joe bloke says:

no hats!!! where’s Thor’s big winged hat? if he ain’t wearing no big winged hat, then he ain’t no Thor. and Loki looks crap. really crap. ah, well. all of my initial excitement ( and, honestly, I was REALLY excited about a Thor film ) has gone, completely. yeah, you’re right, it’s only a film, but. . .hell, no! it’s Thor film! I wanted big and bold and. . .well, God-like Kirby grandeur, and this. . .this is more crappy afternoon made-for-tv movie on the sci-fi channel.

anyhow, thus endeth my pointless enthusiasm. sigh.

j chastain says:

Why they took the photo in that concrete box of a room is beyond me, because they’ve already shown a part of the set that at least looked better than that (though I wouldn’t say it looked like a Kirby drawing.)

The costume designs are more similar to Kirby’s than I thought I could realistically expect, given the current standards of the industry in general and comic book movies in particular. This is still only three years after a feature film adaptation of the Galactus story that didn’t feature Galactus in any form, four years after an X-Men film that featured a “sentinel” fight that didn’t actually involve a sentinel.

Despite some fairly bad decisions recently, Marvel Studios still seem to be trying harder than anyone else making these things. I had always assumed that a Thor adaptation from a studio would chuck the comics entirely and portray Asgard more or less like a Lord of the Rings movie. We instead have an Asgard that exists in space and Asgardians who wear outer space sci-fi fantasy armor covered with little circles and interlocking plates. Everyone has big horny helmets, they’re just not wearing them in these photos. It may be premature to judge, based on the handful of images and clips released so far, but it looks like the color palette’s the farthest element from the mark. Instead of the dull earth tones of generic fantasy production design it looks like we have loads of gold, silver, and bronze surfaces–shiny earth tones. There’s a phobia of bright colors for some reason; you can see it in their costume design for Captain America, too. Muted colors are desirable because they’re somehow perceived as “realistic” even when we’re dealing with subject matter that isn’t realistic in the slightest. It’s a superficial, crazy decision that’s symptomatic of what you might call the “Jason Bourneification” or the “Casino Royaleifcation” or the “Chris Nolan Dark Knightification” or the “J J Abrams Star Trekifcation” of our expensive popular culture.

I would really like to see a new comic book movie with visual imagination to match Bava’s Diabolik, or the De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, or the first two Batman features (66, 89,) or Beatty’s Dick Tracy. I don’t anticipate that any time soon. Sin City set a new kind of standard that nobody’s really made much of a response to yet (it didn’t help that it was usurped by bad Zack Snyder movies.) I’m waiting to see what Wright’s done on Scott Pilgrim.

With specific regard to Kirby adaptations: if this is as close as it gets to the “Kirby-est” book from the 60s, this is as good as it gets. The studio who made The Dark Knight owns all the Fourth World material, and I definitely would not expect them to outdo Branagh and co.’s efforts here (and that’s even if they ever felt like tackling that stuff, which they could easily avoid indefinitely.)

Frank Santoro says:

Do they make all movies drab and brown now so that the cgi is easier to manipulate? Someone needs to re-color this – maybe we’ll hold a contest or something. Re-color Thor publicity shots and win a no-prize.