GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE: Trading One Demon for Another

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2012) – Directed by Neveldine/Taylor – Starring Nicolas Cage, Ciarán Hinds, Violante Placido, Johnny Whitworth, Christopher Lambert, Idris Elba, and Anthony Head.

Odin help me, I kind of dig GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE.

Oh, yeah, large swaths of it are a mess, Nic Cage has hit a point where he’s often doing a self-parody of a self-parody and the film feels like nothing more than a fill-in issue of a regular Ghost Rider run with really pretty art and passable writing, and what it does more than anything is illustrate how much an Idris Elba-starring Black Panther film would rock, but there’s some real energy here that was completely lacking in the first GHOST RIDER film.

Much like Wrath of the Titans, it’s nice to see that a sequel has learned from the mistakes of the first film. I bring Wrath up because the first Sam Worthington-starring Clash of the Titans was a mixed bag of serious actors like Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes playing their roles like they were making a fun B-movie and younger actors like Worthington who were treating the material like it was the most somber story ever told. Wrath was able to bring both sides of that divide together and the result was a much more cohesive vision.

SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has learned the same lesson, and instead of a disjointed, confused origin story, we get a streamlined, straightforward action film. It’s fitting that the directing duo of Neveldine/Taylor has been brought in because VENGEANCE has more in common with their Crank series than it does with the original GHOST RIDER.

It’s important that superhero movies show diversity and as silly as it may be to say it, I really believe that the continued existence of superhero films needs movies like SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE every bit as much as it needs The Dark Knight. Nolan can stake his claim at the literary end by delving into deep philosophical discussions, but a film like VENGEANCE just wants to entertain the heck out of you for 95 minutes and for the most part, I think it succeeds.

A very non-traditional French priest named Moreau (Idris Elba) is trying to protect Nadya (Violante Placido) and her son Danny (Fergus Riordan) from some thugs with guns who’ve been hired by Roarke (Ciaran Hinds), who’s actually the devil, to bring her in because it’s his kid and he wants to put his soul in the kid’s body because it’s more powerful than his. This opening sequence takes place in a monastery and there’s monks (including Anthony Head) and guns and Idris Elba and it sets the tone for what follows – this is going to be a good looking, (relatively) low budget action movie.

When Nadya and Danny escape the thugs and Moreau escapes death, the priest goes to find Johnny Blaze (Cage) to offer him a deal – if Blaze brings Danny in, Moreau’s fellow priests will pull the demon out of Blaze and he can go back to having a normal life.

And, yeah, I hate stories like this. I’m sure being the Ghost Rider isn’t the coolest superhero identity to have (it prevents a relationship with Eva Mendes at the end of the first film, after all), but isn’t being the Ghost Rider a cooler gig than jumping cars at a carnival? Wouldn’t you rather be out seeing the world on the back of a flaming chopper than sharing your front lawn with a a Snow Cone machine?) At least we’re dealing with a real demon here, so I can understand Blaze wanting him out, and at least the story spends more time with Blaze trying to rescue the kid than it does with him whining about not wanting to be who he is.

Once Moreau and Blaze make this deal, the rest of the film is primarily a chase film followed by a raid film. It’s not great but I didn’t hit the pause button, and I didn’t spend time checking Twitter or answering text messages. I just laid on the couch and watched a decent action film starring a guy who turns into a flaming skeleton.

And that’s really where VENGEANCE succeeds for me – it has a vision and it’s consistently deployed from start to finish. Neveldine/Taylor don’t screw around and let Cage get all wacky, either. In the first film, it’s like Cage changed his approach to the character every day, but Neveldine/Taylor only let him have a few scenes where he’s all Crazy Nic Cage. For the most part, they get a consistent performance from their leading man, and when he gets to indulge his acting chops, it comes in a admittedly bizarre scene between him and Danny in a diner while they’re on the run.

The content of the scene isn’t bizarre. The content is solid – Danny is looking for a father figure and Johnny feels a need to fill that role – but they’re on the run from the agents of the devil and here they are munching on fries and having a surrogate family moment. They try to cover it by saying that Nadya is off getting gas, but there’s no urgency to what they’re doing. Johnny even says they have to keep moving, but he says it like you might say, “We need to get to the beach sometime this summer. Maybe. If we can find a day that’s not too hot. And I’m not feeling bloated that day.”

Johnny does deliver Danny to some weird monks with writing on their face led by Christopher Lambert and Moreau does keep his promise to get the demon out of him. I love that Danny is p*ssed at Johnny for going through with the exorcism (that they both have a piece of Hell inside them gave them something to bond over), and there’s a great payoff later when Danny spits hellfire into Johnny to return the Spirit of Vengeance back into him.

