, of everything that matters, because his parents weren’t his parents, because he was lied to all his life, because his brother was favored over him all along and NOW, in front of us, he has come to understand why.

Loki’s entire journey parallels Thor’s. Where Loki grows more unhinged, Thor is humbled and grows into letting the goodness in him shine, in letting the better traits that make him a decent man pull through while he lets go of his arrogance and his belief that he’s entitled to a throne and to everything he could ever want. Their journeys happen simultaneously, and THAT is unique to any Marvel movies. You don’t see that anywhere else. THAT is what made Thor so successful with fans: it wasn’t JUST Thor’s story, it was Loki’s too. The Dark World at least gave Loki the courtesy of a small arc of his own. Ragnarok? Jokes at his expense and a diva complex that resulted in him coming back to help Thor merely because that would mean he would be regarded as hero and savior to Asgard. How is it not cringeworthy?

But that’s not what I was trying to get to, nope. No, my point was Hela: what was the purpose of Hela, in the end?

Ragnarok, traditionally, is brought upon the world by Loki. He’s the one who supposedly ends the entire world, causes the massive fight of the gods and wreaks havoc comparable to the Christian Apocalypse. But Loki can’t do that in Ragnarok because he has too much of a fanbase and can’t be guilty for such heinous crimes, can he? Nope.

Let’s, instead, find someone else to blame everything on. Are there other options for this role? Surtur, Amora, maybe? Oh, no! Let’s go with Hela! Who IS Hela, anyways?

In one iteration of the comics, Hela is LOKI’S DAUGHTER. Never, from my understanding, was Hela anyone’s sister, let alone Thor and Loki’s. Is it that terrible to make her Loki’s daughter? Well, yes, because that’d mean Loki would have to know of her existence and that would cause more problems than Waititi wanted to handle (plus, gives too much protagonism to Loki, and he certainly did not want THAT!). So, Hela had to be something else. She had to be something personal for Thor too, but making her an old flame would be too much (despite uh from what I read she even had a kid with Thor in one iteration of the comics? So it wouldn’t have been completely out of left field?), because we don’t want Thor having multiple romances, we don’t even want him having a full romance, because that’s why the first movies failed! Nope, that can’t do.

Oh, wait a minute, I know! Let’s make Hela Thor’s SECRET SISTER! AHAHA, PERFECT! Because it’s not like he already had a brother in black-and-green clothing who was snubbed and given a shitty deal by their dad and who came back from said betrayal by Odin to destroy everything Thor holds dear. It’s such NOVEL storytelling, so unique! So unexpected! We totally never have seen this story told before!

Hela is a cheap rip-off of the original Loki. Just as the entire movie is a rip-off of GOTG. Hela TRIES, so very hard, to be as impressive and imposing as Loki originally was. Hela fails. Why?

Because for one thing, she’s a crappy retelling of Loki’s story. She has nothing new. She’s not impressive in any regards because she does nothing unexpected, nothing that makes her ANYTHING aside from a bad villain Thor needs to defeat. Loki was Thor’s friend and brother once: Hela generates no such conflict because she could easily be Odin’s former slave rather than daughter and the story would be the same. She could have literally ANY relationship to Thor and nothing would change. Why? Because her being Thor’s biological sister does NOTHING for the story. It creates no bond between them, because the bond that existed between Thor and Loki was established during AGES of growing up together. Hela has no such thing, ergo, you can’t pretend that her being Thor’s sister will amount to anything just because Odin handled her poorly (newsflash, Odin has been handling shit poorly since the first time he showed up in the MCU and most of Thor’s problems in his movies come from that, ergo this is, again, nothing new).

For another thing, Hela is here to take Loki’s place as the complicated family member Thor needs to get in line. Hela is, I theorize, Waititi’s wish fulfillment for what he’d like to have done to Loki but couldn’t because he needed to be around to keep his fanbase appeased and buying tickets for the movie. Hela, though, was new. Hela was irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Hela could turn into all of Loki’s “evil” and “chaotic” impulses, while Loki is reduced to narcissism and cheap comedy, and this way Hela is turned into a cartoon villain who’s only here to break everything because she allegedly obtains her power by doing so.

I already got into it before, but I guess I’ll do it again: Hela’s connection to Asgard is absolutely idiotic. There’s an entire damn realm named after her, connected to her. It’s like saying Hades from Greek Mythology obtains his powers from the Olympus. Or like saying Satan derives his powers from Heaven. No. That makes no effing sense. Therefore, destroying Asgard to destroy Hela feels stupid, and defies all logic. But they needed Hela to cause a catastrophe in Asgard, otherwise you can’t justify destrying Asgard by using Loki to, HAHAHA, HONOR THE ORIGINAL MYTHOLOGY, HAHAHAHA, AFTER ALL THIS TIME OF SHITTING ON IT AND UNDERSTANDING NONE OF ITS CONCEPTS, NOW THEY WANT TO HONOR IT, IT’S THE ONLY FUNNY JOKE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE!

It’s bad enough that the movie fucks over Loki’s character as it does, but it attempts to make him a good, dutiful brother who steals the Tesseract from the vaults but still takes Surtur to the funky flame thing. The destruction of Asgard is ultimately done by Loki, but not really, no, it was Surtur. And not really, no, it was because Thor asked Loki to. So, in the end, it’s actually Thor who killed Asgard and his sister. But um, they were being faithful to the myths, sure.

Hela is a failure of a villain as usual for Marvel. Her story is presented via exposition, via TELL, NOT SHOW. We don’t witness the crumbling relationship between her and Odin because that would have required for her to exist since the first movies. No, we are told all about how Odin used her as his ideal tool to KILL PEOPLE!!!1 (I think I raged enough about this before, didn’t I…?) and then locked her up somewhere because she was too dangerous! Compared to Loki’s very palpable fall from grace, Hela’s character arc is absolutely insignificant. People only liked her because she was hot. That was it. Like I said earlier, Cate Blanchett’s doing. Had it been any less than stellar actress, Hela wouldn’t have garnered more than a couple of shrugs.

