Better must mean something completely different in this context.
That sounds like something from a horror movie.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
- Start date
That sounds like something from a horror movie.
It's 'Gorr the God Butcher' not 'Gorr the Useless' which, sadly, is what we got.
Well, the God-Butcher run WAS a horror story.
My biggest issue with Waititi's Thor movies is that he took very heavy Thor stories (Ragnarok, the God Butcher) and made them comedies.
None of that would be "more" or "better" by my definitions, certainly not if we're talking about how effective an MCU movie villain is as a character. Gorr had an actual personality and a relatable story, which Malekith and Hela did not. Ragnarok had plenty of scenes of death and destruction, but they were shallow and devoid of emotional impact because they had no grounding in character. All the viewpoint characters we could've identified with were wiped out casually, and Karl Urban's character arc was conveyed almost entirely through smoldering wordless gazes.
I don't need to see Gorr actually wiping out a bunch of gods. What's important is why he wants to wipe out the gods. And the movie conveyed that effectively.
Good to know.
And people wonder why I don't read comics. There are so many horrific images in those books that I cannot unsee.
I'd argue that we need to know why (which the movie did well) But that we also need to see that he is effective. Gorr was effing terrifying in the comics, but he's a joke in the movie.
Other than the inevitable subjectivity of humor, I think this is the core of why the movie is so controversial.
Many, many people are like you and wanted to see an epic war for the survival of the Asgardian people against an utterly merciless butcher. It's not entirely unreasonable, given that's basically what the source material is.
But it's also fundamentally judging the movie against a standard it's not even supposed to be hitting. That's not the movie Waititi was trying to make. The movie he was trying to make was a bittersweet, romantic human drama/dramedy about damaged people desperately searching for human connection - and hurting themselves and/or others through that desperation. And while I think the movie still has issues and almost certainy left too much on the cutting room floor, it does a pretty strong job hitting the mark it's trying to hit, imo. That makes it both entertaining and interestingly unique in the genre.
Why use that character as the villain then, if there's no intention of presenting him in any sort of authentic way? There was nearly 60 years of Thor comics at that point, pick someone else.
I think that's fine for, say, a batman villain
You don't like DeVito's Penguin? There will be others.
But Gorr? We are never, ever going to see another God Butcher film. I know everything can't ever be a 1:1 ratio, but if that's the only Gorr I was ever going to get, I'd have rather had one closer to the source material.
It goes in the opposite direction as well. If I'm only ever going to get one Electro, I'd rather the goofy version from the comics than a "dark" one that melts people's eyes out of their skulls.
We've had at least two Electros.
I imagine Gorr will come back and be the absolutely horror villain of the comics.
I imagine Gorr will come back and be the absolutely horror villain of the comics.
Not sure how being less violent alone makes him 100% inauthentic. He is still a God-butcher. And while I don't know all the other Thor characters they might have chosen otherwise, I have a hard time imagining any of them having such a perfect backstory for the story this movie told. That sequence of Gorr dying in the desert praying to his god only to be completely cast aside by this asshole he spent his whole life worshipping is half of what makes his end of this story work.
Eh, I think that's wildly over-pessimistic. He's the last Gorr you'll see for a while, but the last ever? Highly doubtful.
And even if it turns out to be true, you still have the comics. The point of movies is not to just do exactly what the comics did on a tv screen. The point is to make interesting movies. Sometimes that happens by sticking at least somewhat close to source material, but a lot of times it happens by deliberately going far away from source material, too.
Well, as I said, I'm not looking for terrifying, I'm looking for well-developed antagonist characters. The one does not correlate with the other. I also have no familiarity with Thor comics; I'm speaking purely in terms of the MCU. Of the four MCU Thor villains to date, irrespective of any other versions of them, I find Gorr a better-drawn character than Malekith or Hela, or than some of the MCU's other one-dimensional villains. I found his story more interesting than theirs. Was it a great movie? No, but it was more effective than Ragnarok for me, partly because it had a better-written villain.
I can see where not knowing the source material would actually benefit that films audience. To be fair, Bale played Gorr exactly how i wanted him to be played, minus the redemption at the end.
Hela was never Thor's sister in the comics, so I wasn't reallyt bothered by its portrayal, or lack thereof.
The latest issue of Empire magazine, while featuring Deadpool and Wolverine on the cover, has an article about Captain America Brave New World with the first officially released picture of Sam's Cap costume.
https://www.empireonline.com/movies...ve-new-world-sam-wilson-suit-exclusive-image/
https://www.empireonline.com/movies...ve-new-world-sam-wilson-suit-exclusive-image/
What matters in an adaptation is not its resemblance to the source, but its merits as a self-contained story. The point is not to copy the original, which would be redundant, but to use, transform, or discard such of its elements as will serve the needs of your own current narrative, a distinct interpretation of the idea. After all, the point of adapting a story to a new medium is largely to introduce it to a new audience. From their perspective, the work itself is the only thing being considered, so that's what should take priority.
In short, what matters is whether the movie is good. Sometimes fidelity to the comics makes it good, sometimes new additions or changes make it good. Or sometimes they make it bad. Fidelity is not about good or bad, it's a separate axis altogether.
Giancarlo Esposito claims that he’s been cast in the MCU, but not as a role that he’s previously been linked to. Hmmm. Given the overlap between marvel and Star Wars, it probably makes sense that he’s landed a role, all the same
https://collider.com/giancarlo-esposito-cast-mcu-role/
https://collider.com/giancarlo-esposito-cast-mcu-role/
There's no way they could have done that and still gotten the PG-13 rating they aim for with the core MCU movies.
Oh yeah, Doom has the potential to be an awesome villain, but I just like it better when they build up to the big villains like that instead of just jump right to them.
Because there were other elements of the character that made him a good fit for the story they were telling.
"Authentic" doesn't automatically equate to "good." Like I said, those are perpendicular axes. There have been great characters that were radical reinventions of their comics inspirations, like Heath Ledger's Joker or Superman & Lois's Bruno Mannheim. Or who didn't exist at all in the comics, like Phil Coulson or Sara Lance.
Art is not copying. Art is taking an inspiration and doing something new with it. There's no guarantee that new thing will be worthwhile, but if it doesn't work, it's not because of its novelty.