Portman and Hemsworth as people with stupid names.

Comments

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The only way a premise this weird could make it to the screen with this kind of budget is because comics are dumb. And so critics, elites, intellectuals, and people were satisfied with the mere restriction of sexual content from their pages. So from decades of neglect from the elite social cabals through the virtue of being too small and silly to attract serious critical attention, comics were allowed to get weird. An uncritical audience accepts blunders as much as triumphs when their shamefully sneaking past authority figures that decide the value of a story based on the medium it is produced. All those years of brilliant or often-times lazy or even idiotically free imagination built a fan-base. Now that fan-base has disposable income, and that disposable income brings Disney investment to a movie like Thor 2.

If a scriptwriter pitched something as far-out, ridiculous, and as fun as Thor:The Dark World in an alternate universe in which Thor was not a an Avenger or the star of his own comic, executives would have dialed security within the first thirty seconds, and whoever let that writer into the board-room would be fired and probably tortured to death.

So it's like this. Norse Gods are aliens blessed with a multi-thousand year lifespan. The writers have solved the Drake Equation for us because the Asgardians protect Earth from foreign intrusion by more advanced or hostile species for the last few thousand years.

But then a cyborg super-human from the peacekeeping race (That's Thor. His long life span and nigh-invulnerability can't be natural, right? It's quantum nano-tech blarghy-glarg that makes him all super and shit) falls in love with a lesser being because she has more insight into his universe than he does despite her limited lifespan and meager resources. He loves her because as an underdog, she achieves more than the best of his people despite her short existence and total lack of magical hammers. Plus she's played by arguably one of the most attractive women on this planet. Being one-in-500-million chance winner of the bone-structure, metabolism, intelligence, (Harvard, yo!) attractiveness lottery never hurt anyone when attempting to woo a god.

So he goes and fights a more ancient force because she, as a moth investigating the lantern, is so hopelessly beyond her capacity for understanding. The only reason she chose to seek the lantern was that it was the only thing that shared his unknowable quality. So we get a hero that's moved by empathy and care with a being far less blessed than him. He is then willing to risk everything in the attempt to be a man worthy of a person that has done so much more so much more boldly without such superhuman ability and with so much less time.

Corporate greed is a neutral force. The concept of the corporation is to turn the entire world into symbolic measures of worth. The instant it becomes profitable for all of humanity to be ground into dog-food after dogs get access to credit cards, humanity will be remembered shortly as tasty kibble. We've already traded the health and security of our children, and grandchildren to increase the profits with which they do nothing. Now we give a few hours and a few dollars to watch something entertaining. And without them nothing like this could exist.

Corporate executive screened and trained to promote wealth maximization for their ruling conceptual entities at any and all costs gave their money to fan-boys. Those fan-boys are inspired by dudes that read a book about Norse Mythology and then in a wide open market lazily made a funny-book about it. Those humble fan-boys and funny-book makers have put together an entertaining film despite the marketing obstacles set before them by the burden of profit.

So the people that are actively and purposefully destroying civilization, possibly knowingly risking the extinction of our species and for all we know and maybe even to be complicit in the permanent disappearance of sentient life and therefor all meaning in the universe for all time for the sole purpose of collecting as many units of subjectively mutually agreed value are happy. Humans whose nature predicates that they enjoy watching sexually attractive people solve difficult problems are happy. People like me that love stories as a way to play out hypothetical moral dilemmas are happy. And people that want to watch a fucking movie that stands on it's own and is fun also like me are happy.

Only a civilization as divorced from objectivity and guided by the evolutionary cruelty of capitalism could produce a piece of popular entertainment as weird and random and fun as Thor 2 based on merely it's prior tie to a recognizable product.

Thor is a silly character. This story of subjective worth of life and time could be told more effectively without the obligations of franchise, but it could never be told to this many people on this scale with this level of spectacle if it wasn't for the people that will eventually turn us all into dog-food. All hale Disney. You gave money to brilliant people that worked within your arbitrary constraints to tell us a cool story that kept us entertained until we allowed our dogs access to our credit cards.

If all the outside forces that make this work possible were removed, would there have been the opportunity to see tent-stakes crashing into a pipe organ manned by doll-faced pointy-eared weirdos, and then fought off by a red-cloaked sexy-man with a hammer that flew there over a giant rainbow? Would there be fake hand removal and illusionary charcoal chest sword murder and singularity grenades. Yeah, probably not. And I'm sorry that critics across the internet can't enjoy themselves.

Enjoy your culture while you get to. Thor 2 is the kind of bullshit brilliance so contingent on accident and timing and culture, that you should enjoy it for the shear unlikelihood of its existence.

Also, it's pretty funny.
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@1...The part of your brain, or lack thereof, that convinced you that your "comment" is worth reading (Twice as long as the article!) is also the reason that you haven't developed your OWN forum for writing long, dry, intolerably boring descriptions of movies. Bath salts I guess?

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Stringer Bell did have his one moment of badassery.
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@1 to you I say, 'meh' I was pretty drunk, and I was feeling silly. The thing is, I write really fast. So after a bunch of scotch, I took a few minutes and wrote a review of Thor 2. There were no comments on The Stranger's review, and thousands of comments on every other website I know, so I posted it here. I'm sorry you didn't like it. It's the first movie review I've ever written, and possibly the last.

Anyway. Why are you so mean-spirited? It can't be fun living a life that something so silly and tiny as a comment on a regional town's alt-weekly newspaper is cause for you to abandon all kindness and empathy. You happily wrote something you know would hurt another person's feelings when you could have saved time, thought I was an idiot, and wrote nothing. You spent time for no other reason to make another human being feel bad about themselves. What kind of person does that make you?

I wrote a bad post, but you are a bad person. You should try to change.

Oh crap, another long post! It took me three minutes. I hope it helped you.

Please wait...

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