I guess it warrants to say Odin was probably the only thing this movie maintained close enough to the original movies (despite he was poorly written in his death scene anyhow). Odin making shitty decisions seems to be one of the main story points in Thor’s franchise, so I suppose that’s not out of line. Ironically, though, staying true to the same variable with Odin is… pretty damn old by now. All of Thor’s movies have featured Odin being controversial, doing shitty things for his perceived greater good (from stealing a child of another culture to comparing his son’s girlfriend to a goat), so Ragnarok isn’t even telling us anything new about Odin. It’s also not telling us anything new about Odin and Thor’s relationship, because we already know Thor loves the man despite it all, and whatever shitty decisions Odin made, Thor accepts them. He did since the first movie, he does again in this one. Zero new information.

As for a few more inconsistencies:

The Bifrost. Remember how Loki activated the Bifrost and destroyed a lot of Jotunheim by leaving Heimdall’s sword in place, back in the first movie? At one point in Ragnarok, the sword stays in place again and nothing happens. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The scene could have easily happened without the sword there, too. But nope. It stayed in place for no reason, and what came from that? Nothing. Just, a completely absurd situation where, again, Ragnarok is inconsistent with the original Thor.

Another inconsistency, this time one that people laughed about becuause “it fixed the Gauntlet problem”. Reminder: the Infinity Gauntlet shows up for the first time in Asgard’s vaults in the first movie.

In Ultron, though, inexplicably Thanos is wearing the Gauntlet and saying he’ll deal with everything himself (what did he even have to do with Ultron is a pretty good question, one I still have no idea what its answer is). When this happened, people thought Loki was working with Thanos and gave him the thing. Or Thanos broke into Asgard and stole it. But ultimately, it meant Thanos had the Gauntlet and we were doomed, right?

Ragnarok “solved” this problem by featuring Hela saying the Gauntlet in the vault was fake. She knocks it over and says that’s just a shitty copy of the real deal. Fast forward to Infinity War, though…

Tyrion and his buddies fron Nidavellir built the Infinity Gauntlet for Thanos. It happens before Thanos even has access to the Time Stone. Ergo, Thanos couldn’t have made the dwarves craft THE ORIGINAL GAUNTLET and then, I don’t know, used the Time Stone to show it to Odin ten thousand years ago just to get him to make a fake version of it to put it on display for Hela to knock over later. Even if he had done that once he gains access to the Time Stone, someone needs to have at least a shred of common sense and ask themselves why the fuck would Thanos do something so pointless.

Because ultimately, a plothole becomes even more absurd when the attempt to fix it just fucks it up more more. The fake, copy of the Gauntlet, which looks EXACTLY like Thanos’ Gauntlet, existed first. It’s like saying Windows was the original when Bill Gates outright worked for Apple and got his ideas for his own business and OS through working on the MacIntosh. No, Windows isn’t the original. Neither can Tyrion’s Gauntlet be the original because IT MAKES NO SENSE WITH ANY TIMELINE YOU CAN THINK OF.

Had Ragnarok ignored the Gauntlet, nothing would have happened. The destruction of Asgard could have meant this proto-Gauntlet died with it. Thanos could have simply asked the dwarves to make him a new gauntlet because the one that existed was in Asgard, out of his reach by Ultron’s time, and simply gone by Infinity War. But oh noooo, they had to FIX THAT! Well, good fucking job, as usual. You created yet another stupid ass plothole, Waititi. Congratulations.

In short… Ragnarok’s big success comes from it being a “funny” movie with scatological jokes about anuses and orgies, for instance, with Thor making a complete dunce of himself throughout the painful two hours of movie (I don’t even know if it was two hours but it felt like an eternity to me), and let’s not get started again with what happened with Loki. The movie fails at establishing new characters anyone with common sense would be concerned about because they’re as complex and deep as a puddle on asphalt, and it fails at characterizing old characters too. The movie does its best to be funny, but the constant efforts to be funny are akin to a stand-up comedian who is desperate to make his audience laugh at whatever cost. It’s forced, it’s stupid, it’s consistently unfunny, at least it was for me. I can honestly say I laughed at zero points in time in the movie. Was I predisposed to dislike it? I’ve been predisposed to dislike a lot of things before. That the movie failed to subvert any of my expectations is hardly my fault: it was exactly every bit of a failure I expected it to be.

Because when they turned that original logo into a garbage new one, worthy of 1998 Word’s WordArt, when they released a trailer that was HUMOROUS, I knew I wasn’t going to watch something worth my while. You can make comedic stories about the end of the world, people have done it in the past, but Thor did not lend itself for that sort of thing because Ultron establishes Thor is going to be RESPONSIBLE for Ragnarok. Thor has a responsibility to the end of his world. And the Thor we knew, originally, wasn’t the type who would smile and shrug if his mistakes would cost the lives of millions of people.

This is like telling a version of Harry Potter where Harry, faced with Voldemort’s second rise to power,decides to go look for Horcruxes in casinos and strip clubs because hey that’s more fun than an endless camping trip. Well sure, it’d be more fun, but it’d make absolutely no sense and people would die while he enjoys himself and fails to find a single damn Horcrux, right? It’s also like telling me that in Avatar, when Zuko reveals Ozai is going to use the comet to destroy the Earth Kingdom, Aang goes “Oh wow… that’s a shame, huh? So, how about we go back to playing now?” instead of thinking he had to prepare and fight with Ozai to put a stop to the man.

It’s telling me that the destruction of Asgard, of Thor’s world, of his realm and kingdom, is a fucking JOKE. And if we’re not supposed to take it seriously because Thor won’t take it seriously, the movie is a failure. I never felt like any of the previous Marvel films wanted me to take them as jokes, not even the most comedic of them. I did with Ragnarok. Because all that death, all that destruction, all the sacrifices made, brushed past Thor like water from a shower, that he just dried up and walked away. Because the destruction of his world, of his friends, of everything he was supposed to protect, indeed isn’t deserving of a serious treatment because selling movie tickets via comedy is more important. Because quality, consistent, COMPLEX, storytelling isn’t anywhere near as important as making your audience laugh.

Well, congratulations, Feige, Waititi. You guys should have been stand-up comedians instead and left movie-making to people competent enough to make something worthwhile.

