Thor: Love and Thunder: Things That Happened to Thor

Thor: Love and Thunder,

And hardly anybody even noticed, was the really annoying thing for all the people who made the Swamp Thing movie. They worked as hard as they could, in the middle of a swamp, and some of them were good at their jobs and some of them decidedly were not, and eventually it turned into a movie that hardly anybody watched. It made so little that Box Office Mojo has a blank space where the domestic and international gross is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, all the way over here at the other end of history, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe effort — Thor: Love and Thunder — made 143 million dollars this weekend, and people are talking about how disappointed they are.

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Swamp Thing 3.25: Crushed

Swamp Thing,

I tell you what, when Alec Holland concocts nuclear plant food, the man delivers. That glowing green potion of his not only bridges the divide between the plantae and the animalia, it also produces some high-powered propulsion that can blast a well-stocked science lab right back to the stone age.

I mean, all Alec did was splash about two fingers of the stuff onto the floor from a height of several inches, and it turned the contents of the entire building into a smoldering ruin, up to and including the computer equipment, the security system, the plants and stairs and electric lights, even the cooper’s digger. Gone, all gone.

Well, they told us it was powerful, what with all the recombinant animal nuclei and everything. It was supposed to solve world hunger, which I guess technically it would, at least in the immediate blast radius. The only thing I can’t figure out is why Arcane thinks that he should put it in his mouth.

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Swamp Thing 3.24: Shaggy Bog Stories

Swamp Thing, ,

So Swamp Thing is running amuck, I think is where we left things, rearing up out of the mire from whence he came, and taking sides in local disputes. Bad men are shooting holes in the petroleum industry and ferociously hassling female G-men for school supplies, and now a big shaggy heap of vines, roots, mud and miscellaneous has decided to involve itself in the situation, through the medium of tearing the roof off cars, tossing white guys around and generally playing in traffic.

At this point, the audience is shifting in its seat, and asking, what the hell is this thing, and more importantly, why isn’t it flying an airplane?

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Swamp Thing 3.23: A Time of Running

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“In this sequence,” director Wes Craven said, “Adrienne Barbeau falls down twice, and my daughter, who at that time was about 14 when she was watching it, turned and looked at me very sternly and said, ‘Dad, girls don’t fall down when they run.’

“And I never forgot that, you know? Especially twice. [I said], you know, yeah, you’re right, and I think after this I did a lot of films with female protagonists that were very competent.”

I like that story, partly because it’s an appealing moment of self-reflection, and partly because it’s a good example of the redemptive power of 14-year-old daughters in American life.

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Swamp Thing 3.22: The Kid

Swamp Thing, , ,

Soggy, scared and running low on second chances, Cable stumbles out of the scenery and into a new relationship with a young sidekick who, in my opinion, might secretly be a ghost.

I mean, explain Jude, if you can. He’s an extremely unwatched minor who runs America’s grungiest gas station. He appears to be puzzled by Cable and the energetic shooting war that erupts around him, but he keeps his cool and helps Cable as much as he can, appearing in the quiet moments when she needs him, and receding into the background when there are other people around. There is no evidence in the text that he is a human child, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

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Daredevil: Literally the Poor Man’s Batman

Daredevil

Like Matt Murdock and his down-and-out boxer dad, Ryan Steans and I made a promise to never give up. Of course, that didn’t work out very well for Matt’s dad, but I’m sure it’ll be fine for us.

Our goal is to seek justice one way or another, specifically by watching the pre-MCU Marvel movies and doing funny podcast episodes about how terrible they are. This time, we’re discussing Daredevil, the 2003 Ben Affleck effort about a blind lawyer who believes in justice so hard that he’s willing to kill as many people as it takes to achieve it.

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Swamp Thing 3.21: The Other It

Swamp Thing,

Well, everything has to start somewhere, even muck-encrusted melanges of plant matter and human remains. If Swamp Thing teaches us anything, it’s that surprising things can crawl out of the murk when you least expect them, made out of an awful admixture of the living and the dead.

Stories are like that, too. An interesting idea can ooze around in the half-remembered fictional consciousness for decades, until it finds itself bidden back to the surface, clothed in new material and walking the Earth once more.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Swamp Thing wasn’t the first shaggy swampman in American literature to lurch out of the mire and look around for playmates. He wasn’t the second, either; it turns out, if you pick up a couple of rocks and look under them, there was a whole subgenre of mud-soaked monsters that populated much of the 1970s from pretty much every comic publisher there was.

Swamp Thing, Man-Thing, the Heap, the Glob, the Bog Beast, the Heap (a different one), the Lurker in the Swamp… Corpse after corpse, popping up out of the sludge to make friends, take revenge and generally make the world a stranger and a soggier place.

But the genuine original was called “It” — but not the Stephen King one. This is the other one.

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Swamp Thing 3.20: Seize the Day

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You know, they tell you on day one at movie school that every character is supposed to have a clear motivation. In a given scene, the audience should understand what the character wants, and what they’re trying to accomplish.

Well, Arcane’s been in this movie for what is it, thirteen minutes now, and it turns out that it’s not enough, just knowing what a character wants. You also need a grasp on why they want it, what they plan to do with it once they’ve got it, who they think they are, and what the fuck they’re talking about in general.

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Swamp Thing 3.19: The Unknown Soldiers

Swamp Thing, ,

A swamp. A tree. Evening.

Estragon:  Where’s Danny?

Vladimir:  Where’s Willie?

Estragon:  Maybe Willie’s with Tyrone.

Vladimir:  Danny shot Tyrone.

Estragon:  Oh, yeah.

I mean, technically the dialogue is more Abbott & Costello than Waiting for Godot, but you have to admit that if it’s possible to have a Theater of the Absurd action sequence that makes you question the existence of God and the fundamental moral nature of modern society, then this swamp stomp is about as absurd as it gets.

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