lady thor...
cant wait to see this...
Will she have big hammers?
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MovieChat Forums > Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) Discussion > lady thor...
Natalie is a drab actress as an adult and her complete lack of interest in the role of Jane exuded from her like a stink. Her lack of money roles brought her back to us to reprise her bland performance in an adaptation of a bland story line in the comics.
Utterly uninteresting to me. Every choice they have made has been the wrong one.
If only they had let Paul Verhoven direct a true adaptation of anything Walt Simonson did for Thor. Thor 2 butchered that.
My understanding is that she wasn't interested in just playing a love interest type character, so if she's going to be a hero and have a decent plotline, she's coming back. She also seems to be interested in shows and films which are more explicitly feminist - I read that's basically why she was PO'd about the ol' switcheroo with the Thor 2 directors: the original one was a female and Portman wanted to be part of that project.
In a nutshell: she wants to sign on to projects that interest her personally. Which is basically every actor, and then it's just a question of money to get them to play ball with dumb projects (which is why commercials tend to pay a lot more money than, say, Shakespeare theatre shows: actors don't want to do the commercial).
So, if it was a boring role up until now, I don't blame her for being bored. Although, not bringing A-game to any job is unprofessional and petulant. That said, I don't know...maybe she did what she could with the role. Sometimes roles are so bland that they can't be elevated.
I was enchanted by the precocious young actress in The Professional. I expected amazing things from her in her acting future. I stuck with her movie after movie. She is bland. Did Harvard destroy her ability to engage? What happened? She is a bad actress.
Just because the Thor comic story arc of Jane as Thor sucked doesn't mean that the movie version has to. But it seems like they are on a collision course with suck.
If it's Thor 4: Our Important Message for You, then I'm out.
Most young actors who start acting very young and "learn in front of the camera" tend to get less interesting as they grow up. Portman, Scarlett Johanssen, Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale*, they all got raves for their teen roles, and grew up to be very bland as adults. I suspect it's because when they were young they just did whatever the director said, and the directors used them as puppets or blank slates, and didn't really help them understand what they were doing. This does not seem to give actors a solid understanding of their craft and a base to build technique upon, all the best actors, the ones who get better with age, seem to come out of good college acting programs and theater.
So yeah. While I love the Thor movies, giving Portman more screen time and a chance to play the hero is not a plus.
* With the exception of "American Psycho", where Bale gave a brilliant performance as an adult. I hate him in everything else.
Excellent point. Bale was at his best in "somethin somethin of The Sun" but I have liked him in other things as well. Check out The Machinist and though the Shaft remake was not a good movie, he played a villain well. And of course, as you say, American Psycho. Given all that, he is a more bland actor than he started out as. Interesting observation.
shareJohanssen recently did Under the Skin and Her (the latter was an effective performance with just her voice!), and while I haven't seen them yet, she got high praise for Marriage Story and people seem to like JoJo Rabbit, too.
Bale's top grade in The Fighter. Although, that's a decade old now, so maybe it depends what you mean by "used to be good", but the implication was certainly that he was good as a young/child actor but not now.
Lawrence was good in Silver Linings Playbook.
I happen to think all three still have the capacity to do amazing work. So, it's gotta either be personal taste or else it's just which movies you've seen them in lately.
I'll give you this much: all three are in the superhero cyclone and that stuff is largely banal, particularly on the performance side. Like, if you're watching mainstream X-Men movies, yeah, Jennifer Lawrence isn't showcasing her talent with her portrayal of Mystique. Christian Bale doesn't deliver his best stuff as Batman, and Scarlett Johansson is hardly stealing the show when she suits up with the Avengers. (Johansson also seems to pick a LOT of action movie schlock which is fun but dumb and won't stretch her performative capabilities - Ghost in the Shell, Lucy, etc.)
Gott go, but I haven't seen a lot of the films you mention, but I was unimpressed with Bale in "The Fighter". There were a lot of things I didn't like the film, including the fact that the male leads were twice the age that they shouldn't have been, and the presence of the odious Wahlberg, but Bale tried a bit too hard and came off actor-ey and not like a real person.
As for Lawrence, she really seems to have lost her mojo in recent years. all her best performances were several years ago, nothing she's done recently has been impressive. Maybe she's over Hollywood.
I'm willing to believe that he's given good performances I haven't seen, because I've seen enough weak performances from him to... deprioritize seeing anything new from him.
shareJohansson also seems to pick a LOT of action movie schlock which is fun but dumb and won't stretch her performative capabilities - Ghost in the Shell, Lucy, etc.)
I don't think it's the genre of films at all. Johansson is simply NOT a good actress. Any role that you name as being good will be the exception and not the rule for her.
Also, there are plenty of action flicks that give actors a lot of room to stretch their legs. Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 1, for instance, runs the gamut of emotions (and I think he stretches it a bit further in Lethal Weapon 2).
