DVD Review: Thor, or How Sibling Rivalry Can Really Go Bad

Finally got around to viewing Thor (2011) which is the last film I needed to see before seeing The Avengers (2012). What can I say. It's OK. Not great. Not horrible. Just OK. Kind of like a bowl of lukewarm porridge. I felt almost exactly the same way after viewing Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). Oh well. Ho-hum.

By the way, this review contains a ton of spoilers. I figured it can't hurt that much, since the film's been out awhile and anyone interested in The Avengers movie must have seen it a bunch of times by now. Just warning you. Proceed at your own risk.

I know the film makers tried to successfully merge the doings in Asgard with those on Midgard (Earth) but it was always very jarring to go from one universe to another. Of course, you could say that was on purpose, since the Asgardian realm is so much different than plain ol' planet Earth, but after reading some of the film's trivia at IMDB, I saw that the film's look and feel were supposed to successfully merge the two worlds. Oh well.

I know Natalie Portman wanted to be in this film, and it's not exactly like her appearances in the various Star Wars movies were so high brow, but I felt her talent was rather wasted here. On the other hand, Anthony Hopkins played Odin and he's practically the nexus of all wonderful and classical acting experience in the universe embodied as a man. Marlon Brando played Jor-El in the first Superman film (1978) starring Christopher Reeve, so I guess I don't really have much of a point here. Just sayin'.

I know there had to be some way of explaining Thor, Asgard, Bifrost, and everything else without saying it's out and out magic, but it was a little hard to buy that the "Rainbow Bridge" that leads from Asgard to Earth was really something called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, AKA a "wormhole." I guess you can call the Asgardians, Frost Giants and the like all super-dimensional beings who exist in domains outside of normal time-space...except Thor said you could see them all using the Hubble telescope. So Asgard is just something that exists in normal space, out there somewhere.

I think I like "super-dimensional" better.

I know everyone tried really hard, but the characterization wasn't all that great. Natalie Portman as astrophysicist Jane Foster was played like a dippy school girl with a crush on the high school football quarterback. I liked Chris Hemsworth. I think he looked the part. I just wasn't amazingly impressed with his performance, and I really wanted to be.

Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner). He has a brief appearance in the film as a SHIELD sniper who prefers a bow to a high-powered rifle and scope. It explains (sort of) how he'll end up in the Avengers but Barton was always a bad boy in the comic books, right on the edge of being a criminal and heading toward prison (he first appeared as a pawn of the communist agent the Black Widow in the early 1960s, manipulated into attacking Iron Man). Hard to believe he starts out as a government agent rather than a well-meaning but easily conned rogue.

Sif (played by Jaimie Alexander). Nada. She didn't even look like a goddess. Heck, she didn't even look convincingly like a mortal female warrior. I just didn't get the feeling she could kick anyone's ass. She wasn't regal. She wasn't a goddess.

I know Thor is supposed to be the most bad ass god of them all, but it seemed as if he was about a thousand times more powerful than any other Asgardian around him. In the initial fight sequence in Jotunheim, the other gods including Loki seemed no more powerful than some really tough human martial arts/sword and sorcery types, while Thor flew around like Superman, smashing everything in sight. You'd think if everyone in Asgard was considered a "god" and was nearly immortal (Odin seems to age so they can't *really* be immortal), the "warriors three," Loki, and Sif would have been closer to Thor's own abilities (especially Loki, since he fights Thor to a stand still in the film's climax).

Agent Coulson (played by Clark Gregg) was an asshole. In the first two Iron Man films, he was sort of likable if not entirely competent, but in Thor, he was an absolute jerk, especially when taking away all of Jane Foster's (and her fellow scientists) toys. Also, I always had the impression that SHIELD knew exactly who they were recruiting for the Avengers, but Coulson had no idea how Thor was connected to the hammer and he thought Thor was some sort of "Soldier of Fortune" merc. Coulson got on my nerves fairly early and stayed there throughout the film. At least he evoked an emotion in me. Most of the other characters didn't.

