Loki’s face is a mixture of fear and HOPEFULNESS. Thor has been exhibiting surly disregard ever since their return to Asgard. Now at last, he’s touching Loki, looking DIRECTLY into his FACE, and TAKING HIM SERIOUSLY. Classic “negative attention is preferable to no attention.” Since Odin conditioned Thor and Loki to be helplessly codependent, in a scenario in which Loki is fated to be thought the “bad” and “losing” half of a dichotomy, Loki has decided in THOR’S CASE ALONE, it is worth being the bad guy to not be forgotten utterly. Better to be hated than erased, even in a dysfunctional relationship.
Look how goddamn eager his face is. “Yes hit me, rage at me. Anything, I’ve finally got your attention again.”
And not an ounce of that is manipulation. it’s desperation.
Nope, not bothering me, and I will get to your other question eventually…
The reason I don’t talk much about Alan Taylor is because I don’t really think of him as an artist with a distinctive voice or vision, the way Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon, and Taika Waititi are. That might be unfair to him, but I only really know him as one of a rotating cast of directors on Game of Thrones, where the writer and the director are almost always different people, and the “voice” of the series, if there is one, belongs either to George R.R. Martin or to Benioff & Weiss (especially in the last season… what a mess of disappointing clichés).
Now, it’s also true that the writer and the director of Thor 1 and Thor: Ragnarok were separate people: Thor 1 was written by Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz; Ragnarok was, in theory, written by Eric Pearson. However, by all accounts TR was about 80% “improvised,” which is to say, Taika Waititi suggested/shouted things to say instead of what was in the script… and Jeff Goldblum came up with his own shit. One of the more egregious examples of directorial departure from the original screenplay appears to be the infamous bit where Loki plans to betray Thor to the Grandmaster and then Thor outsmarts him by putting the obedience disk on him, gives him a smug little lecture about growth and change while he’s convulsing in pain, and then leaves him there incapacitated and defenseless (which I still think is unbelievably cruel, negligent of Loki’s safety, and OOC). According to people who have read the novel version (which I haven’t but maybe should) – @whitedaydream might be the person I got this from, or @lucianalight – that entire sequence was completely absent from the novelization. And we seem to have some evidence that they filmed a version without it: in some of the trailers: Loki shows up on the Bifrost with the rest of the Revengers rather than arriving later with the big ship. So even if the outlines of the plot were provided by Eric Pearson’s screenplay, the tone and character of the movie – its “humor,” if you liked it, or its soulless flippancy and cruelty (to both characters and fans), if you didn’t – indubitably came from Taika Waititi.
Thor 1 adhered more closely to the screenplay – which is available on IMSDb, if you’re interested – so I consider Miller & Stentz to have more of a role in its creative vision than Pearson did with TR. Stentz has even commented on Twitter about the theme of internalized racism; and that writing team also did X-Men: First Class, in which you can see some of the same themes and also the (totally unintentional…?) homoerotic tension between the two main male characters. That said, you can definitely see Kenneth Branagh’s distinctively Shakespearean sensibility in the way some of the important confrontations are presented – and that’s a major part of what gives that movie its overall tone and emotional power. (Also, as this post notes, Branagh & Hiddleston made some notable departures from the acting instructions in the screenplay that contributed to its tragic and also gay-incestuous vibe.)
The Dark World, as much as I loved it for its Thorki fic realness and ANGST, was kind of a creative mess. Patty Jenkins was supposed to direct it, but then backed out for reasons I’m not completely clear on, and Alan Taylor was brought in kind of last-minute. The screenplay was mostly written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, who wrote the Captain America movies, Infinity War, and Avengers 4, and whom I am fond of calling dimwitted hacks because that’s what they are. (The First Avenger was fine; The Winter Soldier is massively overrated and frankly kind of boring and confusing IMO; Civil War was a disaster of muddled, unsympathetic characterization and missed opportunities for interesting philosophical exploration; Infinity War was similarly disastrous, and showed us exactly why dimwitted hacks should not be attempting to explore philosophical issues.) I say “mostly” because Joss Whedon was brought in as a script doctor (one of his original jobs in Hollywood) to rewrite some scenes that weren’t working, including an “emotional” scene between Thor and Jane (not sure which one), the notorious Thorki bro-boat scene (and you can definitely see the hallmarks of his writing in that one), and Loki’s shapeshifting scene. Loki’s trial scene at the beginning was also a late addition, inspired by a TDW prelude comic; I honestly don’t know who wrote that scene, but the comic seems to have been written by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. The upshot is that TDW was most definitely a horse designed by committee, so it’s hard to identify whose creative vision it was expressing. I can identify Alan Taylor’s influence in the dark, grungy Game of Thrones-esque aesthetic, but I’m not sure where else to find him.
Ugh this kills me because it looks like up until this point Loki still considered himself Loki Odinson. I think in his mind it was much preferable to be Loki, son of Odin, revered leader of the Nine Realms than Loki, son of Laufey, frost giant and monster.
So basically Odin is not only denouncing him but calling (and confirming in his mind) him a monster as well.
AND ODIN TAKES AWAY HIS MOMMA TOO! Marvel you better not mess with Frigga or I swear I’m gonna flay someone one!
Oh shit… this is the prelude comic that got turned into the first scene of TDW. I don’t think I’d ever actually read it. This version of Odin is so much worse than what we saw in the movie, which was pretty fucking bad.
I thought it was established that it was actually squashed-currant juice on his foot, @nuggsmum …
I know.
I just want to be his nurse. I neeeeed to nurse this dramatic fuck back to health.