This isn’t the greatest CGI work ever laid into a film, but it’s hard to make Ghost Rider look lame. They try – there’s a new transformation process that allows Cage to make weird faces – but for the most part, the Rider looks bad ass and if you’re actively choosing to watch a Ghost Rider film, you want that. The film also uses some comic book-inspired vignettes to explain things and they mostly work. They’re a bit of different and again, I’m big on superhero films not all looking and acting alike, so I applaud the effort.

SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE had a very modest budget of $57 million and you can see where they’ve cut some financial corners but it doesn’t prevent this movie from being a satisfying ride. (Get it? Gene Shalit would be so proud.) It’s world’s better than the first GHOST RIDER film, and even if it does feel a bit like a fill-in issue, it delivers. At the end of the film, the demon inside Johnny has reverted back to its original angelic form, and we get a blue-flamed Ghost Rider replacing the red-flamed version, which allows the movie to end on an up note – Blaze hasn’t disconnected himself from the demon, but he has made peace with it.

Sooner rather than later, SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE is going to find it’s way to the bargain bin, and when it does, I’ll be picking up a copy. It’s a slick, stylistic action movie starring a dude with a flaming skull.

Works for me.

PROMETHEUS: Ridley Scott’s Hobbit: There and Forward Again

Prometheus (2012) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Patrick Wilson.

If you’re coming to this site for the first time, you need to be made aware of something right now: SPOILERS are coming. Lots and lots of SPOILERS. This isn’t one of those reviews that talks about the film in generic terms, this is a detailed reaction to the movie and I’m not going to limit myself. I’m telling you right up front that SPOILERS are coming, so don’t read on if you don’t want the movie spoiled. Go watch the movie and then come back.

I’m also not here to tell you why you’re wrong for disagreeing with me. I’m here to tell you what I think about movies, nothing more, and I’d love to hear what you think about the film, too. I’m sorely tempted to pull an Avengers and write up reactions to all the principal characters because with this reaction clocking in around 2,400 words, there’s still way more I want to talk about. I simply don’t have the time to do it this time around, but I love that this movie makes me want to write about it.

That’s that. We clear? Right, then, let’s do this.

In case you watched any of the trailers for PROMETHEUS and thought trailers were always an accurate representation of the film it was selling, here’s what PROMETHEUS is not: it’s not ALIEN, it’s not a horror movie, and it’s not a summer blockbuster. It’s really not even a Ridley Scott movie as much as it is a movie about Ridley Scott movies. While Scott is still going strong, at age 74 it’s a safe bet that he’s closer to the end of his career than the beginning, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s turned in his most philosophical take on the subjects of life and death.

But since he’s still Ridley Scott, it is equally unsurprising that PROMETHEUS’ answer to these big, important, existentialist questions is that their significance comes from being the fuel that drives humanity on its journey, and not in being answered. PROMETHEUS strikes me as Ridley Scott’s Hobbit, serving as a prequel not just to ALIEN, but to his entire cinematic career. The questions and themes that return again and again in his films are present here, and so PROMETHEUS is contradictory, being both a prequel and a capstone, as if Scott has decided to make a movie in which he attempts to figure out, or coalesce, what he was doing in all of his other movies into this singular film.

And what does he find when he looks back on everything? He finds that it’s much more important to keep pushing forward than to look back, and that questions about where we come from are less important than questions about where we’re going. Life – the actual act of living – is, to Scott, something to be embraced. Questions fuel life, and we are defined not by the destination, not by the answer, but by the journey and the search.

PROMETHEUS is a fantastic movie that does not tell a fantastic story. Ultimately, the most truthful pre-release tease about what PROMETHEUS is came from Scott himself, who said that this film would contain the “strands of ALIEN’s DNA” but explore its own questions, and that’s exactly what it does. That the result is less successful than ALIEN should not come as a huge surprise, since 98% of all movies made don’t measure up to ALIEN. PROMETHEUS fails to live up to ALIEN because the narrative is often clunky and a good many characters are defined more by their appearance than their personalities. I don’t understand why an expedition into deep space would have such a poor screening process that two of its scientists would freak out and bail the second things get weird other than the fact that the story needs to have two scientists freak out and bail the second things gets weird so they can be the first sacrificial lambs to the film’s monsters.