I know that in the 21st century, it would be considered poor form to create an entire race of white people, but I was a little surprised to see Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano playing Hogun and African-British actor Idris Elba playing Heimdall. The Asgardian legends are Nordic legends, so I thought I'd see a lot more blonds in Asgard. Of course, if we reverse causality (which we have to here) and say the Nordic people observing the Asgardians fighting the Frost Giants on Earth mistook these super-dimensional beings for gods, then it makes sense that they'd recreate the gods of Asgard in their own image, depicting them in their legends as racially unmixed (blond hair, blue eyes, all white). That means in real (movie) life, Asgardians could look like just about anyone, as long as the men were buff and the women were beautiful.

The one thing I didn't really anticipate and did like in the film was Loki's motivation. In the beginning, he wasn't such a bad guy. Sure, he was jealous of Thor, but I can see why he'd believe Odin favored Thor at Loki's expense. Loki liked to get into a bit of mischief every now and then (and he is the god of mischief after all) but nothing serious. He really did love his parents and wanted to be a good king of Asgard (as opposed to Thor who started out as an arrogant prick). Discovering that he was "adopted" and a Frost Giant to boot, really reset his clock. Adopted kids, especially those who are adults before they are told they're adopted (or find out by accident as in Loki's case) almost always are shocked and sometimes pissed off that mommy and daddy didn't tell them the truth. It just added to Loki's complexity and his desire to take Thor down a peg...actually a lot of pegs, since he tried to kill his older brother.

In the end, Thor has to destroy Bifrost to keep Loki from committing genocide, shattering the link between him and Jane. Loki is lost when he deliberately lets himself fall into space. No apparent connection to Thor's return to Earth or Loki's return as the villain in The Avengers is apparent (save for the "real" ending after the credits when we get a brief glimpse of Loki in some SHIELD labyrinth).

I'm glad I saw the movie if only because it's a set up for The Avengers film and to fill in any gaps in my knowledge base. That said, there are better films out there I could wasted a couple of hours on. I just hope The Avengers movie doesn't leave me feeling as "blah."

Oh well.

Loki's Next Battle!

In the Marvel movies, the villain from Asgard, Thor's half-brother Loki has appeared in Thor (2011) and will be appearing this coming May in The Avengers (2012). But before all that, he battled another, startling hero.

Dr. Strange?

That's right comic book fans. A little known battle between the god of mischief and the Master of the Mystic Arts, circa 1963.

DVD Review of X-Men First Class

X-Men: First Class (2011) is the classic example of how Hollywood gets its greedy little hands on a vast body of work and canon and completely screws it up. Really, the film wasn't totally horrible, but it was so muddled and overworked that I couldn't like it, and I really, really, wanted to like it.

No, I'm not bitching about how the film makers took excessive liberties with canon. I expect that films aren't going to stick lockstep with how the comic books portray a hero or group and that's to be expected. What works in a comic book almost never works the same way on TV or in film. But the X-Men have been around since Lee and Kirby introduced the original team (Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Marvel Girl, Iceman, and Professor X) to the world in 1963 and a lot of material has been accumulating.

The film's writers, director, and producers tried to cram damn near almost 50 years of history in to 132 minutes of running time. It's like they felt they have to jam pack the movie with all of the back story on the Professor and Magneto, plus many of the team members, starting with childhood and, even though set in 1962 (a year before the comic book team came together), also had to drag in material from the 1970s (the human-looking Hank McCoy turning into a real, furry Beast) and 1980s (the Hellfire club including Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost).

They needed to scale back. If this is to be the first of many X-Men films based on the prequel/reboot, then they could have saved some story for later.

I have to admit, I liked the way McAvoy portrayed Charles Xavier (in real life, the "X" in "Xavier" is pronounced like the "X" in "Xylophone"). You just know that a young, male telepath would probably act like an asshole if he knew every thought of every mind around him. He certainly f*cked up "outing" McCoy as a mutant right in front of his CIA boss. Also, his telepathy sense must have stunted his common sense if he couldn't tell that Raven was head over heels for him right from jump street. He payed for that one dearly in the end.

I also liked the Xavier/Lehnsherr chemistry (I think everyone did). Erik (Magneto) Lehnsherr isn't power hungry and evil. He's a holocaust survivor who can see the world treating mutants the way they treated the Jews. This time, he plans to strike first and not wait for the humans to build the death camps. I don't blame him.