Stallone gave a rather intriguing performance in the original First Blood, and Linda Hamilton was extremely believable and evolving as Sarah Connor in Terminator 1.
In other words, I think Johansson picks movies where she doesn't have to put on much of a performative emotional act because her range is quite limited based on her body of work. She's not like, say, Noomi Rapace, who had a tour de force performance in the action-packed What Happened To Monday, which featured a series of characters I doubt Johansson would have been able to embody with quite the verve and versatility that Rapace managed. share
I agree with you that a lot of action movies allow for good character work. I probably shouldn't have listed GitS or Lucy, either, since I think she did a good job in those (particularly Lucy).
Most action movies, however, don't require actors to stretch much. That doesn't mean they can't stretch, or that they can't do a great job, but just that the role itself is pretty generic.
But your point there is well made, and I thank you for that course-correction.
As to Johansson, I do differ here where I think the good performances are most of her movies, not flukes at all. Lost in Translation, Match Point, Scoop, The Black Dahlia, Under the Skin, and Her are all fantastic performances. I haven't even seen some of her highly regarded work like Girl with a Pearl Earring, Ghost World, Marriage Story, and Jojo Rabbit.
So, on that point I disagree quite strongly.
Disagree on Bale. His best performances didn't come until long after Empire of the Sun. Even in one of his most recent roles, he did a good job of playing the race car driver Ken Miles.
shareOh, absolutely! If it's a soapbox movie, forget it. Although, cards on the table, I haven't really been interested in superhero movies in four or five years, with *rare* exceptions.
I liked her in V for Vendetta. She was good in Closer and The Other Boleyn Girl. I thought she was really top-level in Black Swan, though.
That like taking the Part Lois Lane and getting pissed that your not playing Superman. If you take the part of Steve Trevor, didn't be pissed your not playing the Hero of the story.
shareWell, I haven't heard that she's upset about her part in Thor 1. I did hear she didn't like the director switch on Thor 2, which in your example is understandable (signing on to do one thing and having that change would be like signing on to play Lex Luthor and finding out you're now going to play Jimmy Olsen).
And it's totally fine if she only wanted to return if the part/script were good. I have no problem with that. Like saying, "I'll come back to the franchise, but I need something to do more than just be 'the girlfriend'," that seems reasonable to me. Again, she wasn't (to my knowledge) complaining about Thor 1, just saying she didn't want to bother with coming back if the part wasn't better, and when they offered her a hero character arc, she took it.
Back to the analogy: that's like playing Lois in one movie and deciding you don't want to do it again, then signing on to play Superman in another movie.
They really missed an opportunity to reimagine Jane as a more interesting character and left her as boring as she was in the comics. All they did was make her a brainy physicist working with another physicist, and both were the only ones in their fields with crackpot ideas of dimensions crossing over each other. I honestly think they included her "intern" Darcy because Jane herself was written to be so bland. Turning her into a feisty bitch for "The Dark World" did nothing to improve on her character.
I also heard Natalie was a total brat during the filming of "The Dark World" because she originally signed the contract, thinking she would get to work with Patty Jenkins, a director she admired back then, only for Patty to leave the project and a male director took over. So Natalie was a real bitch during filming and even refused to come back for a brief re-shoot, so they had to have Chris Hemsworth's wife stand in for "Jane" for a kissing scene.
Honestly, Jane and Thor did not have a very well-written relationship, even before the woke era. I mean, the writers totally neglected that area in favor of all the action between Thor and his enemies. The only reason they even got together in the first two Thor films was because the script demanded it, not because they realistically formed feelings for each other.
The only reason she came back to do this new film was because the guy producing it basically crawled on his knees before her, and begged her to come back, with promises of a high salary and giving Jane all the glory in the new film.
You'll note that in this new film, there is no hint at a rekindled relationship between Jane and Thor at all.
I can't wait to see it bomb, proving it was a bad idea to start with, and that nobody likes seeing Thor have his balls cut off in favor of making his boring ex-gf look good at his expense. I will NEVER forgive Kevin Feige for what he did to Thor. Ever.
shareit will prob still make a billion, because marveltards will watch anything...
shareBut will it have rewatch value? That's the more expensive question?
shareprob not, I saw Thor 3 twice, it wasnt any better the second time. it was more like a fast n furious movie to me...
this will prob be the same I imagine, but if they go back to the serious route, it wont make any sense...
I no longer think Marveltards will watch “anything” these days.
Black Widow, Shang Chi, and Eternals all underperformed; and if the reports are to be believed, the average viewership for the Disney+ shows is nothing to brag about.
Fans might flock en masse on opening weekend for Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt, but if word of mouth is bad, expect it to drop sharply next weekend and not reach even close to $1 billion by the end of its theatrical run.