#Honestly idk why America has its own distinct version

[goldenfire357]

[philosopherking1887]

Okay, I really hope I’m not bothering you too much, but what about Alan Taylor director of The Dark World? Idk how much it leans towards Christianity versus Norse mythology, but that was the film that really made me fall in love with Loki. Hiddleston’s portrayal was heartbreaking and the whole narrative with his mom?? Why are people not talking about Alan Taylor?

Nope, not bothering me, and I will get to your other question eventually…

The reason I don’t talk much about Alan Taylor is because I don’t really think of him as an artist with a distinctive voice or vision, the way Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon, and Taika Waititi are. That might be unfair to him, but I only really know him as one of a rotating cast of directors on Game of Thrones, where the writer and the director are almost always different people, and the “voice” of the series, if there is one, belongs either to George R.R. Martin or to Benioff & Weiss (especially in the last season… what a mess of disappointing clichés).

Now, it’s also true that the writer and the director of Thor 1 and Thor: Ragnarok were separate people: Thor 1 was written by Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz; Ragnarok was, in theory, written by Eric Pearson. However, by all accounts TR was about 80% “improvised,” which is to say, Taika Waititi suggested/shouted things to say instead of what was in the script… and Jeff Goldblum came up with his own shit. One of the more egregious examples of directorial departure from the original screenplay appears to be the infamous bit where Loki plans to betray Thor to the Grandmaster and then Thor outsmarts him by putting the obedience disk on him, gives him a smug little lecture about growth and change while he’s convulsing in pain, and then leaves him there incapacitated and defenseless (which I still think is unbelievably cruel, negligent of Loki’s safety, and OOC). According to people who have read the novel version (which I haven’t but maybe should) – @whitedaydream might be the person I got this from, or @lucianalight – that entire sequence was completely absent from the novelization. And we seem to have some evidence that they filmed a version without it: in some of the trailers: Loki shows up on the Bifrost with the rest of the Revengers rather than arriving later with the big ship. So even if the outlines of the plot were provided by Eric Pearson’s screenplay, the tone and character of the movie – its “humor,” if you liked it, or its soulless flippancy and cruelty (to both characters and fans), if you didn’t – indubitably came from Taika Waititi.

Thor 1 adhered more closely to the screenplay – which is available on IMSDb, if you’re interested – so I consider Miller & Stentz to have more of a role in its creative vision than Pearson did with TR. Stentz has even commented on Twitter about the theme of internalized racism; and that writing team also did X-Men: First Class, in which you can see some of the same themes and also the (totally unintentional…?) homoerotic tension between the two main male characters. That said, you can definitely see Kenneth Branagh’s distinctively Shakespearean sensibility in the way some of the important confrontations are presented – and that’s a major part of what gives that movie its overall tone and emotional power. (Also, as this post notes, Branagh & Hiddleston made some notable departures from the acting instructions in the screenplay that contributed to its tragic and also gay-incestuous vibe.)

The Dark World, as much as I loved it for its Thorki fic realness and ANGST, was kind of a creative mess. Patty Jenkins was supposed to direct it, but then backed out for reasons I’m not completely clear on, and Alan Taylor was brought in kind of last-minute. The screenplay was mostly written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, who wrote the Captain America movies, Infinity War, and Avengers 4, and whom I am fond of calling dimwitted hacks because that’s what they are. (The First Avenger was fine; The Winter Soldier is massively overrated and frankly kind of boring and confusing IMO; Civil War was a disaster of muddled, unsympathetic characterization and missed opportunities for interesting philosophical exploration; Infinity War was similarly disastrous, and showed us exactly why dimwitted hacks should not be attempting to explore philosophical issues.) I say “mostly” because Joss Whedon was brought in as a script doctor (one of his original jobs in Hollywood) to rewrite some scenes that weren’t working, including an “emotional” scene between Thor and Jane (not sure which one), the notorious Thorki bro-boat scene (and you can definitely see the hallmarks of his writing in that one), and Loki’s shapeshifting scene. Loki’s trial scene at the beginning was also a late addition, inspired by a TDW prelude comic; I honestly don’t know who wrote that scene, but the comic seems to have been written by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. The upshot is that TDW was most definitely a horse designed by committee, so it’s hard to identify whose creative vision it was expressing. I can identify Alan Taylor’s influence in the dark, grungy Game of Thrones-esque aesthetic, but I’m not sure where else to find him.