THOR! (George Ttoouli + Hammer + Horned Helmet = Happy Rampage)

The other morning I was running around shouting "THOOOOR!!" loudly, calling for mead and dusting off the mallet in the toolbox, in anticipation of Kenneth Branagh's new film. I would have gone to see it anyway, but the thought of Mr. Shakespeare's LoveChild (tm) himself directing this was so amusing to me that I decided it would only be fair to go in fancy dress. This was an 11am screening, so I thought the kids might even ask for my autograph, with questions like, "Are you a real viking?" to which I would respond with a growl, like what bears do in clichés when heroes enter caves that obviously haven't been bear-filled for decades.

From the trailer, I was convinced I'd be going into a braindead bash up, slightly camp, not taking itself too seriously, even though Anthony Hopkins was in it. I don't think I've ever seen him take on a role where he didn't get to be slightly melodramatic. Kind of like putting the end of The Fellowship of the Ring film in straitjackets.The sidekicks, done up like extras from Xena, but with a budget that extended well beyond 'bits of brown cloth that look like they might have been animal skins in a version of ancient Greece that never existed', looked marvellously like characters straight out of my childhood tabletop D&D imaginations. Impractically cool bits of metal armour, gung ho expressions, big shiny weapons... My subconscious actually started providing a non-existent soundtrack of dice rolls as they swiped and hacked at the Frost Giants.

Yes, well, you've guessed it: how wrong I was. The reviews have been great, putting this way up alongside The Dark Knight, possibly the best of comic book adaptations. In terms of quality, I wouldn't make that comparison lightly, knowing how my co-editor, in his own words, "Understands The Dark Knight better than Christopher Nolan himself". They're very different beasts, however, and as a companion to it, Thor shows how ideas of terror, militancy and stupidity can play out in a far more beautiful and exhilarating fashion.

The first twenty minutes or so didn't do too much to undermine my expectations. I was delighted by how well-crafted and intensely satisfying it all was, though, from the lush graphics, the stunning costumes and scene sets, the wonderful presence of the cast members, the camera angles that always seemed to be at Odin's feet when Hopkins appeared, to the gung ho 'let's invade' dialogue, which, although playing out familiar tropes in some ways, managed to stay within character-building reference points at all times.

I can pin down the point where I realised the film's intelligence very accurately. Early on, Thor and his adventuring party (the segment so deliberately played up to RPGs for this episode) invade the land of the Frost Giants and, towards the end a giant beast is unleashed. Thor's response is a typical escalation of violence, launching himself at it with his flying hammer. It's very subtle, but listen carefully: the soundtrack, as Thor flies through the air, straight as a rocket, is very much that of a missile's engines.

Let's be specific here: a cruise missile? Why not? That's what I thought. And then, suddenly, it all began to fit into place. Frost Giants: penned into a tiny prison island, physically frightening, psychologically alien; Asgard: self-promoting masters-of-the-universe race, patriarchs of the lesser worlds.

At first the film plays up to the allegory well, interrogates ideas of representation, good vs. evil and so on.(*) And that's all part of the film's subtle contextualising of the ridicule to come. Once Thor comes down out of the clouds (literally and metaphorically), the realism (and 'scuse me French here, kids) kicks the shit out of him. Steadily the film begins its deconstruction of the political in favour of the personal; Thor's character development is what this is about, and what Thor represents isn't so much the US Govt. or affiliated warmongers, but everyday people and their views. The scene where he's cooking breakfast for the scientists, you can imagine him in checked shirt and baseball cap, an Average Joe, bottle of beer and barbecue man.

This is Shakespeare, in many ways. Branagh's feel for stage directing leads to seamless scene changes, a kind of fluidity in how he moves the camera to show the next set piece already establishing itself beside the current scene. It's the characterisation, above all, that does it for me: yes, Thor is royalty; yes, he's a bit of a meathead; but that doesn't preclude compassion, a learning curve. Tradition dictates that gods of mythology are spoiled brats, playing out the urges and whims of children with no checks to their power and ability to meddle except the older, only marginally wiser gods. Yet they also play out the fears of mortals, of what would happen if we tried to behave in the same way.

The most Shakespearian tribute here, however, is to use the Norse Sagas and the comic book's ideas not just to play out an allegory. The film deviates from consistently obvious (at least to me) recent political events by returning to the unique quirks of Norse myth. This provides a freshness, more space to translate the film not only into commentary, but into a personal journey of one's own. Yes, it's ultimately a story we've seen before: the dumb, impulsive coming-of-age lessons; but it's done in such rich terms, I forgave it for all of my preconceived ideas. Branagh stays utterly in control of how each segment of the film is perceived, he knows exactly what you're thinking at each moment; and the direction is completely generous is how it manipulates you into reading Thor's personality, playing on your sympathies.