In Dana Stevens’ review of the movie over at Slate, she writes: “Co-scripted by Damon Lindelof of Lost, this film shares that series’ love for nested mythologies and involute philosophical riddles. Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them.” Ms. Stevens is not impressed, lamenting, “Prometheus could have been an elegant, moody sci-fi actioner if only it didn’t strain so hard (especially in the final scenes) for weighty existential meaning. [...] As Prometheus’ characters wrestle with these slippery abstract questions, the concrete and immediate ones raised by the story itself go unanswered. What were the motives of our marble-skinned forebears in creating us, given that they now seem bent on destroying us? And what are David’s motives as he commits acts that seem intended to sabotage the ship’s mission? To judge by a closing teaser that links this movie’s rapidly mutating beasts to the multi-mouthed xenomorphs of Alien, we’ll have to wait until the next installment in the franchise to find out. After all the strenuous philosophizing that came before, the ending’s floppy irresolution feels less like a sophisticated embrace of ambiguity than like a profound cosmic cop-out.”

I’m not picking on Ms. Stevens, nor am I interested in pointing out why she’s wrong, because she’s turned in a well-written review, and other than one instance where she uses the “you” formulation that mistakes her experience for a universal experience, I really only disagree with her conclusions rather than her individual points.

I like PROMETHEUS. I like it quite a bit, though I can certainly understand why people do not like the film. In regards to Ms. Stevens, I simply don’t share her frustrations about the film refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, and I don’t feel like the film is straining for weighty existential meaning at all. The characters in the film struggle with these questions but I don’t think Scott, or the man he chose to re-work the original script he was given, LOST’s Damon Lindelof, struggle with them. I should point out here that I was one of the seeming few who absolutely loved the final episode of LOST, as well, and PROMETHEUS, as Ms. Stevens points out, shares a good deal with LOST’s overall structure of raising questions and building mysteries that it refuses to answer. Like LOST, PROMETHEUS ultimately decides that after building a mystery, resolving the mystery is less important than offering an emotional resolution. If life makes you lemons, Scott and Lindelof are interested in making lemonade, while Stevens is interested in finding out where the lemons came from – neither side is wrong, but I don’t think PROMETHEUS would have been a better film if we did get those answers. Learning why the Engineers did what they did would have provided an interesting answer, but it’s not an answer that defines the film’s characters, and PROMETHEUS is far more interested in examining how the characters react to questions than in answering the actual questions.

I can certainly understand how frustrating this is, and I certainly would not like all stories to be constructed in this manner, but I also have some love for movies that step outside of the box and that refuse to play it straight. And PROMETHEUS does offer answers – it’s just not the answers that its characters forward as being the most important. They’re here to learn about the great mysteries of the universe, but Scott and Lindelof are here to learn about them. And what they find is coded right in plain sight when Janek (Idris Elba) sings a little ditty after getting the invite back to Vickers’ quarters: “If you can’t be … with the one you love … love the one you’re with.”

In other words, embrace the challenges of the moment you’re in. Don’t let your long term desires interfere with the life that’s happening around you.

In 2089, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers a star map while on a dig with her partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). It’s the same star map found across the globe on multiple archaeological finds from civilizations that had no contact with one another. Their find catches the attention of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, in some atrociously bag old person make-up), and he funds a trip to the stars so they can find the so-called “Engineers,” whom they hope to find alive.

We’ve got a cast full of people with different goals: Shaw wants to find answers, Holloway wants to find the Engineers alive, Vickers (Charlize Theron) is the corporate agent who lurks in the background, Janek (Idris Elba) is the captain of the ship who is interested in keeping people safe and getting in Vickers’ pants, David (Michael Fassbender), a robot with mysterious, somewhat contradictory actions, and everyone else, who can be grouped under the title of Cannon Fodder.

PROMETHEUS would have benefited a bit from ALIEN’s technique with characterization, where the characters were simply but clearly drawn. Here, characters are a bit more slippery and it’s to the film’s disadvantage. PROMETHEUS is constantly creating doubt as to David and Vickers’ motives, and it throws in odd bumps in the characterization. After getting to LV-223 and discovering a man-made structure which contains dead Engineers and then returning to the ship in a storm, Holloway decides to play the grumpy drunk because the Engineers weren’t alive, and then be a dick to David because …

I dunno. It’s like his manhood is challenged by David’s very existence, so he’s always looking to make little digs at the robot. It’s hardly like David is all that sympathetic, either, because he comes back with one of the oozing metal cylinders and doesn’t tell anyone about it. Then he drugs David’s drink with a bit of the ooze that ends up infecting David, which, in turn, infects/impregnates Shaw after she and David have sex, which leads to Shaw having to enter a surgery tube (I forget the fancy name) where she has to cut out the fast growing alien fetus inside of her.

There’s a question with David about how much of what he’s doing is because he’s a programmed robot and how much is him expanding and potentially jumping his programming. While the crew is in stasis, he’s busy learning about them and simply acquiring knowledge. He likes to play basketball and watch Lawrence of Arabia, and when they reach LV-223, it’s David who has to wake the rest of the crew up.

