There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people. To see if we could become something more. So when they needed us, we could fight the battles that they never could.
WTF?? Who finds Bodhi’s death satisfying? I loved that guy! I loved the entire Rogue One crew, but he was an especially interesting character because he figured out that what he had been doing was wrong. It takes much more strength to change your mind about something, to admit that you were wrong, than to keep going in a path you were always on. That doesn’t mean that previous wrongdoing should be forgotten, of course, but it has to be viewed in the context of the arc as a whole. And penance through death is a lot less valuable than penance through difficult right action, through saving lives and undermining evil. That’s what atones; that’s what tips the balance. Death does jack shit.
People who want Finn to die have just got to be stupid. He was pretty clearly brainwashed from an early age; we see his first deployment in Episode VII, right? When would he even have had a chance to defect before? Do people think he enlisted? He didn’t even have a name, FFS. He was bred to be a soldier.
Pietro Maximoff did die; isn’t that penance enough? Anyway, their story is presented as complicated and morally gray; we’re not supposed to completely blame them even while they’re still allied with Ultron. Of course, I get that a lot of people don’t see moral gray. I’m really not sure what to say to them; it’s useless describing colors to the colorblind.
Hi Anon, are you here to join the club of racists (apparently) who don’t understand why we’re supposed to like Taika Waititi’s interpretation of Thor? Welcome!
Honestly, I think the best thing you can do is to watch the other movies if you haven’t. In the first movie, Thor starts out as an arrogant warrior who loves to fight and thinks violence is the solution to every problem, but his father strips him of his powers and banishes him to Earth to learn humility. Aside from the arrogance and eagerness to fight, he’s very loyal to his friends and he has a gallantry about him… well, he’s representative of an ancient warrior culture, really. He loves to fight and feast and flirt; he’s a bit bombastic, but has a sense of chivalry; he picks on little bro Loki sometimes, he can be a bit of a jock/bully, but he loves and trusts Loki (more than he should) and isn’t willing to give up on him even when he’s descended into madness and is doing horrible things.
Thor tells the story of Thor’s maturation into a more patient and self-sacrificing person, and he continues that process of maturation through the other movies we see him in: The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. He’s still a little too ready to solve problems by hitting things in The Avengers, still a little arrogant and Homeric-warrior-bro (he’s Achilles, basically), but he’s getting better, learning how to be more of a team player. In TDW and AOU he becomes progressively more serious and thoughtful, largely because terrible things keep happening in his life… he still has a sly sense of humor, and he spends much of AOU subtly trolling the human Avengers, but he’s also become very canny and perceptive.
Ragnarok just gave him a complete personality makeover with almost no regard for the way he’d been portrayed before. He was never that inarticulate – the Asgardians used to speak in an elevated, slightly archaic register, the way they do in the comics – and he was never as… mean as he is in Ragnarok. I mean, he’s a bit of a douche in Thor, but the point was that he got better.
i can’t believe thor wearing arm guards with loki’s helmet on them in avengers AND thor having a strand of loki’s hair braided into his own hair in age of ultron are both real things that the costume department did and loki in ragnarok still has the gall to ask poor thor “did you mourn me?” like yes loki you made your jock brother so sad that he started accessorizing
@redwoodriver @agent0hio the receipts. the hair I thought at first was jane’s but in other shots it’s 100% black and silky lookin….. like hey marvel? I just wanna talk. i just wanna talk
The thing is that unless these details are explained to the audience within the film, they might as well not have existed. Just like J.K. Rowling announcing to an audience at Carnegie Hall that Dumbledore was gay, but not mentioning it in the book that had just been published, it makes no impact on the way viewers interpret the film. And. unless the MCU makes the significance of these costume details explicit, it’s going to remain questionable as to whether Thor did these things in memory of Loki, or whether they’re immaterial as far as the films are concerned.
That’s not really the same thing. There is no textual evidence for Dumbledore’s sexuality, just Jo’s word.
The costume IS the textual evidence in Thor, it’s not announced but it is part of the text. My high school English teacher would allow me to use the armour and the braid as evidence in an essay, there is no evidence in the text for Dumbledore.