This movie is singlehandedly to blame for my loss of interest in MCU matters and in the Thor franchise. I would still write the occasional story for it, I would still enjoy other people’s works about it, but right now? I’ve even blacklisted a bunch of terms so I can see as few Ragnarok posts as possible. And precisely because I want nothing to do with it have I never gotten in the way of people who do enjoy it unless they outright ask me for my opinion, as you did, Anon. If anyone enjoyed Ragnarok despite EVERYTHING I wrote here, that’s on you. I don’t need any arguments to convince me that I’m wrong and they’re right about why this movie has some worth. The contradictions, conveniences, poor characterization and lack of creativity that went into this film will not go away just because someone excuses them one way or another, so if anyone is hoping to “enlighten me” about why this movie is actually brilliant? Save it. For your own good.

So, after these twelve thousand words on why Ragnarok is the worst MCU movie for me… is there anything left unsaid, really? I suspect so, because I watched it too long ago to remember every detail. Still, I’d have nothing good to say anyhow, so it’s probably for the best that I stop now that I’ve made my case quite clearly, right?

#thor ragnarok #*happy sigh*#well frankly I can rant a lot about this and sometimes I feel better afterwards #that's probably the one thing I can say in its favor

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thehollowprince · 5 years

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Wanda Maximoff - Here We Go Again

I reblogged a post about a week or so ago that was a series of tweets regarding Wanda Maximoff and her "being directly responsible" for the deaths of Africans whenever she visited the continent. I added my own minute commentary and reblogged it and left it at that, but ever since then it's been festering in my brain and I've been debating on whether or not to make a post about it. But then I thought to myself, "Dude, when have you ever shied away from sharing your opinion?", and after thinking about it, I was right and decided to make this.

With all that out of the way, here's the first tweet

There are a lot of things to dissect in just this tweet alone, such as the term "directly responsible", which I'm assuming the Tweeter doesn't actually understand. If they did, they'd know that "directly" means that Wanda went to Africa in her various missions with the sole intent of killing people. Anyone who actually watched the movies knows that's not even remotely true, because out of all the Avengers she's the one who emotes the most how horrible she thinks those deaths are. The one who beats up Wanda the most for any collateral damage she causes is Wanda herself.

Then there's the whole "Wanda's (body count) is entirely black" bullshit. Once again ignoring that they seem to think that Wanda went there on those missions with the sole intent of killing people, but then the fact that they're trying to turn the entire population of Africa into just black people, as if its not a multi-ethnic continent or that black persons don't live all over the globe.

I know I am not the best person, or the person at all, to be speaking about that particular topic, but that bugged me and it bared mentioning.

Moving on.

This is a tricky one, because Wanda was responsible for setting off the Hulk, which led to that rampage, but this just smacks of the same attitude that wants to put the whole of Ultron and his crimes on her shoulders. Just her, I would like to point out, not her brother, who is hardly ever mentioned and who was shown to be more bloodthirsty and vengeful than his sister. But I refuse to hold Wanda accountable for the Hulk's rampage, especially when we've seen that he's totally capable of being civil, as evidenced in Ragnarok. I mean, the very fact that the Avengers brought him to the conflict at all and just left him off the field was stupid and part of the circumstances that led to what happened in Johannesburg. Why bring a weapon like the Hulk to the battlefield if you're not planning on using it? Because them sidelining him is what allowed Wanda and Pietro to get the drop on him.

An excellent takedown of this argument is here, but just be warned, @chirpingtiger is a master at proving their points and their arguments are long and thought out.

The main point you should take away from that examination is this image

The fight with Ultron and the Twins took place at a shipyard on the South African coast, where as Johannesburg is very clearly landlocked and quite a distance away from the coast. There's also the fact that she hit the other Avengers with her mind whammy and they were all down for the count, engulfed with their traumas of various natures. Ther was literally nothing to suggest that the Hulk would react the way he did to her mojo when everyone else was rendered into a fugue state.

Next,

Once again I have to fall back on my age old question of "Did you actually watch the movies?" Its sad that I have to ask that so much, but this is Tumblr and we have gifsets and metas all around and so many people thinking that counts as canon.

If this person had actually watched the movies, they'd know that the entire body count in Lagos lies solely on Rumlow's shoulders. He was the one who attacked the laboratory, the one who attacked Cap and the one who set off the bomb that took the lives of several Nigerians and Wakandans. Wanda did not set off that grenade. Wanda contained the blast as best she good, with powers that no one truly understands at this point, which otherwise would have had a much bigger fatality rate if it had gone off in that crowded marketplace.

And all of that is completely ignoring that if she hadn't been there there's a good chance that Rumlow or his men would have gotten away with a biological weapon that could have caused untold damage.

The sad fact is that collateral damage happens when in the field and it's horrible, but trying to put that blame on one of those trying to stop the carnage as opposed to the actual person responsible is not only reprehensible, but boring. I never see anyone blaming one of the other members of the Avengers, or the Wakandans or whomever for the collateral damage their action or inaction causes.

(There also the thing that I think the whole Rumlow situation in Lagos was a plan by Hydra to contain and control enhanced individuals for their own purposes, but that's a conversation for another time.)

This was the one where I seriously considered the person tweeting to be a troll. I can't imagine how anyone who sat through that movie could blame the genocide committed by a delusional grape to be Wanda's fault. I mean that in all seriousness, because once again, it's all right there in the movie.

The very fact that Thanos claimed the Time Stone, arguable the most powerful of the Infinity Stones, and probably the one thing that could have stopped him but wasn't used, before he came for the Mind Stone means that it didn't matter when, or even if, Wanda destroyed the stone. The very presence of the Time Stone rendered all that irrelevant because he now controlled the very fabric of time itself. He could have gone back to any moment in time and taken the Mind Stone, whether it had been destroyed or not.

And the Battle of Wakanda itself. I feel like I'm on repeat here, because how is she responsible for Proxima Midnight's attack on the Wakandans? Did she tell her to attack? Did she command the Outriders to try and kill everything in sight? No, of course she didn't, because ad powerful as she is, she's not so powerful as to make others do things against their will. And that's all completely ignoring how this troll just completely stole the Wakandans own agency in this fight. Or T'Challa's choice to have the battle there in the first place. He did what he could with what he had in the little time he was given, but at no point was Wanda responsible for any of the deaths of the Wakandans during that battle.

