The Golden Age of Marvel Movies May Be On The Wane

Rating: 3/10 (15 November 2017)

After the success of Deadpool and Guardians Of The Galaxy (both fine, fun, movies, by the way) the magic of Marvel - i.e, believable characters you care about in unbelievable situations, with a unique balance of gripping drama, action and lively humour - seems to be tipping more and more into only humour. In doing so, they risk losing what made them so special in the first place. I noticed this recently in the noisy and chaotic mess that was Spiderman Homecoming, and the flimsiness of the technically dazzling Dr Strange.
The new Thor movie is another step in that direction, and the most obviously unbalanced. This wouldn't necessarily be that big a deal if they could somehow make the comedy seem natural extension of the characters and believable, but they fall down quite majorly here too: I didn't recognize Cate Blanchett until the closing credits, which is strange, since I'm quite I'm a fan of her, but she seems out of sorts here and unable to maintain a convincing tone for her character who remains not the least bit godlike throughout. At no point in the movie does she successfully personify the death of all things but rather a bitchy soccer mom at a class reunion.
None of the familiar characters talk or act anything like how we remember them - Odin is gone in the blink of an eye and his death means nothing. Loki is completely wasted and does nothing at all Loki-like. Thor himself has gone from being a dazzling manifestation of an ancient, otherworldly GOD to... just being a big doofus, really. And there was no reason at all for that god-damned haircut, by the way, which only works against the believability of the character even more.
The Hulk, too, goes from being the ultimate depiction of unstoppable force in human form to ALSO being... well, just a big doofus too. No reason is given for why he does not revert to Banner when he has calmed down enough to bounce a ball around or get in a hot tub, and he holds lengthy Abbot & Costello-like comedic conversations in a manner he hasn't in 50 years of comic books. There's nothing to identify him as a character: if you swopped the CGI covering him for one of the other brightly coloured and slow-witted alien monsters, you'd never know it was him.
The central tragedies at the heart of all these characters - which, after all, define them - are here almost completely excised, along with the gravity of the thousands and thousands of deaths of the Asgardians. Some long-recurring characters are literally in the film for 10 seconds or so before being killed, but there's no space made for the mourning needed to make such an event resonate and matter, and by the end of the film it's as if none of it ever happened. All this unbelievable loss of life, and yet at every turn, every scene is played for laughs.
Ultimately, the film plays like a satire of the film you actually paid to see - it's a little like going to see the new Star Trek movie and finding it to actually be Galaxy Quest. This was great for Guardians Of The Galaxy and Deadpool, but tonally way out of balance for a tragic family saga of ancient gods.
Don't get me wrong, a bunch of it IS fun, it's just fun that doesn't make any sense, hang together as a story, or mean anything. Yes, it's a colourful and frothy space romp, and there's stuff within that to be enjoyed. But next time, more care and depth and a decent script, please.