The biggest narrative failure in PROMETHEUS is that the film doesn’t do a better job setting up David and Shaw as rivals. By combining David, Shaw, Vickers, Janek, and Holloway together in a chaos cloud from which David and Shaw emerge, it muddles the narrative focus. I think the movie would have been better off more clearly making David and Shaw the opposing signposts around which everything revolves, with the other characters filling the grey space between these two black and white positions, because that’s where the movie ultimately ends up, and if you’re going to raise questions that you don’t answer, I think you need to make a point to lock down the emotional conflict, and PROMETHEUS doesn’t do this as strongly as it needs to for me.

Where PROMETHEUS shines is as a spectacle; this is a gorgeously shot movie, whether it’s the ship’s interior or the exterior’s of Earth, space, and LV-223. There’s lots of great little visual touches, with the very-cool red survey “pups” and the blue survey suits working best.

Plus, there’s all the connections to ALIEN, which are not over-sold, but in clear evidence: the Engineer’s space ship, the interior design of Prometheus, the Alien-like creatures, and the H.R. Giger-esque designs that touch nearly everything on LV-223. And in the final scene, the Cthulhu creature shoves its tentacle down the Engineer’s throat and out pops what is clearly the first Alien that we recognize as “our” Alien.

There’s a whole handful of excellent action spectacles, from an Engineer’s initial appearance on Earth to the silica-based storm on LV-223 to the surgery sequence to the Prometheus taking out the Engineers’ ship to the Engineer vs. Cthulu-spawn final battle, but the real signature moment comes when David is on the bridge of the Engineer’s ship and activates the star map. I love scenes like this, where people are walking around inside of massive, 3D maps, and the visual effects team on PROMETHEUS nails it. David figures out that this Engineer ship was headed for Earth when the tragedy happened that cut it short.

What’s that tragedy? The Aliens took them out. Now, these aren’t the Aliens we come to know and love but a prior generation that are clearly modeled on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu more than Giger’s Alien, especially as it grows larger. The role of the Engineers and the Aliens are two of the questions that PROMETHEUS refuses to answer. The film indicates the Engineers did, in fact, build humanity because there’s a DNA match between the two species, and also indicates that the Engineers turned on their creation and were headed to Earth to wipe humanity out. This idea is enforced when the one, last surviving Engineer is awoken and starts killing people. (Which brings up another muddled plot point – Peter Weyland has been kept in deep freeze this while movie and then awoken to go see the Engineers. He’s hoping they grant him immortality, but instead they kill him almost instantly, meaning his whole appearance in space was kind of a pointless dud.) Why did the Engineers create humanity and then want to destroy it? Were the Aliens created by the Engineers to infest the Earth? The film refuses to answer and it doesn’t really bother me all that much because it works as a commentary on faith and how, in the end, whether one chooses to believe in God or disbelieve in God, we’ve yet to get an answer to the question of His existence. What’s important isn’t that we get an answer, but that we keep searching.

I know I’m in the minority on this, but not getting an answer doesn’t really bother me because I’m far more interested in what the characters do with the not knowing than I am bothered with not getting an answer. Both Shaw and David – the woman of religious faith and the atheistic robot – make it out of the film alive and they choose to work together to get off LV-223 and go exploring through space.

The key question that PROMETHEUS poses for itself is David’s, “How far are you willing to go to learn the truth?” All other questions and mysteries are secondary to this concept – what are you willing to do and how far are you willing to go to get the answers you want? Holloway was devastated when he thought there were no Engineers (and thus he dies a physical death that matches his psychological death), but Shaw and David kept pushing forward, and the film ends not with an answer to why the Engineers built humanity or why they then decided to wipe humanity out, but with Shaw and David staying on the hunt.

For me, it’s a powerful resolution, as the true believer and the atheist come together to continue the search for their answers. PROMETHEUS is ultimately about humanity’s never-ending quest for knowledge, and it’s fitting that its two survivors are those who were most interested in acquiring as much knowledge as possible. While it’s a difficult film with a muddled narrative, it’s also an exciting film for me to watch and think about. I can’t wait to see it again.

And therein lies the rub: In Tolkien’s Hobbit, Bilbo’s memoir is entitled There and Back Again, but for Ridley Scott, there is no going back again because a return home signifies an end to the journey, and Scott is too unsettled for tidy endings. The only real finality in his signature films (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator) comes through death, and those who make it to the end of Scott’s films are typically unsettled survivors – they may have made it to the credits, but the experience they’ve undergone has altered their worldview in such a way that they cannot mentally go home again even if they can physically go home again.

There and back again? No. There and forward again.