In point of fact, Wanda actually jumped into the battle because she was witnessing the death and carnage and knew she could stop that. How was she, or anyone for that matter, to know that the whole attack was a distraction to get her on the field so that they (the Black Order) could take the stone for Thanos? Answer: they couldn't. Especially when they were under the impression that Corvus Glaive was already dead.

Also the fact that these people who hate Wanda are so okay with her killing someone she loves (which she did! That does need pointing out, because so many people like to ignore that) to end the conflict. No one demanded that Gamora should have let Nebula die or that Loki should have let Thor die in order to protect their respective stones. So why is Wanda singled out?

I don't feel like these even bares a mention, but the very fact that this dumbass thinks that Wanda is responsible for the dustings that Thanos committed is so ridiculous that its hysterical. Especially when you factor in that WANDA HERSELF WAS DUSTED!!!!

My suggestion is that this person take off whatever rose-tinged glasses they're wearing when they watch these movies and actually pay attention to what's happening on the screen. Its totally okay to not want to overanalyze these movies, because as I can state from personal experience, it does take some of the joy out of watching them, but if that's the decision you make, you don't get to take and state them so wildly out of context and present that as canon. It doesn't work that way.

#rant #wanda maximoff defense squad #wanda maximoff #age of ultron #more ca:cw bullshit #infinity war

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unwiltingblossom · 5 years

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Less meme this time, I just want to express the profound sense of loss that comes from ‘the same but not’, because anyone who dies might one day come back (It’s the MCU, even if the actors won’t/can’t, they can be replaced), but there’s no reason to bring back someone who’s already there.

So let me talk about that behind the cut.

First, I actually feel a bit of loss from their final fight not being against the Thanos they knew, but one from 9 years ago. It’s weird, since they were enemies, but there was a certain connection to that version of him. He knew them, they’d earned his respect and in a twisted way he felt certain compassion for them. This was a Thanos who had both of his daughters turn on him, who lost his armies, who saw Gamora cry over him and then had to watch her die for his dream. He’s a monster, but some of his cold conquerer shell had been chipped away and they formed bonds with him even if they were adversarial ones. When Scarlet Witch says “You took everything from me” and he answers “I don’t even know you” that really underlined it. He was almost the same, but this final battle was just that much more hollow when it was against some younger version of Thanos who didn’t know what he was walking into. (Yes, they did kill the original, but obviously that was a hollow victory too, since it was only revenge, not fixing anything).

But now moving on to people we actually care about.

Gamora. The one who explored her (not-)humanity, who built a family with the Guardians, a friendship with Nebula, and fell in love with Quill is dead. The one who personally killed Thanos, who was personally responsible for the death of half the universe, who begged Peter to kill her, she’s gone and her younger self can’t ever be her. She was plucked out of her development before all that happened, and while she’ll obviously still find herself, it won’t be in the context of the Guardians. She can’t share the experiences she did with Peter - like meeting his father and comforting him - and so it’s unlikely they’ll ever love each other. For Peter (and for the audience), the woman he loved is still gone. There’s just another woman with her face, who’s almost just like her but not, running around the universe keeping him from ever properly moving on.

And I know this one is probably going to be divisive due to his character, but...

Loki. Look. We all know that zany sequence where they tried to pull trickery right in front of the Trickster and it blew up in their faces wasn’t just for the opportunity to later kill off Steve. They could have just failed to get the Tesseract and be unable to get it back from Hydra and still have the same result. That was very transparently (and hilariously) just the opportunity to give him an out. Ancient One explicitly stated that any timeline where the stone doesn’t go back where it belongs bridges out, and guess what, Loki ain’t giving that back. (presumably one day it’ll end up with Thanos but it’s too late, he’s gone full Reverse Flash now)

There’s just one little issue if you’re fond of his character (which I, personally, am): this is end-of-Avengers Loki. AKA: peak villain Loki. He hasn’t sat in prison for a while, he didn’t watch his mother die, he hasn’t been forced to work with Thor and (fake-)sacrifice himself, he hasn’t had the fulfillment of leading Asgard for years and finally getting recognition from Odin, he hasn’t learned his lesson and decided to move on from just being ‘the god of mischief’, save all the Asgardians, chosen Thor over the infinity stone, or eventually really die for Thor. None of that has happened. His full route to redemption and giving up all that hasn’t and won’t happen to him.

The one we watched for three or four movies slowly developing is actually dead (probably. most likely.) I can presume that they’ll still push him in the direction of anti-hero anyway, because his character is boring and doesn’t really work if he stays villain/anti-villain (and he has a show following him, so it’s better if he’s not villainous), but he’s always going to be a different version. The one who stood and protected Asgardians during Ragnarok is never going to return, and I think that’s just extra sad. Nat, Stark, and Rogers can all eventually reappear. If they can find an excuse for the character to appear with a different actor, they can come back and probably will. An obsolete version of a character, who will be rapidly overwritten and replaced by this alternate timeline version?

They won’t come back.

And that’s the real tragedy of Endgame. Not the ones who died and couldn’t be brought back, but the ones who cheated death and were changed.

#endgame spoilers #avengers spoilers #avengers #avengers endgame #loki (marvel)#ooc

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northlandian · 5 years

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How I Fell in Love with Marvel

As a die-hard MCU fan today, it's hard to imagine where I would be and what I would be interested in today if it wasn't for my discovery of these fantastic movies. This is the story of how I accidentally saw my favourite movie to date, resulting in me finding one of my greatest passions today.

For context, before that day occurred, the closest I had been to anything Marvel related was having seen the original Spider-Man movies, 1 through 3, and I actually liked them (well, except for the obvious). A few years after that, I also saw Guardians of the Galaxy in theatres, which also happened to be on accident, as I was cottaging in a small county during the summer, and my sister and I were bored one night. However, Guardians wasn't enough to reel me in. If I'm being completely honest, it was never one of my favourite MCU movies (I even prefer the sequel over it). Not that it's not good, it was, but at the time, there was a lot of information thrown at me all at once that I didn't quite get because I didn't see any movies previous to it. Obviously, being young, stupid, and not that into that kind of stuff at the time, I didn't know I was supposed to.

