I remember that when I saw Iron Man I did not expect much (and was not surprised there), with Iron Man 2 making an even less favorable impression (though I think that opinion was more widely shared).
I was more optimistic watching Thor, partly because of the involvement of Kenneth Branagh and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski.
The result was that where Iron Man lived down to my expectations, Thor was a disappointment.
In fairness the film worked well enough as CGI-packed action movie spectacle.
The problem arose when it tried to be something else--to tell a story of the Arrogant Prince who Needed to Find a Heart, in which of course a romantic subplot would feature, while we also got a Fish-Out-of-Water comedy about an alien on Earth. Alas, it all fell flat for me, with the Earthbound middle act on the whole being of the same quality as those movies from the Asylum that SyFy would screen on Saturday nights back then. And when the music surged at the close over the shots of the starcrossed lovers--well, it was a reminder of where the term "melodrama" came from, a show that relies on the music to make us feel what the drama was supposed to make us feel (but didn't).
It was a reminder, too, of the perils of action movies trying to interest us in their characters "because that's what storytellers are supposed to do" when the characters really aren't that interesting--and indeed, it seems to me that Hiram Lee was broadly right when he said that "Branagh and his collaborators" took the tale "far too seriously" as they produced a film that, whatever the talents of those involved and the good intentions they may have had, was "so thin, one can almost see through it."
In fact Thor: The Dark World, for all its limitations, struck me as a significant improvement over the original as, if nothing else, mindless entertainment.
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The first two Thor films were among the last superhero films I saw, and I thought they were fucking boring. Among the superheroes I knew about, only Iron Man had a personality, the others were all bland.
Hello again! And thanks for writing.
Certainly superhero stories are not usually the place to go for character drama--especially outside of the work of someone like Alan Moore (though in fairness, he is usually subverting the superhero story, rather than writing conventional superhero stories, and anyway never has anything good to say about the movies made from them). I think that an Iron Man is an exception in having a personality itself says something--basically they copied the cult of the "tech billionaire" and attached it to the character, the "bag of tricks" at their disposal limited to a maneuver like that.
Incidentally, you say the first two Thor films were among the last you saw. Was there some movie after them that made you say "That's it, I'm done"?
So it was Avengers, then I didn't see any superhero movies, then I saw Wonder Woman and that was it. So it was in 2017 when I completely lost interest rather than decide "that's it, I'm done".
In 2020, I watched Watchmen, the 2009 film, just because I was told that it's different, but that's it. Now you'd have to pay me a lot to sit through a superhero movie lol.
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