THOR: It Was Asgard and Its Warriors That Brought Peace to the Universe

Thor (2011) – Directed by Kenneth Branagh – The 4th Marvel Cinematic Universe Film – Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Anthony Hopkins, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Kat Dennings, Jaimie Alexander, Ray Stevenson, Joshua Dallas, Tadanobu Asano, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, and Stan Lee.

We don’t watch movies in a vacuum. Even if we literally watched movies in a vacuum, we wouldn’t be watching them in a figurative vacuum. I bring this up because, whenever you read this, I watched this soon after watching Green Lantern, and the difference between the two films could not be more stark: while Green Lantern runs from what it is, THOR embraces it.

As I discussed in the GL review, that film fronts the cosmic angle in its marketing, but then largely fails to deliver on any of it in the actual film. While Hal makes a visit to Oa, nothing that happens there really matters all that much to the film; Hal’s growth is due to Earth-bound concerns and his being Green Lantern doesn’t really mean anything to the film except that it gives Hal a pretty green ring and an ugly mask.

In light of my disappointment with Lantern, THOR comes across like a big breath of fresh Alfheim air.

THOR is a fantastic movie, skillfully blending the dual subplots of Earth and Asgard, and the result is a film that feels like both a superhero movie and a cosmic movie. Unlike the cheap-looking CGI of Green Lantern, THOR’s CGI is gorgeous and natural-looking; instead of looking like some cut-scene in a video game as Oa did, Asgard and Jotunheim feel like real places, thanks in part to the massive Asgardian sets the film makers had built.

THOR was my favorite comic as a kid. I was lucky to start reading comics during the Walt Simonson era and there’s no single author who’s had as much direct influence on my own writing as Simonson; I loved the way he kept his characters human no matter how large the plot or great the threat. I met Simonson and his wife Louise once, at a convention in Boston, and like many of these encounters it was a brief back-and-forth, but unlike many of these chats we have with the people who write and draw our comics, I can still remember both conversation more than two decades later. As Simonson’s THOR was my favorite comic, the one back issue I wanted desperately to buy was a copy of his first issue on the title, THOR 337. In the dealer’s room I stopped at a table, picked up a sealed copy of 337, opened it up and started flipping through it. Next thing I know some old guy (when you’re 13 or so, everyone out of college is an old guy) makes some remark about how he really liked how that issue came out and takes it from me.

The old guy was Walt Simonson and I spent a precious few moments talking with him about the issue.

By talking I mean I stumbled and mumbled a few questions and gushed a bit of praise while he did most of the talking. The one clear thing that I remember saying was, “Can you sign it?” to which the dealer thankfully replied, “You might want to buy it first, because once he does, the price goes up.”

I paid for it and Simonson signed it and I felt like such an incredible loser that I began my lifelong hatred of autographs. I was having a nice chat with the guy who was writing and drawing my favorite comic and I brought the conversation to a crashing halt by asking for his signature. What a noob. As if someone writing their name is more important than the experience of talking with someone. Lesson learned: autographs are stupid. (Well, okay, they’re not stupid but I haven’t tried to acquire one since then; for me, given a choice, experience trumps evidence every single time.) Later, my pals and I had a brief chat with Louise Simonson and she couldn’t have been a nicer person to give a few minutes to three idiot kids, and then we bugged Walt again about one particular cover that looked like he’d drawn a hand with six fingers but hadn’t. Great, great people, and it was nice to see them have a cameo in Branagh’s film.

Oh, right, this is a movie review.

Importantly, THOR begins in Asgard with a Lord of the Rings-esque historical opening: Odin (Anthony Hopkins) narrates a 10th century battle between the Frost Giants and Asgard that ends with Odin claiming the Casket of Ancient Winters, a really powerful device that makes everything really cold. It would have been easy writing a movie that focused on a post-banishment Thor being dropped down onto Earth without a memory of who he was and what he was doing. That would have provided an Earth-centric movie that would have placated the idiot studio execs who think every movie needs to take place in New York City. (No offense, New York.) Instead, we open with a nice balance between the two realms. A quick sequence on Earth in which we’re introduced to Jane Foster, Erik Selvig, and Darcy Lewis (Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, and Kat Dennings, respectively) ends with Thor falling to Earth. The film then jumps back in time a bit to reveal how Thor came to be cast out of Asgard.

It’s Coronation Day in the Golden Realm, as Odin is ready to hand the reigns of leadership over to Thor. Before Thor can be crowned King, however, some Frost Giants bust into the Weapons Vault and attempt to steal back the Casket of Ancient Winters, and we get out first glimpse of the Destroyer, the biggest, baddest-ass security guard ever built. The Destroyer steps out from behind his protective cage, opens up his front grill, and blasts the life out of the thieving giants.