It's also worth noting though, that before this accident I'm about to delve into occurred, I knew I wanted to be a Marvel fan. I had seen the Spider-Man movies and enjoyed them (although I didn't know that the MCU would differ from those, but anyways), so I knew there was a fairly good chance I would enjoy the others. Just the idea of these incredible fighters had always intrigued me, and it's probably why I enjoy video games as well. But I also wanted to feel like I was part of something, something bigger than myself. I was over my book phase, Gravity Falls had just ended, and I had finished all the Harry Potter movies... I wanted to find something else to love. But at the same time, I could never really find the time or effort to catch up on however-many countless movies were out at the time.

SO, without further ado, this is how I happened upon the MCU.

First of all, it was near the end of December 2017...yes, this took place just last year, I'm aware of how new I am and I only wish it could have happened sooner.

Anyways, my sister and I were staying at my cousin's for a few days during the winter break. We decided to go downtown for the day, which included seeing a movie. We hadn't bought the tickets ahead of time, but we were planning on seeing Coco - I had only heard good things, so we were all really excited. We get to the theatre, and one of my cousins goes to buy the tickets, while I wait with her three little brothers and my sister. Eventually, she comes back, only to tell us that Coco was sold out...big bummer for me. There was nothing else to see. My sister began complaining. My cousin then informs us that she had instead, purchased us all tickets for the new Thor movie...what? Her brothers seemed happy about it, and I decided to grin and bear it, but I gave my sister one look and knew I'd be sitting through one boring boy's movie. Whatever. I'd get it over with.

So we sit down in the theatre, we sit through the previews (I saw the preview for Black Panther for the first time, and ironically thought, "huh, that looks pretty good"), and the Marvel logo comes on. First impressions? Well, it was pretty cool. It was my first time seeing the newest Marvel logo, considering Guardians never had it.

Then it pans down to Thor, and he starts monologuing in his deep Asgardian accent, and I'm expecting it to be expositional and boring but...wait, it's not? It was actually pretty funny. The Surtur scene continues, and now first impressions are really kicking in... they were able to make it expositional and funny at the same time, and it worked well. Then the fight began, and suddenly, I was like...woah. These fight scenes are really good. Like. Really good. I found the camera angles made to follow the hammer very cool. Enemies were being taken out like dominos. Even Thor using his hammer as a shield against Surtur's fiery breath was literally a battle move I had doodled all the time! And now I was seeing it in front of me! Then, of course, his escape. I fell in love with the score instantly. The Bifrost aesthetic had me captivated. And from the moment the camera panned up into birds-eye view to read "Thor: Ragnarok", I knew this movie was going to be a bit more than interesting.

Suffice it to say, first impressions were good.

I won't go into detail about every scene like I just did, but I'll highlight the important ones that really made the movie for me.

Loki's introduction. Little did I know I'd be meeting one of my favourite characters of all time. His magical capabilities were revealed instantly for a first-timer like me, something I appreciated at the time I was watching. So was his relationship with Thor; not all of it, obviously, because there are many, many layers, but it was enough for me to determine that he was someone who had the kind of relationship that allowed him to act very jokingly, as seen while also being very jealous deep down, and expressing resentment (his desires of wanting to be King, making a stage production out of his own death, exiling his own father, etc). I could also pick up his immediate character traits fairly quickly - he’s funny, he's someone who practically embodies trouble, and he will always put himself first. It was unclear how much he truly did care for others, specifically his brother, but then again, it's been like that throughout most of the MCU anyways. I, of course, did not know why he was the way he was, but his personality had me intrigued from the very beginning.

The references made to past MCU movies. Believe it or not, I wasn't completely lost, unlike with Guardians. The reason for this was because it was presented in a way that made it so simple. For example, Loki faked his death. How do I know? Because Thor comes back to a stage production about it, but surprise! He's not dead. Another example is, Hulk and Thor always fight alongside each other. How do I know? "He's a friend from work". "Work" obviously being the Avengers (I didn't live completely under a rock, at least), and "friend" being enough to tell me that they were on pretty good terms the last they saw each other. Even the line "adopted" being enough to tell me that there was some deeper story behind why Loki is the way he is. It was small things like that that really set this particular movie apart, and sure, there were some references I didn't catch until seeing the previous movies ("Yes! That's how it feels!"), but it was nice to not always be in the dark about everything.

Valkyrie. Literally, everything about this character. I hadn't exactly been acquainted to Natasha Romanoff yet, so she was the first female badass I had ever had the pleasure of watching. From the moment she's introduced, you can tell she has a deep backstory. Her confrontation with Loki had me rolling when she beat the crap out of him, and then proceeded to throw a bottle at him shortly after. And of course, there's her entrance onto Asgard... enough said.

The last thing I'm going to mention goes out to the film's director, Taika Waititi, as well as the perfect portrayal performed by the actors, and that is the constant humour in the movie. Perfect example: “Get help”. It had me rolling. This is why I always consider it the most wonderful, yet coincidental incident because the truth is, if it was any other MCU movie, I wouldn't have been enticed enough. The movie was so damn funny, I must've laughed through half of it. Before I had seen it, I didn't know Marvel didn't take themselves so seriously. Or at least, I didn't know they didn't have to. I know now of course that that movie specifically was purposed to completely rebrand Thor in order to make him more interesting, and damn, did they do a good job.

So, that last point especially lingered as I left the theatre that day. I cannot express how much I thought about that movie for the rest of the night, which rarely happened to me, as it only happens when I watch something really good. The best thing I can think to compare it to was when the author of the journals was revealed in Gravity Falls (for those who have seen it). I even remember asking my cousin, "Wow, I had no idea Marvel movies were that good. Are they that funny in all the movies?". She responded, "Yeah, we should definitely watch the Avengers tonight", to which I agreed.

We watched Wonder Woman. I was highly unimpressed. Sorry, not a DC stan, never will be.

