Colette Arrand

Tag: Chris Hemsworth

  • Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    Avengers

    I remember spending a lot of time in my local library as a kid. It was close, within safe walking distance from my house, and beyond a few people who hung out and read magazines they didn’t want to subscribe to, it was just me, the librarians, and a whole lot of books. Browsing the stacks one day, I found these gigantic treasury editions of 60s and 70s Marvel Comics, which I checked out and read every week for three years. My favorite of them was Marvel’s Greatest Superhero Battles, its cover promising an epic clash between The Hulk and The Thing, my two favorite characters in the yet cinematically undiscovered country that was the Marvel Universe. This was the 1990s, and, say what you will about Stan Lee, but the way he wrote his superheroes (and the way Jack Kirby, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buschema, and John Romita (among others) drew them) still had a way of speaking that appealed directly to this very particular sense of selfhood I was developing. Bruce Banner was a quiet man, Benjamin Grimm a soft-hearted lunk. One wanted to be left alone. The other was doomed to be forever unhappy with his body. I got that. I identified with it. And, sealed away in these treasury books, they belonged to a world that only I had access to.

    Had you told nine-year-old me that The Hulk would be a cornerstone of one of the world’s most successful film franches—man, I don’t even know. 27-year-old me can hardly believe it, and I have lived experience of summers spent in multiplexes that weren’t showing a superhero of some kind. Sitting in the dark waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to start, there were three trailers for upcoming superhero films, and I was late. The next in Disney’s Avengers sequence, Ant-Man, is coming out in July. We barely get a month to rest up between episodes now, such is the cultural demand for city-destroying bacchanalia. I was tired. I was restless. I wanted to shove nine-year-old me into a locker for liking this stuff. And when the film started, I was largely still exhausted. Joss Whedon’s latest venture into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is overstuffed and overlong, struggling to contain itself, even at two-hours and 20-minutes. A lot of the bloat, at this point, must be attributed to the fact that an Avengers movie isn’t just a movie—it’s part of a cycle, and, as such, is part of a feedback loop that looks back as far as 2008 and looks forward as far as the heat death of the universe. Around that, Whedon, admirably, is going for something more here than in Avengers. Meglomaniacs get smashed-up real good and the physical and psychic trauma of 9/11 is exported to a countries real and imaginary, but it’s clear at this point that Whedon is most in his element when the world is quiet and his team has divested itself of their spandex.

    Then, he can get down to the real meat of Marvel Comics, which is that beneath the spectacle and muscle, superheroes are really just damaged human beings who are very uncomfortable with their bodies. This has been a sub-plot of most MCU films for awhile now, the whole “He’s just a man, but I’ve got an army!” deal, but Whedon’s script ventures beyond that, ruminating on the fallibility of flesh. His villain, Ultron (James Spader), a malevolent, sassy robot whose AI bears a striking resemblance to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), sees the body as a necessary step forward in his evolution. Stark knows he will die, leaving his project of world peace unfinished. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is just a regular dude with a bow and arrow. Captain America (Chris Evans) is still acclimating to a world where most of his friends have died. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is doomed to be ashamed of his monstrous, green alter-ego, and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) has a past that involves bodily disfiguration. Where a villain like Ultron (or Loki, or the assembled horde of Hydra bad guys, or men in knock-off Iron Man gear) see this as the team’s weakness, it’s the axis upon which the whole thing spins—there aren’t many people who could understand their individual circumstances, but they’re all here in a room together, drunkenly trying to lift the hammer that lets Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lay claim to the throne of Asgard.

    But at this point, it’s not enough to truly satisfy. MCU films are, like a hang-out sitcom, an excuse to sit around and chuckle with a group of favorite characters, mind turned off. Battle sequences are well-executed, if perfunctory and consequence free. If you don’t check in on Marvel’s televised output, it’d be easy to assume that the fallout from any given fight is a paycheck from the Stark Relief Fund (which, man, that name) and a new life in a city that maybe won’t host a rampaging Hulk. I feel like complaining about the lack of stakes after eleven Marvel films, far from being a fruitless endeavor, reveals something about the limits of popcorn filmmaking, or at least the men responsible for making them. The Avengers: Age of Ultron can be nitpicked to death or praised for things that happen or are imagined to have happened at its fringes, but at heart this is a big, dumb action movie trying a little too hard to sound smart. This, in general, works for me. I am, if anything, overly enthusiastic about The Fast and the Furious‘ focus on makeshift chosen families, and am still fascinated with The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises‘ attempt and failure to engage with philosophical theory and political science. Whedon does the same here, toying with ideas of fatherhood, Catholicism, and ruined women, but all too frequently it feels like he’s wrestling a Wikipedia page and not the idea itself. The drama will continue in the next wave of Avengers movies, we’re promised, but just once I’d like to see a Marvel movie that is a movie first, rather than an advertisement for an upcoming slate. I’d like something real to chew on. I’d like to go home not dreading the prospect that, someday soon, it will not be enough for a comic book movie to merely entertain me for three hours. Like the villains of these pieces so frequently say, it’s time to evolve. If only the folks behind the camera were listening.

