Thor

I love it when media is transformed into movies. Comic book into movies, novels into movies, television shows into movies. Movies remade into NEW movies! Lucky for me it happens almost constantly in this day and age. Though I think it says something about the movie industry that almost all movies are based on something else. There are not a lot of original movies these days. Perhaps digital media is draining all of our creativity away? Or perhaps the movie industry realizes their audience is full of people like me who don't need creativity and will gladly pay for movie versions of old stories. Why bother taking a risk on a creative idea when everyone knows that movies like Thor and Captain America will kill at the box office? Always best to go with the sure thing.

Anyway, this blog entry's focus will be on the comic-book-turned-movie Thor. From a popular media point of view, it was a brilliant movie. We start with a very attractive and muscular male lead. And then add Natalie Portman, an extremely popular choice lately, to the point that she is losing the ability to NOT be Natalie Portman. She is saturating the market at this point and it may end up hurting her art as an actress (though it is not hurting her bank account...). It is hard for audiences to see past her fame to the characters she plays. Especially given the very one-dimensional character she was given in Thor. But another key to a successful movie translated from other media is to dumb down the story and characters as much as possible to make it accessible to as many viewers as possible. Thor did indeed have flat characters and a cliche storyline, as well as editing problems. It's understandable when one has to condense such a long running series into a 2-hour movie to have some editing problems. Everything seems to happen so fast, like speed reading through the story.

That's why these types of movies are perfect for the attention deficit youth of today. They don't have time to check out an entire series. Two hours is the limit and it doesn't matter how poorly the movie is put together sometimes, as long as the effects are amazing. The final and most important element to putting together a blockbuster, especially one translated from other media, is the special effects. The fans of the story want to be able to see everything they imagined from the story to be on the big screen, no matter how fantastical. And in order to attract audience members unfamiliar to the original work to read/see the original, they need to be wow'd.

So there you have it, the key to successful blockbuster movies based off a different media. The more people love it, the more that will be made. We already have Captain America coming up, I wonder how that will be?