But when I got home from my cousin's, I did end up watching it. And then I watched Ultron. Then the Thor's. Then the Iron Man's. Then the Captain America's. I loved them all. I even enjoyed Guardian's 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, as I was hesitant about both. A few months later, I went back to the theatres to see Black Panther, just like I wanted to. With each time I watched and rewatched the movies, I fell more in love with the characters, I picked apart more from the storyline, made sure I knew every after-credits scene...started crafting my own theories for Infinity War.

And of course, little did I know, it would smash my heart to pieces not five months after I first discovered it.

And now, here I am, still obsessing over these movies, still undecided on who I could possibly like more, Thor or Loki, just as I felt from the moment I left the theatre for the first time. It's cool to think I found my passion on a happy accident, and it's weird to think that considering how happy it's kept me, what I'd be doing without it today.

#marvel #MCU #storytime #thor ragnarok #thor #loki #avengers #iron man #captain america #spider-man #guardians of the galaxy #origin #story #love

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owl-eyed-woman · 6 years

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Pacific Rim Uprising: A Comparative Review

A miracle has occurred. Pacific Rim, the brainchild of Guillermo del Toro that bombed in the US but soared internationally for a total box office gross of $400 million, has, against all odds, managed to get a sequel. Am I dreaming? Pacific Rim: the movie (and now franchise) that could.

But though the existence of a follow-up to this underdog of a movie (if a Hollywood blockbuster can be called that) is certainly miraculous, we must ask ourselves if a greater miracle has occurred: Is Pacific Rim Uprising actually good?

The answer is no… and yes. Wait, let me be clearer. This is a bad movie… and I dug it. OK, this is still confusing. I guess ‘patchy’ is the most accurate word here. The patches mostly consist of giant gaping holes of badness, but there are patches of (relative) goodness.

Let’s get this out of the way: Uprising is, in most ways, not the Pacific Rim we know and love. Set 10 years after the first, sporting a new director along with an almost entirely new cast, it is unmistakably a departure from the first one. Yes, it still has giant robots and giant monsters and they do indeed punch each other, but it is a fundamentally different movie in so many ways that it isn’t really surprising to find that something essential has been lost in the sequel.

I almost feel bad comparing Pacific Rim Uprising to its predecessor. As special as Pacific Rim was, I do typically believe that movies should be judged on their own merits… but it is a sequel and such comparisons are inevitable, so screw it, I’m doing it anyway.

Before we can unpack what Pacific Rim Uprising lacks, we first need to understand what made Pacific Rim so beloved.

Pacific Rim was special from the start. Guillermo del Toro, a man who has made a career out of penning revisionist love letters to cherished nerd genres, somehow managed to get 200 million dollars to make a big budget ode to monster movies and mecha anime. This once-in-a-millennia, stars-aligning act of providence made Pacific Rim, from its inception, something to behold and treasure.

But to suggest that the improbability of Pacific Rim’s existence is what makes it so special, is to do a disservice to Guillermo Del Toro and the film he created.

On a purely surface level, Pacific Rim has some of the most striking visuals of an action movie in recent years. Pacific rim could have just skated by on the novel prospect of trashy anime and B-movie visuals paired with the polish of a Hollywood blockbuster. Instead, Guillermo del Toro paired this already enticing spectacle with what can only be described as an explosion of saturated rainbow. In a time when The Dark Knight-inspired grey was the norm, Pacific Rim was a sweet, candy-coloured treat for sore eyes. I would even argue that the neon wonder of Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok have the bravery of Pacific Rim’s psychedelic colour palette to thank.

But the uniqueness of Pacific Rim goes much deeper than its admittedly stunning surface. What makes Pacific Rim stand, maybe not above, but most definitely apart from the crowd, is tone and theme.

At its heart, Pacific Rim is a silly movie. Its premise is ridiculous, its spectacle is over the top, it’s big budget, b-movie, anime trash. In the hands of a lesser director *cough Steven S. Deknight cough* this kind of movie would most likely be couched in a form of defensive snark and detached irony, as if embarrassed by its own frivolousness; the implication being that a movie like Pacific Rim is an indulgence we can partake in, but only if we feel guilty about.

This is what makes Pacific Rim so refreshing; it isn’t ashamed of itself. Every ridiculous line, every overwrought emotion, every heroic sacrifice and every earnest declaration, contains not one ounce of shame or cynicism. Instead, Pacific Rim oozes self-love, pride and, perhaps most unexpectedly, gravity.

There is always an urge to dismiss the often-simplistic conflicts and relationships we see in movies like Pacific Rim as mindless fluff, but Pacific Rim just won’t let you. Every part of this movie is delivered with a feeling of weight and import. An elbow rocket may at first seem like a throw-away sight-gag, but honestly, Pacific Rim takes Jaegers, and, by extension, their elbow rockets, seriously and you should too. They are trying to cancel the apocalypse and you need to get on board.

In this way, Pacific Rim doesn’t just make sure you get invested in the movie’s characters, robots, monsters and endlessly goofy dialogue; it makes sure you respect it.

And honestly, as much as I’ve been playing up the more outlandish parts of Pacific Rim’s premise, it’s hard not to respect the truly weighty and revolutionary ideas that Pacific Rim contends with. Its central conceit shows every nation banding together to save the world in a utopian vision of internationalism and global co-operation. Its puppy dog-like characters love each other with all their heart seemingly from the second they meet, truly trusting each other with theirs lives and innermost self. Its Jaegers are literally powered by emotional understanding and compassion between human beings. Every part of Pacific Rim expounds a far too rare faith in humanity’s potential for positivity, idealism and empathy.

In a movie ostensibly about revelling in the apocalypse, Pacific Rim was, in actual fact, creating a utopia by showing us how humanity’s fundamental goodness could save the world. So needless to say, it is deeply disappointing to find that these things that made Pacific Rim so memorable and, dare I say, important, have been abandoned by the sequel.

The most obvious change is, unsurprisingly, the visual style, as the rainbow extravaganza of Pacific Rim is traded in for the grim, muted greys of reality. To be fair, Pacific Rim Uprising is not entirely devoid of colour, but it isn’t soaking in it like the first film.