Fruit or not.
Why must all you people ruin my dreams.
He definitely has emotional wounds there. You can do like Jesus and wash his feet.
More like this.
….wasn’t it supposed to be blood on his foot? I thought the berries were added in post production because the thought of displaying any wound that close to the pain of stepping on a lego was just. too. graphic.
I’d also heard that the berries were added because there’s a limit to how much blood you can show in a PG-13 movie. Not that it’s a lot of blood, but… they were using their blood allowance for other things, I guess, and the strong suggestion of at least negligent self-harm might have been too much.
I don’t accept the berries. Han shot first and that’s blood on Loki’s foot from stepping on broken glass and/or shards of furniture.
Kevin Feige:“The scene with Loki in chains being led towards Odin at the beginning of the movie was one of the additional photography scenes, and it actually came about for a couple of reasons. I was reading the tie-in comic and they had that scene in it. I get all the comics when they’re published – I flip through some of them, and I was flipping through that one and I went, ‘Holy crap – this has got to be in the movie!’ It’s slightly different in the comic than it is in the movie, but I thought this has to be in the movie. So I called Tom [Hiddleston] and we talked about his availability, and we said we were gonna do this scene. So he goes, ‘Remember, I pitched you that scene. Months ago!’ Well, I did not remember, but I believed him, and I’m happy for him to take credit for it because he does an amazing job in the movie.” [x]
Tom always ahead of them lol
Yes! Proof that he is smarter and more talented than them and has the perfect understanding of his character and Marvel didn’t deserve him.
Proof both that TH knows his character better than anyone else and that Marvel doesn’t give a shit and never had. They HAD a perfect villain, who was perfect precisely because he wasn’t a villain and because he was relatable and complex and people loved him. But they decided that since maybe Loki had a bit too many female fans and looked a little bit effeminate and wasn’t much of a heavy muscly hitter and used brains instead of force… That maybe he had cooties, you know, so better let him go or Marvel’s masculinity would be questioned or something. So they squandered a perfectly rich and nuanced character in favor of a muscly, gigantic and overpowered New Awesome Villain ™ with the most laughable and forced Moral Dilemma ™ ever that would totally appeal to the target adolescent male audience and pushed him down everybody’s throats.
Thanks for nothing, Feige. Your intelligence is on the same level as that of the adolescents you’re trying to woo, except they’ll grow and wise up and you… Well… won’t.
Kevin Feige:“The scene with Loki in chains being led towards Odin at the beginning of the movie was one of the additional photography scenes, and it actually came about for a couple of reasons. I was reading the tie-in comic and they had that scene in it. I get all the comics when they’re published – I flip through some of them, and I was flipping through that one and I went, ‘Holy crap – this has got to be in the movie!’ It’s slightly different in the comic than it is in the movie, but I thought this has to be in the movie. So I called Tom [Hiddleston] and we talked about his availability, and we said we were gonna do this scene. So he goes, ‘Remember, I pitched you that scene. Months ago!’ Well, I did not remember, but I believed him, and I’m happy for him to take credit for it because he does an amazing job in the movie.” [x]
Tom always ahead of them lol
Yes! Proof that he is smarter and more talented than them and has the perfect understanding of his character and Marvel didn’t deserve him.
I know the collective fandom likes to pretend like Ragnarok was the ‘pièce de résistance’, of the Thor movies, especially in regards to Loki’s characterization and Loki and Thor’s relationship, but aside from my numerous grievances with that movie….
None of Loki’s ‘heroics’ or loyalty or anything being praised as ‘amazing character development from Ragnarok’ is new, and it was NOT Ragnarok that brought it about or first proved its existence.
It was Thor: The Dark World
Yes. Does anyone remember the movie where:
– Loki agreed to help Thor attempt to save the world with no other reward than a supposed ‘revenge’ for their mother’s death (which Thor did not intend on giving him; see “You fool, you fool, you didn’t listen.” when Loki interfered with Kurse/Thor) and return to eternal imprisonment? (”Vengeance… then afterward this cell.”)
– Loki saved Jane from a void bomb and almost got himself killed in the process. Something he was not beholden to do, and could have passed off easily as inevitable or unavoidable if he was evul.
– Loki saved Thor’s life, and almost ‘died’ in the process (which cannot be disproved, since if we want to hold Ragnarok up as the gold standard, it went out of the way to prove that Loki’s illusions cannot be touch/can have things thrown through them, so no. Kurse could only have stabbed Loki and Loki alone).
– Loki did not betray Thor (You might say, “He took the throne!!! And deposed Odin!!!”. Oh. You mean the throne Thor was avoiding and refused entirely by his own volition? And deposed Odin, who… told the guards to stop Thor ‘by any means necessary’ leading them to shoot at him i.e. stop Thor, even if you have to kill him. Odin, who would have done exactly as Thor said, “Failure will mean our deaths; success will mean exile”, and either exiled Thor again or executed him, in light of the fact Odin would have executed Loki if not for Frigga and told the guards they were ok to kill Thor?)
Yeah. That was all… Thor: TDW. That movie where Loki loved his mother, and cared enough about Odin to still be hurt by his rejection and try to show Odin the hypocrisy of the situation with, “I went down to earth as a benevolent god…. just like you.”
Yep. The movie where Loki called Thor ‘brother’ throughout the whole film, and saved his girlfriend, and saved Thor?
Ragnarok was a crack fic written by someone whose only knowledge of the franchise came from memes they found on Reddit. That’s my new headcanon.
Loki is the Philosopher King 