That's the part about Erik that Charles could never understand. As far as the movie presents, Charles was raised (although we never see his parents) in a safe and secure environment. Nothing ever threatened his world so he can afford to see the possibilities of a human/mutant friendship. Erik, on the other hand, learned from Shaw in the camps that anyone who claims to be your friend just wants to use your mutant powers for their own gain, and they'll even blow your mother away right in front of you if that's what it takes (I can't imagine why Erik killed the soldiers who murdered his mother, but didn't drive every sharp metal object in that chamber of horrors right through Shaw's black heart).

It's the billion inconsistencies in the film like the one I just cited that makes "First Class" feel like "low class" to me.

Other stuff.

They could have let Hank McCoy be like the Beast in the 1960s comic books. He didn't tragically cause his metamorphosis into the furry Beast for over a decade, after he joined the team, graduated, and left to pursue his own career (he eventually joined the Avengers).

OK, no Cyke, Angel, Iceman, or Marvel Girl. The original team is out. So we have Sean (Banshee) Cassidy, who in the comic books, was more Xavier's age and an ex-cop. Raven (Mystique) Darkholme, who really didn't make the scene until the early 1980s (same time frame as the Hellfire Club) as opposed to growing up with Charles in his huge Westchester mansion.

Um, wait!

Charles doesn't have any other X-Men by the end of the film except Sean, Alex (Havok) Summers, and Hank. Everybody else either dies (Darwin) or deserts him (Erik, Raven, Angel Salvador). Oh, and never mind that Alex is supposed to be Scott Summers' (Cyclops) younger brother.

Now that I read what I'm writing, maybe I am complaining about lack of adherence to at least some canon.

However, I do think it's more "realistic" for Charles to end up in a wheelchair due to a bullet (a la "Ironside") rather than having his legs crushed by a giant block of concrete by an alien being called Lucifer (see X-Men #20). But Charles lost his hair before he even got into high school as part of his mutation (see X-Men #12). I'm not even sure James McAvoy will look good with a shaved head (Patrick Stewart nailed it, however).

One interesting thing that I don't find in any of the other reviews of this film is the subtle comparison between mutants and the LGBT community. At least twice in the film, one of the mutants (Raven says it for the last time in the movie) says "mutant and proud." It referred to the struggle (especially in Raven's case) of feeling that you always had to hide who you really were because the world wouldn't accept you (blue, scaly skin and all) as you really were. That, coupled with the inadvertent "outting" of McCoy by Charles which I mentioned earlier, gave a whole new meaning to Lady Gaga's Born This Way sentiment.

What could have saved this film? A much less "everything and the kitchen sink" philosophy as far as details were concerned. I know that films go through a lot of rewrites, often while being actively filmed, but this movie really showed it. It was like a patchwork quilt of this bit of X-Men history or that. It's as if no one could make the hard decisions necessary to keep the movie on track, internally consistent, and able to tell a "clean" story that the audience doesn't need a scorecard to follow.

I've read every one of the original 1960s through 1980s X-Men comic books and there was a great deal of good history to draw from. Rather than carefully picking and choosing what to put in and leaving the rest for another day, someone randomly loaded a bunch of X-Men comic books into a cannon and blasted them at a movie screen.

The early X-Men stories are among my favorites. X-Men: First Class pretty much crapped on them.

Review: Batman and Robin, Volumes 1 and 2

I know, I know. I promised to write this review a long time ago, but things keep happening in my life. No, not anything nearly as dramatic as what Richard (I can't bring myself to call him "Dick") and Damian live through, but enough to keep me from writing a review on this blog. At least up until now.

I borrowed these two graphic novels from my local public library (I love libraries...you should, too) and read through them in a few evenings. Not exactly peaceful and calming material to go through right before bedtime, but they inspired some truly entertaining dreams. But what are they about, anyway?

The story of this Batman and Robin, starring Richard Grayson as the heir apparent to the "Mantle of the Bat" and Damian Wayne, the unlikely son of Bruce and Talia al Ghul, is set in the period of time when Bruce Wayne is struggling to return to the present after Darkseid's Omega beams sent him slamming back across the time line to the days of "Alley Oop" (almost). How will this dynamic duo fair as Gotham's protectors in the absence of the original Dark Knight?