In the scheme of things, it’s not a devastating loss, but it is indicative of Pacific Rim Uprising’s biggest problem: its decision to trade in the flavour and uniqueness of Pacific Rim for the bland, the generic and the safe.

Thematically, the internationalism of the first movie is still present implicitly in the diversity of its cast, but the unique positivity and unabashed idealism of the first film has been abandoned. Ideas of empathy and interpersonal relationships are inextricably woven into the premise of Pacific Rim, but these elements never really congeal into any coherent message or ideology; it has lost the unique voice and lofty ambitions of Pacific Rim, so it never feels like Pacific Rim Uprising is trying to say anything other than ‘friendship is good’ and ‘let’s save the world’.

Tonally, the child-like sincerity and self-respect of Pacific Rim has been replaced by generic snark and detached “edgy” humour. Mostly, this tonal shift is just boring and predictable – scenes play out emotionally like you’d expect, characters react with defensive sarcasm and contempt, the humour is crude and forgettable. It plays like a typical, middle of the road blockbuster, content in its mediocrity.

To be fair, it doesn’t not work, it mostly just exists, but it also leads to some bewilderingly bad choices when it comes to humour, especially when it involves the younger members of the cast. A joke about a cadet’s plastic surgeon father goes on for far too long and somehow, in 2018, the triumphant blast off for battle is accompanied by, of all things, the Trololol song.

That’s not to say all the sincerity or joy has been lost – a scene where the team bands together to rebuild their Jaegers hits the right blend of cheesy and awesome, and Jake and Amara’s bond is, at times, quite sweet but in the context of such a snide movie, these glimpses of sincerity seem awkward and unnatural.

Let me put it this way. In Uprising, a Jaeger, the awe-inspiring feat of human ingenuity and mechanical embodiment of empathy and co-operation, flips a kaiju the bird. This is the what Pacific Rim is now.

It’s appropriate that Pacific Rim Uprising shifts the focus to a younger generation of cadets, because Uprising kind of reminds me of being a teenager. It wants so badly to be detached and cool, but it’s far too desperate and unsure of itself to ever truly be considered ‘hip’; it embodies that awkward teenage posturing we all thankfully escape in adulthood. Contrastingly, Pacific Rim exudes the confidence of an adult, secure in their interests and themselves, and in that, effortlessly achieves the coolness Pacific Rim Uprising so desperately seeks.

By now, I think I’ve made it clear that Pacific Rim Uprising is pretty bad, but the thing is, I actually do think there’s some good in here!

But before I get into that, we need to once again, return to the original Pacific Rim, because I haven’t been entirely honest in my assessment. Though my glowing praise at the beginning of this review may suggest an intense, fangirl-ish love of Pacific Rim, in all honesty, I actually don’t like it that much. I appreciate it, I respect it, and I do enjoy parts of it, but there are fundamental flaws that prevent me from truly loving it, specifically, character and plot.

When it comes to Pacific Rim’s characters, the word patchy once again comes to mind. There is some genuinely strong character work in this movie - Mako Mori was rightfully praised at the time for being a well-rounded and interesting female character with a character arc separate from the men around her – and then there is some bafflingly incompetent character work, namely, Raleigh, the protagonist of the film, is fundamentally uninteresting.

Part of this can be attributed to the dearth of charisma that is Charlie Hunnam who seems unable to imbue Raleigh with any emotional depth, but even setting this bland performance aside, Raleigh just feels like countless other mediocre male leads. He’s got a tragic backstory related to a dead family member that he still hasn’t gotten over and he needs to learn to let someone else into his heart before he can save the world; I’ve seen this plot in most uninspired video games.

But to be fair, just because this setup is cliché doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been interesting; Pacific Rim is, in many aspects, an example of this, elevating classic genre tropes through thoughtful execution and smart, progressive additions.

This only makes it more perplexing that Raleigh remains so conventional, with no real twist or update. Even the most interesting part of his character arc, that is, the difficulty of reconnecting emotionally with others after a loss, falls flat since Raleigh never seems to struggle with this. Once he agrees to re-join the Jaeger program and meets Mako, he instantly accepts her as his co-pilot and his arc is resolved.

This emotional hollowness also impacts Pacific Rim’s greater plot issues. Pacific Rim’s plot is mostly passable, with a straightforward story propped up by the novelty of the premise and world. However, Guillermo del Toro seems to be aware that to make Pacific Rim great, he can’t just rely on the inherent coolness of giant robots and monsters fighting. To this end, he has intentionally foregrounded human relationships in the very premise of the film with the idea of an intense, emotional connection required for Jaeger co-pilots to control their mech – its ingenious really! But that only makes it more disappointing and bizarre that Raleigh’s arc is so devoid of emotional depth. This setup for emotional conflict never really pays off past the halfway point of the film, with next to no internal conflict between Mako and Raleigh after they drift together. They face external threats of course, like Kaiju, Stacker and an angry Australian, but there is no conflict between our main characters.

That’s not to say there is no emotional conflict in this movie; Mako struggles to reconcile her respect for her adopted father with her need to define her own destiny and avenge her family’s death. But as amazing as Mako is, she isn’t the main character. We’re stuck with Raleigh, a bland, white man who is the hero despite the fact that his female co-star is so much more compelling and, well, heroic.

The other threads in the film are similarly hit or miss. Idris Elba kills it as Stacker Pentecost but the Australian Jaeger pilots are mostly annoying and the resolution to Yancy’s arc is perfunctory and unearned. I honestly loved Newton and Hermann but many people found them grating, and the other secondary characters, while memorable, remain fairly flat, sketched out in broad strokes rather than elaborated upon with depth or nuance.

I still think Pacific Rim is a great, nay, important movie, but I also think we must acknowledge where great movies go wrong and, conversely, where terrible movie go (somewhat) right, or perhaps more accurately, go wrong again but in a slightly different direction.

?) Thus, we once more return to Pacific Rim Uprising. In regards to the film’s protagonist, Raleigh has been cast aside and traded in for a newer model in the form of John Boyega as Jake Pentecost, which, unsurprisingly, is a good decision. As a character, Jake isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but there are a few things that elevate him above his archetypal beginnings. John Boyega’s performance makes a huge difference. Unlike Charlie Hunnam, he has genuine screen presence and acting skills to boot, imbuing what could be a flat, cliché role with character and vivacity - he is a speck of salt in an otherwise bland and flavourless movie.

