So seeing the Thor movie has had the consequence of being made to watch other Marvel movies by my partner and so far…eh.

Iron Man was pretty good, could have used fewer science montages and more female characters. But like, how did Tony Stark not know that Jeff Bridges was evil??? Could he not see the beard??

Iron Man 2 is boring in this really sublime way where I enjoyed the movie while I was watching it, but I couldn’t tell you anything that happened it in 20 minutes later. Scarlett Johansson was great, her hair didn’t make any sense but that’s okay. And I don’t understand why they recast the dude playing Rhodes, I liked the guy from the first movie better. I hope it was just that he didn’t want to reappear and not that they decided to ditch him for a more famous actor. Pepper is a good character and she has good chemistry with Tony, so that was good, but a lot of the dialogue felt like someone who was trying to be Joss Whedon to me. And why is everyone who is a “scientist” in these movies good at particle physics and engineering and metal work and AI design and computer programming? I mean I know they’re comic book characters but come on.

Thor was bad. I did not like Thor, which was especially disappointing because I did like the new one. It was not a well written movie, the dialogue was awful, they wasted Natalie Portman, Idris Elba and Anthony Hopkins. And I know we all like Loki but he was the worst part of the movie? His plan didn’t make any sense, they wanted him to be the intense schemy puppetmaster but he was just reacting to everything around him, even when he broadcasted his villainous motivation at the end it didn’t seem genuine and there could have been an interesting narrative in there about him becoming what people expect him to be, but no. The only interesting part of this movie was the brief period where I thought that Heimdal was evil. I hope Heimdal turns out to be evil someday, he’d be a great villain, and it makes a lot of narrative sense if the dude who can both see everything and control the thing that lets you go anywhere was actually evil all along.

If I was writing the MCU, Heimdal would be evil. It would provide actual, you know, tension. I don’t know if anyone has told the MCU writers about narrative tension, but someone should.