As a final point, I ought to relate this to discussions of convention and ideology that I've been pasting on G&P with sticky tape. I can see, through and through, Thor is a 'conventional' film. While I may have come across as tub-thumpingly pro-experimentation, I'm not zealously ascribed to it, but I am concerned with ideas of stagnation, when derivatives take over the vast bulk of publication.

Mr. Co-editor put it to me recently, in one of our late evening, over-caffeinated conversations, that the avant garde (whatever they are, Simon) are always at least one step ahead of what's just been published. Yet in terms of what's been published, we can still look at work and judge it by the merits of tradition and experimentation. If the work isn't yet in circulation, then it can't form part of a circle of reference points for reviewers, critics and even practitioners, unless we're in the community of experimenters, maintaining dialogue at the rockface of creativity. So we have to look at the published work to learn about where to experiment next, or how to assimilate new ideas into traditions.

Branagh sets out to exist within a tradition that allies itself not with mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, but with Shakespeare's drama. He's fully in control of the film's style, structure, character - all the technical elements, pretty much - by being an expert on the genre and an expert reader of how each element in the film can be perceived. (That makes me wish I knew a bit more about the editing process for Thor, given how tight the final result is.)

Arguably, there is something original to how he goes about this, by not adapting a Shakespearean story into the godawful conventions of a highschool teen drama, or similar crud. Instead he's adapting a comic book series, which is in itself an adaptation of Norse mythology, using the techniques of Shakespearean theatre directing, but positioning it within a marketplace of story/plot conventions that could be considered part of a Hollywood/mainstream US filmmaking cannon. Where other films (Kick-Ass, Iron Man) flounder dramatically in resorting to story and plot conventions that are utterly prevalent today and undermine any superficial entertainment these provide for me, or moral commentary they seem to be attempting to carry on their overloaded camel's backs, Thor kicks these aside it makes its way towards the podium of best comic book adaptations available. It rises above the genre, as Nolan's Batman films have done, but doesn't set out to imitate those films, or others immediately and obviously connected to the genre.

What I'm trying to say in summary is, don't miss it. And I'm hoping co-editor will run over and see it, then throw up a more detailed comparison of it to The Dark Knight, as he's far more knowledgeable than any mortal ought to be about it.

A Note on 3D:

I really didn't want to have to throw up such a dud aside about this stuff, but I have to. It's an unfortunate sign of things to come when credit sequences make better use of 3D technology than the rest of a film. Thor is incredibly lush, even without 3D, but what 3D there is makes feeble use of depth throughout. The juicier CGI sequences didn't really gain much scope from teching up, and the big shots, e.g. of Asgard, seemed static, as if only the camera was moving. As bad as it was as a story, Avatar is a great example of 3D use, extremely immersive, without being showy. Films like Thor, with the punch of story, script, tight editing and brilliant characterisation, don't need this crap. The visual medium is secondary to the aural experience. Once again, an example of studios trampling over the fanbase. (On that note, this is fun, but note: a faux-trailer.) Homogenising bastards, all of them.

(*) Can't work out where to insert this, so it's a footnote. A small niggle early on with the presentation of Asgard's backstory - Peter Jackson did it brilliantly in LOTR, the history of the severing of the ring from Sauron's finger; and he set a template for future epic fantasies which no one has tried hard enough to dismantle. The slightly distanced narrative perspective, serious voice over, the hordes of static CGI-ed combatants lined up implausibly in some kind of WWE face off, big sweeping battle scenes. Yes, it's a helpful shorthand for storytelling, but no, no, no. Unless you're going to make some serious comment on Jackson's style, Tolkien's campness and LOTR generally, why? Here's a challenge: why not let readers use their imaginations and set up a field on a table, with metalcast miniatures - painted Warhammer moulds and papier-maché landscapes. Has anyone done that yet? Probably cost a shitload less than CGI and look as beautiful. All you'd need is a decent soundtrack.

Here, look at this. Now imagine the intro and other intertitles read by James Earl Jones. And the sub/surtitles as stage directions. You can also note the realism of the set up: units formed into small squadrons, with a clear chain of hierarchy spreading through the different unit types. Multiple points of attack, multiple points of contact on a single battlefield... I'd better stop here, my geekery is getting the better of me. But it's a footnote, so that's OK, boy's and girls.

Simon Turner - Form and Novelty and Ghostwatch: Some Thoughts

Earlier on this evening I was speaking to my illustrious co-editor, and for those who care (not many of you, I'll wager) much of the conversation - the parts I can repeat here, anyway - revolved around questions of narrative tropes, their impact in the socio-political sphere (media representations, the restrictions of totalistic ideology on dialogue and thought-processes, the usual spiel), and the means available to the individual to escape them: basically, we were riffing on what George had posted earlier in the week, because our lives are that self-absorbed.  Then, obviously, we got on to Thor. 