Nobody is happy about the attack, but Odin takes the long-view, insisting that the Destroyer did its job and the Frost Giants have paid for their transgression with their lives; Thor, on other hand, thinks the thing to do is go to Jotunheim and knock the giants around since they have, in fact, broken the truce. Odin doesn’t budge, however, insisting that taking the war back to Laufey (Colm Feore) and his people will only bring more war.

Which is exactly what Thor wants.

It’s a very compelling conflict between father and son; the father who brought peace to the universe by defeating the Frost Giants now ordering his son to stand down. Thor yearns for the chance to prove himself in battle and his anger is focused on the denial of conflict and not the denial of his ascension to King. Thor is more interested in being a warrior instead of a king, and so he rounds up his allies in order to convince them to go to Jotunheim against Odin’s wishes. Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Sif (Jaimie Alexander), and the Warriors Three: Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), Fandral (Josua Dallas), and Hogun (Tadanobu Asano). Thor’s comrades are less than thrilled with the idea, but Thor convinces them to come along through the force of his adventuresome, contagious personality.

It can be hard to convey camaraderie without seeing the evolution of a relationship, but the actors do a very good job conveying a real sense of history between these characters. You can see how everyone has their place within the group, and their comfort (or, in Loki’s case, discomfort) with one another is palpable. Thor is definitely the ring leader but the rest aren’t afraid to stand up to him and question the wisdom of this move. When Thor reminds them all how they owe him, it’s done with jocularity, not entitlement. And when he asks Sif who was it that made her overcome the Asgardian sexism that said a woman couldn’t be a great warrior, Sif replies with a big smile that, “I did!,” to which Thor smiles back a bit sheepishly, “Aye, but I supported you!”

Let’s be real, here. We’re not going to get a Sif and the Warriors Three movie, but if we did, I’d be there.

All of these actors are well cast to deliver what the film demands of them, but the real star here is Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. All I’ve ever seen Hiddleston in before this film were the 6 Wallander BBC movies he’s made with Branagh. In those films, Hiddleston is solid in a small role, but there’s just not enough there to really judge his talents. In hindsight, what we can see of Loki in those Wallander films is a guy who does his job, content to deliver what the limited role needs, with an understanding that his job isn’t to be the center of attention. During the few times when the script requires Hiddleston to step to the fore, he delivers. Hiddleston’s character in Wallander is very much a young cop trying to find his place in the police department, not content to do what he often considers menial or mundane work when what he really wants to be doing is playing a more prominent role – either in Wallander’s investigations or in leading his own.

The same traits apply to Loki, and Hiddleston’s performance is again just what the movie needs: he’s content to sit in the background as Thor and Odin have at one another, stepping in only when his machinations can help push them to the outcome he desires. What’s so darn wonderful about Hiddleston’s performance and this conception of Loki that he, Branagh, and the writers put together is that Loki is the same master manipulator that we know from the comics, but without any of the grandstanding smirkiness that we might expect. This isn’t a Loki that slyly manipulates Thor into going to Jotunheim by providing the right comment at the right time to push his brother past the tipping point and then sits back with a big crap-eating grin on his face. He just manipulates and tags along, content to wear his mask and wait for his opportunity. The great thing is, if you don’t know who Loki is, you really don’t know he’s the guy pulling the strings, and if you do know who he is, you can see the strings being pulled and appreciate that they didn’t cast an actor who would ham everything up. A lot of actors and a lot of directors might want you to know that Loki is wicked right from the start, but luckily, Hiddleston and Branagh have decided to downplay his cleverness and let it unfold naturally.

Chris Hemsworth is also very good as Thor, the brash kid still desperate to prove himself on the field of battle who gets his power taken away from him and cast out of his home. I love that the film shows us what a jerk he is; we don’t just hear Odin telling him he’s a vain, cruel, arrogant boy, we see it. Odin’s condemnation contains lots of delicious adjectives, but it’s that noun at the end, “boy,” that bears the full weight of Odin’s anger. Whatever else Thor is, he’s clearly just a boy and Hopkins delivers the line in such a way that you feel like Odin has known all along that Thor isn’t ready to be king, but has convinced himself otherwise. Now, after Thor leads his pals into Jotunheim to attack Laufey, and after Odin has to step in and save them from being killed by the Frost Giants, Odin is forced to confront the consequences of that bit of self-deception. While it’s Thor who’s cast out, Odin’s anger is directed at himself every bit as much as it’s directed at Thor.