Actually, just about as you'd imagine. Not all that great.

You'd think that with all of the experience Grayson had, first as the original Robin and then as Nightwing, he'd be a better Batman, but it seems as if he's intimidated by the cape and the cowl. If anyone could fill Bruce's "bat boots", it should be Richard, but he just doesn't act like they're a very good fit. Contrast this with Damian Wayne, all of ten years old, and yet he acts like he could be Batman right now. This is the part that was tough for me to swallow. I don't care if the little punk was raised by an assassin's league and his grandfather is Ras al Ghul, he still should have gotten his ass kicked on a more or less regular basis, right from jump street.

Actually, there were plenty of times Robin did eat the pavement and at one point, even got his back broken (sound familiar?). However, the little jerk always managed to bounce back and get into trouble again. If there was ever a Robin I wanted to see get a bullet in the brain, it was Damian. Even "Dick" wasn't this much of a "whiny bitch" when he first put on the "pixie boots". Frankly, it would have been better for Batman to team up with the Red Hood (Jason Todd).

Nobody loves this new Batman and Robin. Even casual observers on the GPD can tell it's not the "real" Batman, and Gordon tolerates them only because of his faith in the first Robin turned Batman (or maybe his faith in the return of the first Batman). Everyone was waiting for them to go "ker-splat" including me, while I was reading Volume 1. I know that Damian really is supposed to be a bad-ass, but I kept remembering myself at age ten and even if I had the attitude of a rattlesnake and the best ten-year-old body in the business, One good punch to the gut or a knife across my throat would have ended my crime fighting story before it started. It's hard to imagine Damian being ready at so young an age. He acted more like an "emo" 14 year old than a junior grade assassin. He even had the balls to call Alfred "Pennyworth" and to treat him like a "servant", which is something his father never would have done.

As it turns out, Richard never does (at least in the first 2 volumes of this series) get comfortable with being Batman. So much so, that he tries to resurrect what he thinks is Bruce's body by putting it in a Lazarus pit. Too bad it was a half brain-dead clone of Bruce that he gets a hold of instead (remember, Bruce is very much alive and leaping across the pages of history like a dark caped version of Sam Beckett in an extended episode of Quantum Leap) of the real Bruce. The "bat thing" that comes out of the pit is just about too much for our "dynamic duo", especially since Damian is trying to recover from the experimental surgery that put his spine back together and (covertly) turned him into a remote controlled pawn of his mother.

Amazingly, the two of them, with the much needed assistance of Alfred, manage to put away "Bat-zombie" before he makes them permanent residents of the land on the other side of the Styx. Little by little the two start to meld into a team as Damian begins to see what it is to truly take on his father's values, and Richard realizes that Bruce isn't coming back to save him. Richard takes his biggest step to becoming the next Dark Knight when he realizes he must become Batman, because there's just no one else.

Damian finally turns a corner when his mother uses him to try and assassinate Richard, and Grayson turns his own corner when, by the final page of Volume 2, he demonstrates his own detective skills in discovering the true identity of the heretofore mysterious Oberon Sexton.

Oh, it was kind of "cute" when Richard tried to hit on Batwoman not knowing that she'd have more interest in Barbara Gordon or Dinah Lance. Oh well, welcome to 21st century relationships, Dick.

DVD Review of Captain America: The First Avenger

It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all. I think Chris Evans turned in a pretty good performance as "Cap", allaying my fears that he'd play Steve Rogers in the same crappy manner as he did Johnny Storm in both lousy Fantastic Four movies (2005 and 2007 respectively).

By the way, if you haven't seen the film yet and want to be surprised, stop reading now. I'm jumping right into some major spoilers. Here we go.

I was initially dubious about changing Bucky from a teenage sidekick to a "big brother" character, but there'd be no way to realistically introduce a 14 year old onto a World War II European battlefield. The main point of Bucky anyway is to provide Cap with plenty of guilt and post-war angst over how he should have prevented Bucky's death, but didn't. In that sense though, the separation between the time of Bucky's death and Cap's going into deep freeze diminishes the impact (at least as far as I could tell). If Bucky had died just seconds before Cap crashed the plane, it would have been the last, horrible thought on Steve's mind when he was flash frozen and the very first when he woke up almost 70 years later. Oh well.