But to give props where its due, Jake’s arc is just better constructed than Raleigh. Thematically, Jake has more going on than Raleigh; he starts off as a party boy avoiding responsibility to both his family and the world and learns how to move past his father and sister’s death and become the leader the world needs. Already, it’s a stronger base for a character than Raleigh’s, but what really makes Jake work is how he genuinely struggles with what path he should take; he tries and fails, he makes mistakes, he grows, and because of this, when he finally gets his heroic moment as both a leader and a surrogate brother to Amara, it feels earned and makes the earlier struggles actually mean something.

Did I just praise Pacific Rim Uprising? Well, don’t get used to it, because, like its predecessor, Pacific Rim Uprising can’t seem to get a handle on its ensemble. This leads me to the worst part of the movie: the cadets.

The cadet plot line didn’t have to be bad. On a meta-textual level, it makes sense – just as the cadets are aspiring to take over from an older generation of Jaeger pilots, so too is Uprising is taking on the mantle of the original Pacific Rim. On a more basic level, who doesn’t like stories with training montages and burgeoning camaraderie?

But even the most basic elements of character development are absent from Uprising. The cadets have screen time, they appear in scenes and they say things, yet it is all done with no greater purpose or pay-off. For Generic Teens, 1 through 6 (i can’t remember their names and I refuse to look them up), they remain half-baked, under-developed and pointless.

The cadet storyline needed not just re-writing, but some actual writing, because if the filmmakers don’t care about the cadets, why should I? In the end, the only real function the cadets have is to be an attentive audience for John Boyega when he delivers his Pentecost brand inspirational speech.

But as angry as the mishandling of the cadets makes me, I am only saddened by the film’s mistreatment of their female characters.

Pacific Rim was a feminist film with some caveats: while Mako became a minor feminist icon because of the (sadly) uncommon amount of respect and care given to her arc, she was still the only female character in an otherwise a male-dominated film.

One might think then, that Pacific Rim Uprising, with its noticeable increase in female characters, could challenge the first movie on the feminist front, but apart from Amara (who is fine), every female character is under-served and disrespected.

The most cursory and useless of them all is the ‘character’ Jules. I’ve put quotation marks around ‘character’ because her only character trait is ‘happens to be into Nate’. You see, the filmmakers wanted some sexual tension, along with some bro-conflict between the two male leads but they didn’t want to go to the bother of writing an actual character for these bros to lust after. So they didn’t. You could edit her out of the movie and lose nothing. It is unacceptable to so callously write a woman like this.

They do better with Shao, the imperious and imposing head of Shao Industries. She works well as a fake out villain, but when she takes a more active role in the third act, she is denied the development and screen time needed to make me truly invested in her. Yes, it’s a cool moment when she pilots Scrapper and saves our heroes, but her appearance is more of a convenience than any culmination for her character.

But what of Mako aka the best character in the whole franchise? Mako returns for a bit as Jake’s older sister and shines as the new boss of the PPDC, before being killed off in the first act. Mako, a character who was never defined by the men around her, has been reduced to fodder for male character development. Need I say more?

I can’t help but imagine what could have been if Mako hadn’t been fridged, and she’d been the one to pilot Scrapper and save her brother and Amara’s life in the climax – what a moment that would have been! Or, if not this, imagine if they had truly fleshed out Shao as a character with an arc. Or, why not simply have two Asian female leads treated with respect they deserve? But maybe I’m being unrealistic (if it’s not clear, this angry sarcasm).

But despite these numerous flaws, I still really enjoy this movie, if only because, unlike the first movie, I was never bored by the story.

Pacific Rim had a great world and premise, but its plot was too straightforward and predictable. Pacific Rim Uprising, by comparison, has a sense of mystery and several reveals that genuinely surprised me. As much as I bemoaned Uprising’s generic tone, for most of the film, I really had no idea where it was going, and that’s not something to be dismissed.

Admittedly, Uprising’s success in this realm is indebted to the original Pacific Rim and the skill with which Guillermo del Toro built its world. It’s because of this strong foundation that Uprising is able to take this franchise into new and bold places, expanding on the world of Pacific Rim in exciting ways, like all good sequels should! We get to see how the Jaeger program proceeds after the threat has seemingly disappeared, as well as new drone tech looking to supersede a human workforce, the repercussions of human-kaiju drifting and kaiju-jaeger hybrids! This is all fascinating stuff and I’m actually getting excited just thinking about it. It reminds me of why I was so desperate for a sequel in the first place.

Yes, most of it is handled clumsily and it’s still plagued by character and tone issues, but the core ideas and worldbuilding are strong enough that it still made the film worth watching. And sometimes, you even get glimpses of a good movie in there; seeing the effect of kaiju-drifting on Newton, the reveal of Alice and how his and Hermann’s relationship had changed, was so satisfying and well-done it shocked me (I’ll stop here before I start fangirling about Newmann).

This is all supported by some stellar action scenes. Earlier, I bemoaned the loss of Pacific Rim’s rainbow colour scheme, but to the film’s credit, what it sacrifices in visual innovation, it makes up for in clarity and thrills. The fights are faster, the monsters are bigger and every Jaeger has a sword. Like all good action sequels, Uprising ups the scale, the spectacle and the challenge, and lives up to the inherent coolness of watching two giant things fight each other.

There’s a scene in Pacific Rim Uprising, just before the final battle, where the Jaeger pilots and cadets combine broken parts of various mechs in order to build a working Jaeger to fight with. In the film, it’s a triumphant moment, but it’s also the perfect metaphor for Pacific Rim Uprising: it’s a mess of a movie made with broken and disparate parts, that may function, but not as a cohesive whole. Many choices are bad. Some choices are different. Some choices are good. It is the definition of a mixed bag.

But honestly, at the end of the day, I’m still left with a smile on my face, and an eager, grabby hand reaching back into that mixed bag for more.

I hope they make a sequel

(but Uprising bombed at the box office so...)