On Earth, Thor literally falls into the lives of Jane, Erik, and Darcy. Jane has been recast for the movies as an astrophysicist studying strange light displays in the New Mexican sky. Erik is her mentor and Darcy is her gopher. Each has a clearly defined role: Jane is the brilliant scientist who’s driven to find the answers she’s looking for, while Erik takes the long view, preaching caution in order to pump the brakes on Jane’s short-term thinking. Darcy is the comedic relief, providing just enough laughs to help keep the film’s momentum going strong.

If there’s a problem with the film, and it’s a bit of a nitpick, it’s Jane Foster. She starts off as a very strong character, but somewhere along the line she becomes a bit too Lovesick Little Girl. Her interest in Thor is initially built on the fact that he can provide answers to her scientific question. She notices his hotness, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but at some point when her interest turns personal, Jane becomes a bit unhinged. The film hints at an emptiness in her life; when Thor is hanging with them, Jane gives him some of her ex-boyfriend’s clothes, which tells us, 1. she’s alone but not moved on, and 2. Dr. Donald Blake must have been a big dude, too.

Almost everything in this film works on multiple levels, which gives THOR a nice sense of depth. Take Darcy’s tazing of Thor – not only is it funny but it gives us an indication of his stripped-down power levels.

On Earth, Thor is coming to grips with his situation and when he learns that Mjolnir has landed in the desert outside of town, he knows that’s where he needs to go. The locals have gathered around the hammer, turning it into a festival atmosphere. Stan Lee gets his requisite guest shot as a guy who tries, and fails, to pull the hammer off the ground with his truck.

Word spreads.

Enter SHIELD.

Enter Agent Phil Coulson.

Clark Gregg is back in the saddle as the confident, quick-witted, middle-management-looking agent, and he continues to make this character the real glue that holds these Marvel films together. What I like about Gregg’s performance is that you always get the sense that he’s the only guy who sees the big picture and that he knows he’s at the center of this story. He also talks differently than everyone else in these movies; it’s like there’s one Aaron Sorkin character walking around in all these decidedly non-Sorkin films. Coulson is quick with a quip and firm with his resolve; he’s also incredibly smart and flexible. When Thor breaks into the SHIELD site that’s been built up around Mjolnir, he kicks the crap out of the SHIELD soldiers but then crumples in anguish when he finds out he can’t lift his hammer, allowing SHIELD to capture him. Coulson interrogates him, wanting to find out where he received his training, but Thor’s not talking. Knowing he’s hit a wall, Coulson allows Dr. Selvig to take him away, when he shows up with a lame story that Thor is actually Donald Blake. Coulson knows Selvig is lying but he also knows it’s the only way he’s going to get any answers, so he lets him go.

Thor’s storming of the SHIELD site also marks the debut of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) into the Marvel cinematic universe, and it’s a fantastic debut. As Thor is knocking heads and the rain is pouring down, some half-seen SHIELD agent grabs a bow and gets hoisted above the ground, taking aim. He keeps asking for Coulson’s orders if he should shoot, eventually telling him, “Hurry up, Coulson. I’m starting to root for this guy.”

What a moment. Pure fanboy bliss.

The last few years have seen most of my childhood favorites turned into excellent movies: Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Spider-Man, Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern … even the Silver Surfer made his way to the big screen, though in the daft Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. There was a special kind of thrill seeing Hawkeye pop up in a movie, though. I was a huge West Coast Avengers fan back in the day, having started to read comics right as WCA was beginning. I’ve always felt that the WCA was “my Avengers,” so to see Clint take a bow in THOR (of all places) was pretty darn awesome.

THOR is a wonderfully paced movie, continually shifting emotions between Earth and Asgard. When Thor is captured and sitting in the makeshift SHIELD cell, Loki pops in for a visit and tells Thor that he can never return to Asgard. Sif and the Warriors Three are in Asgard, struggling over what to do; it’s a great bit as you see them struggling to operate without their leader and reacting poorly to Loki’s new leadership role.

Because Loki is now King of Asgard (after Odin falls into the Odinsleep), he’s got the realm to himself, but he’s not done plotting. It was Loki who let the Frost Giants in back at the start of the movie, and Loki who goes to Laufey to make a deal with him that will allow his real father to kill his adoptive father. Ah, but that’s not enough scheming for Loki because he wants to allow Laufey in to kill Odin just so he can kill Laufey and save Odin. It’s just so nice to watch a film where the bad guy thinks long term and doesn’t feel the need to ham it up for 120 minutes until he gets his face pounded in by the hero.

Which, of course, Thor is only happy to do. Sif and the Warriors Three convince Heimdall (Idris Elba) to let them go to Earth. Well, actually, they argue about wanting to go to convince Heimdall to open the Bifrost and let them go when Heimdall sends a messenger to bring them to him. Elba is fantastic as the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge, which brings us to this …

Idris Elba is black. And he’s playing a Viking god.

Oh. The. Humanity.

