The smart move Marvel Pictures made was to appoint Kenneth Branagh as director. Not an obvious big action movie choice, but throughout their work to create their cinematic Universe Marvel have repeatedly shown enough faith in the pull of the characters themselves to get people involved who wouldn't have gotten near a Summer Blockbuster tm at the time. It worked with Robert Downey Jr. and John Faveau on Iron Man in spades, and Branagh was a perfect choice here for what is a very Shakespearean set up in the Asgard portions of the film. He knows how to get large performances from the actors without it feeling too OTT or hammy.
Of all the characters Marvel has been carefully plotting to bring to the big screen individually before getting them all together for The Avengers, Thor was always going to be the most difficult sell for the non-comic fan audience. He looks silly, speaks silly, and isn't even as well known as either Iron Man or Captain America were before their films.
The smart move Marvel Pictures made was to appoint Kenneth Branagh as director. Not an obvious big action movie choice, but throughout their work to create their cinematic Universe Marvel have repeatedly shown enough faith in the pull of the characters themselves to get people involved who wouldn't have gotten near a Summer Blockbuster tm at the time. It worked with Robert Downey Jr. and John Faveau on Iron Man in spades, and Branagh was a perfect choice here for what is a very Shakespearean set up in the Asgard portions of the film. He knows how to get large performances from the actors without it feeling too OTT or hammy.
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If you'd have told me back in 1999 when I brought The Sirens of Time that the Big Finish audios would still be going 12 years and a 150 releases (in-fact, my folder with all the related main range audios has 181 albums in it, and that's still missing a couple of Big Finish Magazines and the original Doctor Who Magazine promo disc) later I'd have thought you were mad. But then Doctor Who felt a very different place back then. Though the same year's Comic Relief skit The Curse of Fatal Death (written by one Stephen Moffat) was in retrospect the first real sign of a softening attitude towards the program from the BBC the future seemed very bleak back then. The fact Big Finish managed to not only survive what seemed to be the dying days of the program's popularity but go on to produce some of the very best Who in any medium and have a influence on the revived television series (most obviously Robert Shearman's contribution to the first season, but only three weeks ago we had a Cyberman story where the words “Spare Parts” were repeated several times as a wacky in-joke) says a lot for the talent of everyone involved. |
AuthorStuart Webb. Who knows everything about nothing and not a lot about that. Archives
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