Thor's Day

I guess the MCU has a history of bad hairpieces. I watched 2011's Thor again last night, for the first time since it first came out. It's about exactly as good as I remember: better than the average MCU movie to-day but none to rank among the best.

The main attraction is the relationship between Thor and Loki and Loki is still the best character. Director Kenneth Branagh allows Tom Hiddleston's performance to suggest quite a lot about the nature of his internal conflict.

Hiddleston's the right actor for that. He has such expressive facial features, you could pick up on a twitch of his eyebrow from a hundred yards.

I wish the films had allowed us to spend more time with Anthony Hopkins' Odin. I like how he always seems locked up. Even in the end, when he's telling Thor he's proud of him, you don't sense he's being totally open, you sense this dialogue is just one part of the vast calculations going on in his mind.

Jane still feels superfluous, a typical girlfriend character from a standard superhero movie. A more interesting film might have made Kat Denning's supporting character the love interest. Intellectually, she's a better match for Thor. Jane is almost more suited for Loki.

Thor is available on Disney+.

Another Layer of All Powerful

Last night brought the best premiere of an MCU series on Disney+ and the lion's share of the credit goes to Tom Hiddleston. The writing and direction on Loki aren't really bad but far from perfect. Michael Waldron is head writer on a series for the first time in a career in which his biggest previous credit was one episode of Rick and Morty. Now not only is he in charge of this show he's written the screenplay for the upcoming Doctor Strange movie and he's working on Kevin Feige's Star Wars movie. The people at Disney, for whatever mysterious reasons, really seem to like this guy.

I loved last night's premiere of Loki but the writing was decidedly uneven. Loki (Hiddlestone) is apprehended by the Time Variance Authority, which seems to be a sort of all powerful DMV presiding over the multiverse. Loki has gone from a frustrated attempt at becoming supreme god of the Earth and Asgard to being a regular schlub in a jumpsuit under the thumb of bored, slightly braindead office workers. Somehow, the God of Mischief has never heard of the TVA. It would have been nice if Waldron had given him some knowledge of it, especially since we see the TVA agents are pretty fallible. Considering they preside over all space and time, it seems like they should have left some evidence of their presence here and there in some way or another.

Loki is stripped of his clothes and forced along his path by cattle prods but it's only when he's finally before the judge (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) does it occur to him to try to use his powers. All of this does feel like it comes from someone more accustomed to writing cartoons than something that's supposed to be at least halfway dramatic--the focus is more on getting gags than on making sense.

Things improve considerably, though, when Loki sits down with Mobius, a TVA agent played by Owen Wilson. The two have enough acting chops between them to make the show captivating but Waldron's writing starts to get more interesting as he sets up the show's themes of free will and predestination. Loki himself had already been talking about his "glorious purpose", which sounds nice and all, until you consider it might mean he's stuck in the role of villain. Will the TVA be his chance to break out of this path the universe has written for him?

This is a very old story, one that goes at least as far back as 1667 and Milton's Paradise Lost in which Satan said of God's plan for him:

If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil

This gave rise to the whole archetype of the Satanic Hero which saw a new manifestation in the late '60s and '70s with stories about traditionally villainous characters from a new, more complicated perspective. There's always going to be plenty to mine from this premise because any of us who've contemplated ourselves and the universe have always had some anxiety about our own worth and ability to do anything meaningful with our lives.

Hiddleston draws us in with a performance filled with bitterness yet still with a kind of vulnerable agony. One is reminded that his character in Kenneth Branagh's Thor was originally meant to be a version of Edmund from King Lear. There's a lot of potential here and I'm looking forward to next week.

Loki is available on Disney+.