I really like Skurge. I wish they could have done more with him, but the screen time he got was still… well some of his scenes were just really good and memorable.
Well I was completely wrong on that prediction!
I’m glad everyone likes this even more than I do, because I do like this movie, and it’s great to hear it’s landing so well for everyone else.
He was a narrative necessity more than an interesting character in his own right. Good villains always need a lackey (or captured hero) to monologue at. That’s how the audience finds out what the villains big plan is!
Hela had both in this movie, but mostly Skurge.
There was a nice call out in the credits to Simonson’s work on the comic.
I don’t know what to tell you. I liked Skurge, and I wanted to know more about him. His role was fine on an already kind of crowded landscape.
I thought this sequence was a little too predictable:
- Person makes a big dramatic speech.
- Something funny happens at the end to undercut the drama.
That happened enough times that it started getting predictable. Luckily, the humorous moment was usually funny enough that I could overlook it.
Interesting article over at The A.V. Club about how Marvel bobbled their handling the reveal of Hulk in this movie:
Now I haven’t seen the movie yet, but given how Hulk is front and center in their promotion and hownopenly we’ve been discussing him being in the movie, I’m not sure Hulk’s presence can really be thought of as a spoiler. Though I have to concede that if that reveal is in the middle of the movie and you’ve gotten no warning about his identity, I could see where that would be a fun reveal. They make the comparison to Terminator 2, where nobody even tried to hide the fact that Schwarzenegger was playing the good guy that time around, and that definitely would have been cool to not know going in.
That’s bunk, that reveal in the trailer made me MORE excited to see the movie.
That’s a fair point, I have zero interest in Thor but I like the Hulk a whole bunch.
It’s a great bit of marketing. But what makes for good marketing isn’t necessarily what’s good for the moviegoing experience.
Saw it yesterday, had a delightful time, so it was fine…?
Me too. That scenes made me think it was not going to be a bleak, watch all this horrible stuff happening with Ragnarok DC depressing movie. Also the Thor movies are like the worst of the single hero movies outside of, you guessed, the dead Hulk movies.
I did not see either Thor movie in theater. I saw this one opening weekend.
So are we saying then that there exists something like a good spoiler? Some piece of info that, if leaked from a movie or something, can generate interest and goodwill rather than pissing people off?
Totally with ya there man. Thor 1: Okay but mostly boring. Thor 2: Piece of garbage. Ragnarok: Gonna see at least 2 more times in the theater.
I guess? I’m usually very spoilerphobic but I had no problem with this at all.
I don’t think you can hide that kind of thing anymore, anyway.
I mean, setting aside the fact that the internet exists and you can’t control the information once the first person sees it, Mark Ruffalo has an agent. He’s doing contract negotiations, figuring out where his name goes on the posters, and setting up his talk show appearances. I don’t think it was ever even a possibility.
Hiding that reveal would have been cool, but I think it was equally cool to have the synopsis include “Hulk/Thor team up” from the get-go.
Right? Painting this as something of a buddy comedy with Thor and Hulk just made me wanna see it more.
I don’t think it’s a simple either/or answer. Yes, it made me more excited to see the movie too, which I’m sure is why they put it in there. But I would have enjoyed it even more if I didn’t know about it ahead of time.
If it had been a complete surprise that showed up in the middle of the movie?? I would have LOST MY SHIT. It would have gone down as one of the greatest movie reveals of all time! But they want to get asses in the seats, so they’re going to reveal as much of the movie as they can get away with.
(And by the way, it’s the same thing with Spider-Man in Civil War. THAT’S something they could have kept secret more easily, and people would have lost their damn minds! I don’t think “It will get more people in the theaters!” is a valid excuse for ruining major surprises in a movie.)
But would you have been more or less likely to see it in theaters given the…inconsistent nature of the previous Thor movies, had you not known Hulk was in it at all? I dunno if I would’ve seen it at all in theaters, given how fucking awful Thor 2 was.
Yeah, I was more likely to see it. But given the choice between “more likely to see it, and thought it was really good” and “less likely to see it, but HOLY CRAP I can’t believe they pulled that off!”, I would rather have the second experience. You only have one chance to surprise people.
I can think of plenty of movies where some major reveal would have made the opening-day crowds bigger, but ultimately would have lessened the impact of the surprise. Like I said, I don’t think you can absolutely say one way or the other, but obviously the publicists chose the way they did for a reason.