     

    The Avengers: Age of Ultron. With Robert Downey, Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Quicksilver), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), James Spader (Ultron), and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury). Directed by Joss Whedon from a screenplay by Whedon, based on the Marvel Comics characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

  • Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World (2013)

    Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World (2013)

    Thor-The-Dark-World

    Thor: The Dark World is the year’s fifth superhero movie. That’s five different films where spandex-clad men bash in the brains of other spandex-clad men. Five films featuring speeches on subjects like truth, justice, and doing the right thing. Five films where one major city or another—sometimes fictitious, sometimes not—is turned into a smoking cinder by the gods who use it as an arena. The Thor films—counting The Avengers, whose villain Loki is central to the narrative of the entire Marvel cinematic universe, there have been three—have a decided advantage over other movies in the genre. In Thor, director Kenneth Branagh was able to find a nice balance between fish-out-of-water humor and action largely indebted (though unfortunately not monetarily so) to Jack Kirby. Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor wisely decides to spend much of his time exploring Thor’s celestial homeworld of Asgard. It’s a nice change of pace from a Marvel film’s usual focus on large, clean military installations and glittering R&D research laboratories, but even the best aspects of this movie aren’t enough to distract from what is now a very shopworn formula.

    But if long-running network sitcoms and The Avengers franchise have proven anything, it’s that people like hanging out with their favorite characters, even if nothing truly significant happens. Thor: The Dark World does more with the fallout from The Avengers than Iron Man 3, did, sending Thor (Chris Hemsworth) planet-hopping with his warrior friends to quell the revolts stirred in the wake of Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston) rebellion against Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and his near-conquest of Earth. Odin’s helpful narration reveals that there’s a threat much greater than these rebellions, a long-lost cosmic weapon created by a race of dark elves upset that the Big Bang turned all the lights of the universe on. The opening scene—Norse gods crossing their swords and shields against the space lasers and gravity grenades of their elven enemies—is a highly polished mash-up of pulp sci-fi and hard fantasy paperback covers, but there’s nothing particularly creative or threatening about this largely faceless horde. Even their weapon—The Aether, which threatens to turn the lights off again—inspires a shrug of the shoulders. But when Thor’s girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) finds herself the vessel of this cosmic power, the God of Thunder hastily arrives on Earth to whisk her away to the halls of Asgard, hopeful for a cure.

    Of course, there isn’t one. Odin, clearly the most pragmatic man on a floating rock connected to the rest of the universe by a rainbow bridge, suggests that Jane’s malady is evidence of the difference between the fate of an Asgardian and the fate of a human, imploring his son to maybe fall in love with someone more suitable as Queen of the realm; Sif (Jaimie Alexander), for instance. But Thor: The Dark World doesn’t fool around with love for long. The Aether is something of a homing beacon, and its inhabitance of Jane Foster’s body sends a signal to the dark elves, who’ve long been asleep at the fringes of the universe. They storm Asgard furiously, laying waste to the city and killing Frigga (Rene Russo), the Queen. Odin vows to quash the elves, even at the cost of his realm. Thor, however, has other ideas. Hoping to save his people and Jane Foster, he reaches out in desperation to Loki, serving out a life-sentence in a rather nice-looking jail cell for his crimes, and plots a sneak attack on the elf Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) and his few compatriots who remain from the prelude’s long-ago war.

    Of course, the real draw here is Hiddleston’s Loki, who is once again the most compelling, entertaining aspect of a Marvel film. This is causing something of a problem, narratively speaking, as all of the movies in this franchise have largely used even their heroes most iconic villains as one-off castaways, focusing instead on whatever piece of world-destroying technology they happen to possess. Loki’s popularity, which is potentially greater than that of any of the Avengers save Iron Man, virtually guarantees that he’ll continue to be part of the narrative, even as phases two and three of the Marvel cinematic universe provide ever-diminishing space for him. Thor: The Dark World flirts with making Loki something of an anti-hero. Sure he destroyed an entire town in New Mexico and most of Manhattan in a fit of jealousy, but he was pithy and funny while he did it, and he is burdened with issues of identity, purpose, and godhood in a world where he may be the only person smart enough to qualify as a psychoanalyst. While plotting his jailbreak, every character (and the audience) knows for a fact that any Loki/Thor team-up is doomed to end in betrayal, but they (and we) go along with it. For Asgard, Loki serves as an unlikely last hope. For the audience, the ambitious terrorist of the cosmos happens to be written in such a way that he seems like the most fun guy to have a drink with.