Some wankers on the Nutjob Right were all up in arms about this when it was announced. Can’t have a black Viking god. Or an Asian Viking god. Why? Well, as we all know, Vikings only like white people.

Right here you might be expecting me to lay on the “people are willing to accept a magical hammer that no one can lift so why can’t they handle a black Viking?” routine, but I’m not going to do it. There’s two reasons. The first is that Elba brings a whole damn lot to THOR; in a quiet, small role he still manages to make Heimdall ring with power, torn between his duty to his King, his role as guardian, and doing what’s right. In short, Elba delivers a performance totally worthy of this conception of Heimdall and what I want out of a film is good actors giving good performances. Elba does that.

The second reason I’m okay with it is because I’m not a racist. And if you start hiring actors who only fit the racial and ethnic profile, well, then you’re never going to find enough Viking gods to play all these roles, are you? Why is it any more okay to have a bunch of white Brits running around pretending to be Vikings than it is to have a black Brit?

Because he’s black?

Get off yourself.

Plus, if you take half a second to actually think this “Vikings can’t worship black gods” bit, it completely falls apart. If the idea is that there are this race of gods that make themselves known to Vikings, and the Vikings decide to worship them, then the gods can be anything. The idea that Vikings won’t worship non-white Gods only really makes sense if the gods don’t actually exist, and that the pantheon was created by humans as fictitious magical, lily-white beings who live on the other side of a rainbow.

Though, presumably, not Leprechauns.

That bit of logic might work out here in the real world, but in the world of Marvel Comics, these gods are actual gods. Or aliens, as the film recasts them, and that means they can be whatever the heck you want them to be because the Vikings, in all likelihood, were going to worship whomever showed up to be worshiped. If Odin was worried the human folk wouldn’t take to a black god, well, he could, I don’t know, put him in charge of the Bifrost and tell him he could never leave his station.

Anyways, it’s a tiresome argument and if you’re going to let a bit of racial recasting ruin your appreciation of a film this good, well, you’ll always have Birth a Nation.

When Sif and the Warriors Three arrive on Earth, they find a human Thor hanging with the mortals, which is a problem because Loki has sent the Destroyer down to take care of everyone. The Asgardians look to Thor to join them but he tells them he’s only human and thus can’t help, so he asks them to buy some time so Jane, Erik, and Darcy can help him get the locals out of town. The Destroyer sequence is simply awesome, starting with its initial arrival, where a SHIELD agent asks Coulson, “Is it one of Stark’s?”

“I don’t know,” Coulson replies, “he doesn’t tell me anything.”

The Destroyer does its damage and Thor ends up sacrificing himself to save the others, which leads to him once again being worthy of Mjolnir, which flashes in to give Thor back his Asgardianness. Thor and his Asgardian pals head back to Asgard for the big finish, which sees Thor and Loki throwdown on the Rainbow Bridge. The bridge ends up going kablammo, which prevents Thor from heading back to Earth to continue his romance with Jane, who’s now working for SHIELD. Showing more of his flexibility, Coulson ends up giving her all of her stuff back that he took from her and gives her a job, as Thor is forced to ask Heimdall to spy on her for him.

THOR is a film that proves that superhero movies can take a step off-planet and be successful. More importantly, it proves that superhero movies can stay true to their roots and not only deliver the goods but put people in the seats – THOR took in $450 million worldwide. But really, what it proves is that it’s a damn fine movie. I love everything about this movie apart from Jane’s brief foray as the Lovesick Girl. The scene where Selvig and Thor bond over beer is terrific, and Skarsgard brings a real sense of concern for Jane over his confusion with the appearance of his boyhood myths. The set designs and costumes on Asgard are brilliant, and all of the fight sequences work. Thor’s journey from the desperate-to-fight warrior to the man willing to sacrifice himself for others is played out beautifully, and without any of that, “I have learned my lesson and will now be a different person” mumbo jumbo – his arc simply happens. Branagh doesn’t treat his audience like they’re idiots because there’s a faith in the story he’s telling with the characters and actors he’s using to tell that story.

THOR is, quite simply, an absolutely stunning, wonderful movie.

Unfortunately, Marvel has announced that Branagh isn’t coming back to direct the sequel but may remain in a producer’s role. They’ve hired Patty Jenkins (director of Monster) to handle the sequel and while my preference would be for a more experienced hand, Branagh has built a phenomenal world for the writers to craft a story in and for Jenkins to move the pieces around. Hemsworth, Portman, and Hiddleston will all be back, and one hopes that Jenkins can pull a Branagh and bring in an actor or two she’s worked with in the past to bring into the world of cinematic Marvel.

Or can you actually think of someone better than her to play her?