Small details are important in film, tiny things that aren’t necessary to the plot but if noticed enhance it are called World Building, your Dumbledore example is a lack of World Building
The gauntlets are indisputably a tribute to Loki; the hair thing is less clear. I saw someone speculating that it’s probably just a black ribbon, in which case it could be a sign of mourning for both Frigga and Loki. If it’s Loki’s hair… well.
I don’t see much discussion about Fury’s conversation with Tony in Age of Ultron, which I think cements Fury as the closest thing to a positive father figure in Tony’s life. After Fury chews him out for inventing Ultron, he tries to pull Tony out of the lowest point in the movie. So Tony pours all of his regret and fears into the last sympathizing ear left in what I think is a very vulnerable and well-done scene for Tony’s character arc.
Tony:You’re not the director of me. Fury: I’m not the director of anybody. I’m just an old man who cares very much about you. Tony:And I’m the man who killed the Avengers.
Tony: I saw it. I didn’t tell the team. How could I? I saw them all dead, Nick. I felt it. The whole world too. Because of me. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t do all I could.
Fury: The Maximoff girl, she’s working you, Stark. Playing on your fear. Tony: I wasn’t tricked, I was shown. Wasn’t a nightmare, it was my legacy. The end of the path I started us on.
Fury: You come up with some pretty impressive inventions, Tony. War isn’t one of them. Tony: I watched my friends die. You’d think that’d be as bad as it gets, right? Nope. It wasn’t the worst part. Fury: The worst part is that you didn’t.
Fury understands who Tony truly is. He knows where to cut through the evasive bullshit and get to the meat of Tony’s insecurities and foibles, but not to cut him down – to raise him back up. And most of all, he’s an old man that cares very much about him.
In some ways, but not as much as I feared. Actually, what I was really afraid of was that they would turn Thor into Kevin from Ghostbusters, or he would be the version of Thor we saw in the “Thor: Civil War” video. I was incredibly relieved to see that the stupid line in one of the trailers about Thor having more brains because he has more muscles did not make it into the movie.
The filmmakers were clearly aware of the possibility that Thor would come off as anachronistic and/or Tony Stark-like; Taika Waititi even said in an interview that Thor’s change in diction and demeanor could be explained by his having spent more time on Earth hanging out with Tony Stark and learning about sarcasm. There was room for some movement in that direction, but I think they went too far with it. Thor has shown a sense of humor in earlier movies, most notably in the scene in TDW where he and Loki commandeer the Dark Elf ship with a lot of brotherly bickering, but also in Age of Ultron. There’s a post that I’ve seen going around occasionally with all the instances of Thor “trolling” people in AOU; I think the “I am Thor son of Odin, and as long as I have life in my breast I am… running out of things to say” bit is the most memorable. But it was always kind of an understated humor.
I’ve seen some people saying that they see some of the character change as a reversion to the brash, cocky warrior-prince of the first Thor movie, but with more cunning and caution and a better sense of proportion. I guess I can see that, and I can sort of see how that might have happened as he gained some distance from the traumatic events that turned him into the grave, almost world-weary figure he presented in TDW and AOU… but again, I think they went too far in that direction. I’m trying to stay mostly positive about the movie, because for the most part I did like it, and it was not nearly as much of a travesty of the characters as I was afraid it might be. But yeah, I’ll admit to finding the abrupt character transformation somewhat jarring.
no i know what i want from my mister tony “have i not been warning you about space threats for years” stark
i want a Passive Aggressive comment. like i want *THAT* type of passive aggressive comment that’s been entrenched and rotting inside you for years and when it finally comes out it just slices right through people the way a paper cut does, it seems small and inconsequential but by god the sting comes eventually and it s t a y s
[deadpans while focusing on a screen] “guess at this point we might as well just die together”
[someone asks alien-related question] [tony immediately answers, flatly, from across the room] [everyone looks]
[maria hill:] so, was it last night that you became an expert in intergalactic diplomacy [tony stark:] about six years ago
[pulls out multiple anti-alien contingencies he’s put together for the team]
[someone:] you’ve been busy huh? what is this [tony stark:] [squints, as if trying to remember the name] six years of stuff no one helped me with. anyway
“I can’t believe we’re going against aliens again.”
“Yeah, me either,” Tony deadpans, straight into the camera. “It’s almost like we had this whole argument about threats in the future and I mean maybe someone said something.”
Loki is the Philosopher King 