I thought the pre-Cap Steve Rogers was handled pretty well. The film was a little light on why Steve wanted to enlist so much or for that matter, why he was always so courageous, even when getting the living snot beaten out of him, though. After getting a brief look at his medical records early in the film and noticing he had heart problems, I'm a little surprised the repeated beatings he alluded to didn't put him in the hospital or even kill him. It's one thing to be a 98-pound weakling with asthma and another to be extremely medically fragile.

I know Director Joe Johnston wanted the character of Captain America to be less about being a patriotic symbol and more about how nice guys make better heroes, but Cap is all about being the American hero at a time when we are all about symbolic inspiration to help us endure the sacrifices of war. I found Steve, both before and after his transformation, to be a little too humble. Captain America is a decisive leader of men. His character started developing in that direction but Evans never took it quite far enough. To be fair though, it's a difficult balance to strike between being heroic and always being portrayed as a "nice guy" (as opposed to an arrogant ass like the guy Colonel Phillips [Tommy Lee Jones] wanted to put through the experiment).

I still can't believe that douche politician turned Cap into some sort of cheesy performer. How many millions of dollars were poured into the experiment to turn Steve into a Super Soldier and yet, his only options were being a lab rat or a USO actor? What a waste of resources. I'm stunned the military went along with it. I suppose this was the only way Johnston could figure out how to put Steve in a red, white, and blue outfit in the ETO (European Theater of Operations) and then get him into action. I still wish he'd have found another way to do this.

I loved how Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, and the rest of the Howling Commandos (minus Sgt. Fury for continuity reasons) became Cap's "team". In the 1960s Marvel comic books, Cap would sometimes team up with Fury and the "Howlers" for one mission or the other. I didn't expect this and it was a welcome addition to the film.

I did expect Howard Stark to be in the film and he was depicted in a way that it's easy to see why Tony ended up being such a womanizing, arrogant playboy. Like father, like son. I was a little surprised at a few of the "miniaturized" devices Stark was able to create in an age when vacuum tubes had yet to be replaced by transistors (which were still bulky but allowed Marvel to justify the comic book Tony Stark creating the Iron Man armor in 1963). I thought the levitating car (even if it didn't work) was a little over the top. It's much more "real" to imagine Howard being part of the Manhattan Project and creating "the bomb".

The whole Steve Rogers/Peggy Carter relationship was interesting if expected. They never really "hooked up" (and for that matter, never got to that dance Steve had promised her), but they were really hung up with each other (sometimes to Peggy's surprise), adding the required "romantic relationship" to movies like this. I found myself wondering that if Steve didn't know how to talk to a woman and had never danced with one (because he was so puny at first and then too busy as Cap later on), what else had he "never done" with a woman? Does this mean Steve Rogers wakes up in the 21st century still a virgin? Maybe the Black Widow would be able to help him out later on. Either that, or Peggy's granddaughter or great-granddaughter (Sharon Carter AKA Agent 13 is bound to make an appearance sometime or another) will finish what Peggy started.

There is one, really big plot hole (not the only one, but I can live with the others). Why did Steve have to "die" at the end of the film in order to save New York from the Red Skull's "doomsday" plane? He'd already exited and re-entered the plane in flight by using one of the on-board "mini-planes". Couldn't he have just set the big plane into a dive and then escaped using one of the smaller modules? This was pointed out with great panache by the gang at How It Should Have Ended.



When the Cosmic Cube "short circuited" or whatever it did when it "ate" the Red Skull (great job by Hugo Weaving, by the way), Cap should have "discovered" that the energy discharge destroyed the mini-planes or fused the controls that opened the bomb bay doors or something, but it was just overlooked by Johnston. Steve didn't have to die/get frozen at the end of the film.

