Marvel's laboratories

Rating: Null/10 (3 August 2015)

There was Forbidden Planet once upon a time, all about the journey to and mystique of discovering a new world in the stars. Then Star Wars. Inbetween these, Marvel seems to have cranked out a few hundred thousand panels populated with sundry worlds, mythologies, heroes, vast beings, demigods. So when time came to fashion their cinematic world in the stars, there was already a vast reservoir of Marvel myth on one side, cinematic ways to build worlds on the other. They have a few dozen people whose job is to keep threading this universe these days.
The only one of those that appeals to me is the first Thor and now this a bit less. Two things they do well enough here, one is they chose a corner of their world that will be completely new to most of us but look how uniformly we're placed inside, in such a way as to feel it's a broader world with its own structures in motion. The motley group of heroes have spark. I see this as coherence that gestated for a long time on the page that the filmmakers had the luxury to mine; built on Star Wars.
The second thing is that they poke fun at the usual grandiose Marvel world. They often try it but only Thor excelled in this; it was Branaugh poking fun at his own Shakespearean world. So in the middle of it here walks a slightly buffoonish guy abducted with his tape recorder from the 80s and sent to a world where powerful beings threaten to wreak planetary annihilation. (the Kree, the name reminiscent of Forbidden Planet)
I like that we traverse a world and the charm that lets us parse movie vistas in the shoes of someone like us who would have known them as movies, it's pleasant to watch. Formulaic in myth, dilemmas, lessons, and some of the action, expected from Marvel; it's what their library is made of.