    Thor the dark world loki

    As for the film’s human ciphers—Foster, Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings)—they’re largely inessential, shoehorned in because the final battle needs some recognizable faces running around in panic while the world burns. Portman, as Jane Foster, does her usual capable job, and a scene where she goes on a dinner date with some guy but can’t think of anybody but Thor is one of those fleeting instances where these movies actually address what it’d be like to be a normal human being in a world occupied by gods and monsters, but even with a cosmic entity flowing through her veins she’s little more than a combination damsel in distress/MacGuffin. The Selvig character has the most to do with the continuing story of The Avengers, though his function here as the world’s most brilliant man to have stripped nude at Stonehenge while muttering incoherently about Ragnarok is largely that of comic relief. Skarsgard and Dennings are given the film’s snappiest non-Loki dialog, but the film just isn’t as interesting when focusing on its earthbound characters, which, if anything, is an indication of how fully-realized Asgard has become, almost by accident. Jane Foster’s visit and the dark elf raid necessitates that a good deal of Thor: The Dark World‘s runtime takes place on Asgard, which, fantasy tropes aside, manages to feel like a real place. The plot doesn’t allow for much exploration of the realm’s tertiary Asgardians, which is something of a shame.  I have a rough idea of what a political science major does, but a character like Heimdall (Idris Elba), who can see some ten trillion souls, probably deserves a better fate than serving as Thor’s Facebook app or failing at his job as gatekeeper.

    Thor: The Dark World was perfectly enjoyable; not only was it the best superhero film of the year, it may be the best of The Avengers series. But these movies have quickly become a succession of James Bond adventures, right down to the credit text assuring viewers that THOR WILL RETURN in a year or so, whenever the next production requiring a blonde-haired, hammer-wielding meathead is mounted. The difference is that Thor is part of something larger and ultimately more organized than Bond or any other long-running franchise, and coming at a two- or three-a-year pace as these Marvel movies do, there’s less opportunity for Thor to distinguish himself from Captain America, let alone allowing Thor: The Dark World to stand apart from Thor. For now, audiences seem contented by these opportunities to sit down and catch-up with their favorite superheroes and villains. Manhattan may still be smoking, and Liverpool may lie in ruins, but nothing about Earth is fundamentally altered. There’s comfort in that, I suppose, but it’d be nice if a Marvel movie shocked the world by growing up a little, maybe by being something more than not terrible.

    Thor: The Dark World. With Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Natalie Portman (Jane Foster), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Christopher Eccleston (Malekith), Jaimie Alexander (Sif), Rene Russo (Frigga), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Stellan Skarsgard (Erik Selvig), and Kat Dennings (Darcy). Directed by Alan Taylor and produced by Kevin Feige. Screenplay by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeeley, based on the comic book Thor, created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby.

  • Movie Review: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

    Movie Review: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

    Hiding within Snow White and the Huntsman is something sleek and subversive, a forward-thinking fairy tale concerned with gender politics, something both of and for its time. It’s so well-secluded, however, that to continue on in that vein would mean entirely forgetting about the film’s title characters and focusing on its villain, which isn’t likely to happen in even the best summer blockbusters. The villain, after all, is just a crutch by which a less-than-interesting protagonist is supported, and while Rupert Sanders‘ retelling of Snow White flirts with crafting a staggeringly effective evil queen, the strength of Charlize Theron’s initial performance gives way to your usual bad guy platitudes, culminating in your typical CGI “epicness.”  (more…)

  • Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

    Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

    A time-displaced soldier. A Norse god. A playboy billionaire genius. A brilliant scientist who turns into a raging monster when angry. A former Russian spy. An expert marksman. On paper, a team comprised of six individuals this vastly different shouldn’t work. There are egos to deal with, competitive urges, the occasional extinction-level event. Since 1963, the Avengers have walked the very fine line between being Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and Earth’s Largest Screw-Ups. All it took back then was an assortment of popular comic book characters and the retrospectively brilliant idea of bringing a World War II era hero back from the publishing grave. In 2012, to get The Avengers together under the auspices of one movie took a more herculean effort: Five good-to-great movies serving as pretense, an assemblage of the right actors playing the right characters, and the right director at the helm of so much potential chaos. (more…)

  • Movie Review: The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

    Movie Review: The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

    As an exercise in metatextuality, The Cabin in the Woods really only rises above mere cleverness once, when the small band of attractive college undergraduates gather in the living room of their rustic soon-to-be deathtrap to play a game of truth or dare. The one christened as the dumb blonde of the group is dared to make out with the taxidermied head of a wolf. The wolf—surely a big and bad one, before the axe fell—has teeth so sharp and eyes so bright one is tempted to think its mouth will snap closed, devouring our poor heroine. It’s a nice bit of tension, yes, but its jaws never clamp down. Instead, this young, blonde woman makes out with the head of a dead animal. She has three audiences: Her friends, the men and women watching on monitors from an undisclosed location, and you. Presumably, all three are titillated, and for precisely the same reason: Something pristine, unspoiled, and innocent (remember, blonde hair is a trigger for sympathy) is being deflowered by something wild, merciless, and foreboding. (more…)