In spite of my bitching, I really enjoyed the movie overall. It wasn't exactly what I would have expected out of Captain America, but it was still good. Musical score had a hard time trying to figure out if it wanted to be 1940s nostalgia or modern hero theme music. Credits at the end (none at the beginning of the film at all) were straight up lame. The end and then the real end (after all the final credits) were good, which brings me to my last point.

Captain America and the Avengers. In the 1960s Avengers comic books, there was no one, permanent leader. Each Avenger took a monthly rotation as far as leading the team. Having said that, whenever Cap was around (and always when he was leading Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, and Hawkeye), he ended up being the de facto leader and the unofficial "heart" of the Avengers. Nice guy aside, even when he was the weakest member of the team, having no "real" superpowers, he always had the soul and the vision of a leader. He was used to being obeyed instantly, not because he was some kind of dictator, but because he was just that good at taking command, sizing up every combat situation, and taking decisive action in deploying his "forces". In the Silver Age comics, this was pointed out again and again by the other team members. I hope that he gets to fulfill that destiny in the upcoming Avengers (2012) film as well.

Unfortunately, based on the trailers I've seen so far, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is more likely to dominate any screen time he shares with Rogers (Evans) and Cap will just be another guy in a costume, probably more spectacular than Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) but trailing behind the other Avengers (the Black Widow will attract more attention only because she's played by the very beautiful Scarlett Johansson - yowza!).

Back to the current review, I would definitely watch this film again...and again and again. It's not perfect, but it's still Captain America. In an age where we have no one to look up to anymore, we need an American hero like Cap.

What Went Wrong with Star Trek Enterprise?

In the wake of Jonathan Frakes' recent declaration that for him, Star Trek: Enterprise's series finale was "an unpleasant memory," actress Marina Sirtis has also come out on the controversial final episode. But instead of blasting it, she defends it as a fitting finale for ... The Next Generation.

In another of Star Trek.com's lengthy interviews, the 56-year-old actress—who had to slip back into one of Counsellor Deanna Troi's skintight uniforms after 18 years in the role (and three years after Star Trek: Nemesis) in May of 2005 for the controversial Enterprise final episode ''These Are the Voyages''—said about the finale.

-Nathalie Caron
"Marina Sirtis defends Enterprise finale as a fitting end for TNG"
blastr.com

I've tried repeatedly to create a comment in reply to this blastr blog post but I keep getting an error message. Guess I'll have to write a wee blog of my own about it. First off, here's part of what I was going to say in my comment:

Wow! She's 56?

Anyway, I guess this means I'll have to get around to watching the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise one of these days. Actually, I stopped watching the show at the end of the third season. It just failed to hold my interest the way that the rest of the Star Trek franchise shows did.

I don't think this was the fault of the cast or crew. The producers set it too early in history and created too many plot holes in terms of the already established "Trek" history. They introduced things like view screens and transporters when, according to the "official" time line, they shouldn't have existed yet. Then there were the desperate attempts to revive interest by introducing Romulans, Ferengi, and Borg when humanity hadn't met them yet, either. "Enterprise" could never create its own niche because it lacked most of the elements the Trek audience had come to know and love. The producers should have set it in the Romulan-Earth or Klingon-Earth wars or even when Capt. Pike 1st took command of the Enterprise. Now that would have been a riveting series, if handled correctly.

To continue, I think Berman and Braga just became arrogant and complacent. They assumed all you'd have to do is stick the title "Star Trek" on a show and everyone would spontaneously "nerdgasm" all over it.

Wrong.

They should have put a lot more thought and research into the concept of a "pre-STTOS" show. Instead, they goofed and shot Bakula, Blalock, Billingsley, and the rest of the cast in the collective foot. They also assumed (probably thanks to Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager, that a pair of really large breasts would make up for good stories, consistent plots, and character development. Wrong again. Big boobs aside, my favorite character was "Trip", played by Connor Trinneer. I found him very human in his struggle to apply his personality and preconceptions on a rapidly unfolding interstellar exploration.

I could go on and on about what went wrong with the show and what could have been right, but I don't feel like writing a novel today. Like I said before, the one big thing I'd change, if I could, would be to set the show later in history but still before Kirk's time.

Point's moot because with the full Star Trek reboot, history is up for grabs again.

Set course for the Talos star group. Time warp, factor five. Engage.