George promises me that he'll post in depth about Kenneth Branagh's interpretation of the Marvel superhero, which he claims is something of a masterpiece of the genre, at a later date.  I'm pleased, as I've not seen the film yet, so any comments I might have would be entirely speculative and apocryphal in character, so I won't try.  But George's enthusiasm for the movie - bear with me, this is leading places - got me thinking about the question of narrative and form in purely artistic terms, and how forms tend to revivify themselves through the incorporation of alternative modes and techniques.  Indeed, in its early stages of existence, any form (the novel, say, or cinema itself) might neccesarily have to leech its ideas, at least to a certain extent, from pre-existing forms, just to get the ball rolling.  Early novels, for example, took journalism and autobiography as their starting points (see Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe, which both use the trappings of existing non-fiction forms to tell their wholly fictional narratives, not because Defoe was a post-modernist before the fact, but because the novel, being so young, didn't have any conventions yet, so ready-made conventions needed to be imported for the stories to be told).  A little later, letters became a staple mode for the novel to adopt (hence Richardson's Pamela, and the creation of the epistolary novel, a long-running subspecies of fiction that shows little sign of abating). 

The advent of modernism(s) in the 20th century, meanwhile, saw an explosion of possiblities in all of the arts, and one of the consequences was that the novel became increasingly omniverous in its approach to borrowing forms: Nabokov's Pale Fire takes the shape of a scholarly exegesis of a long poem (also included); Mark Dunn's Ibid, meanwhile, is composed entirely of (fictional) footnotes to a destroyed (and equally fictional) manuscript; whilst Leanne Shapton's Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, ingeniously tells its story of a relationship falling apart through the photographic form of an auctioneer's catalogue.  It's a truism to say that poetry refreshes itself through translation, but form can stagnate as well as language, and can just as easily be translated across boundaries into new contexts and continuities.

The run of movies, stretching back to The Blair Witch Project - and beyond - that use the visual language of 'found footage' to tell their stories is a good example of this process.  There's nothing more tired than a haunted-house horror (Paranormal Activity), or the monster-on-the-loose-in-New-York schtick (Cloverfield), but both cliches are energised by being recontextualised through the imported, realtively new forms of, respectively, handheld camera footage and closed circuit television.  (The use of cinema verite techniques such as these adds another frisson to proceedings, as such methods draw attention to the act of looking and recording, making these movies self-reflective texts by default.)         

I say 'relatively new', because a lot of this kind of thing had been done before - and to much more devastating effect - by the BBC in 1992.  Ghostwatch - available in its entirety on Google videos, for anyone who wasn't traumatised by the original broadcast - remains the most controversial moment in the corporation's history, and goes down as the only program on record to cause PTSD in some members of its audience.  Ghostwatch, shown as part of the Screen One series of films on Halloween Night in 1992, took the (fictional) form of a live boradcast purporting to investigate 'the most haunted house in Britain' (in Northolt, but it had to be somewhere).  In the studio, Michael Parkinson, a living legend and an entire nation's favourite Yorkshire uncle, acted as master of ceremonies, whilst the show's field reporters were Sarah Greene (of Going Live! and the subject of a million schoolboy crushes) and Craig Charles (of Red Dwarf and, hopefully, NOT the subject of a million schoolboy crushes), on location at the house in question. 

Ghostwatch is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least which, in the light of George's postings about anti-narrative, is its wilfully counter-intuitive approach to storytelling.  By neccesity, the pretence of a live broadcast needs to be maintained, so nothing really happens for the first 45 mintues or so.  Indeed, some very smart games relating to narrative truth and reliability are played midway through, and a number of curveballs are thrown at the audience in quick succession, which makes the final act of the piece all the more troubling.  Aside from the often disturbing content of the narrative itself, Ghostwatch is troubling precisely because of its refusal to draw a clear boundary between fiction and fact: it's not a question of its being a 'hoax' - it was clearly billed and trailed as a drama; I was 12 and knew it wasn't true, but was frightened nonetheless - more the fact that it draws attention to the narrative tropes of 'factual' television years before Big Brother blurred comparable boundaries in a 'factual' setting.  One comes away from Ghostwatch a more sceptical human being, distrusting everything the tv tells you is true.  For that reason alone, it's a radical treasure.  In essence, Ghostwatch did for tv what Hayden White did for historical study: shatter its conventions and reconstruct them anew.

Eyepopping hyperbole: the blogger's best friend.  That's all for now folks.  I've some longer - and, hopefully, more intellecually rounded - posts in the pipeline.  To anyone who's interested, feel free to use the comments to point the Editors towards any other texts - film, fiction, poetry - that revivify their chosen medium through the importation of new or antithetical elements.  Let's build a hydrid canon...