#thor!

I mean, YES, postcolonial politics: Taika made a movie where the message is, seriously, BURN IT ALL DOWN.  The idea that they end up overtly questioning where all that Azardian gold came from - framing the whole society as one built on exploitation, Hela as the Return of The Repressed, the massive violence underlying what appear to be the most civilized societies - and then propose this unbelievably radical solution: don’t be afraid of burning it down and starting again. (Talk about a contemporary film in the age of tearing down statues and questioning Columbus Day! This was literally a film about getting history out of the museums, of realizing that these “frozen” artifacts of history represent real, living conflicts.) All of Asgard ends up on an ark, as refugees, literally huddled masses - which gets me to the other thing that I loved about the movie, which was that every (apparently) silly thing turned out to be a serious thing: so, witness, The Immigrant Song, which was cute/funny the first time we hear it but turns out to be the thematic keynote to the whole story. 

In this way, this was the most New Zealandish film I’ve ever seen, because of course the New Zealanders stereotype the Australians (hello Thor!) as drunk, loudmouthed boors - Thor  breaking everything over at Dr. Strange’s - and then you had the Valkyrie who at first appears to be merely “slapstick” drinking /falling down drunk, except that ends up being absolutely serious, too: she’s Native, she’s like so many displaced people: traumatized, alienated from her culture and her own memories, whether she be Maori or Native American or Inuit; her drinking problem got increasingly important and poignant to me. The film was on the one hand, funny, but on the other, very sensitive to trauma, even Loki’s - and omg, Loki staging plays in which everyone loves him, his father, his brother (with Matt Damon et al!) - and JFC, the iconography, the peeling back of the Catholic-style ceiling art to the violent friezes underneath. And Jeff Goldblum’s reality show! They did fucking theatre, film, media, and art criticism in the middle of it! GOD I  LOVED THIS MOVIE. 

ALSO, more randomly, things I loved: Bruce Banner dazzling his enemy with disco, while wearing Tony’s too-tight pants; it was like queer theory weaponized!  The wry dig of Jeff Goldblum changing “slavery” to “prisoners with jobs.” THOR LOSING HIS EYE AS PART OF BECOMING A REAL KING --omg, I could not be happier with the symbolic nature of that (Buffy fans will be with me here), but also Thor leaves us more a king as well as a more powerful superhero than we’ve ever seen before; he’s got a wisdom he hadn’t had before, IMO.  He’s had a real hero’s journey to the garbage pile of history and back and is now set up to be a really amazing king!--for the first time I really see him as a king.  Plus on a comic book level, losing the hammer and grasping the lightning and thunder was AMAZING. (Also on a comic book level, the mocking of Ultron, which needed mocking. I will also say that normally comics lose me when they go intergalactic, but this made the idea of it not seem stupid to me, unlike--and apologizes to those who liked it, Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a film I really disliked; too dudebroish, a world run by adolescent boys. For the first time I have some small hope for Infinity War, though I suspect that they won’t find the infinity stones as stupid as Taika obviously did - I was looking for some rocks, I didn’t find them - which is a pity.)

On a shipping note, you could --and should - ship everyone with everyone in this film, but Thor/Loki in particular had a nice arc: I loved Thor throwing things at him, and the way his physical presence became meaningful at the end; he finally, literally, REALLY SHOWED UP. I love how Loki came with the revolution and got to be the hero of the story like he’d been dreaming of  in his headcanoned fanfiction story - but of course that was the Loki story I wrote for love, so I’m biased toward this interpretation.  And I loved that it was Thor’s fanfiction too: I thought the world of you, I thought we’d fight side by side forever. And of course the mid-credits clip leaves us with them side by side.

I could watch a whole movie about the Valkyrie war, which was beautiful and beautifully shot, and though they said that they cut the evidence of Valkyrie’s bisexuality, I had no trouble seeing the whole story of her lover’s self-sacrifice and her guilt. Valkyrie was a more interesting and complex female character than we’ve had for a while--and I actually found Hela to be really complex too, in that she--how to put--had an honesty to her.  She wasn’t lying, she wasn’t that kind of devil figure; she was forcing us to confront the lies that we’ve been telling ourselves about how power works/has worked. She was literally the pure military force that builds empires, and she was demanding to be acknowledged. Often women are framed as temptresses or liars or seducers - Eve - but Hela was a fury, a punisher of unavenged crimes. \o/