Thor Director Addresses Biggest Marvel Fan Complaint About MCU Classic, And It Was Too Expensive to Fix — Explained
Of the six original Avengers in the MCU—Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk, Hawkeye, and Thor—it’s the series of Thor movies that is perhaps the most heavily criticized and has arguably undergone the most change. Granted, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk hasn’t had a standalone film in the MCU, nor has Hawkeye (although he did get the Hawkeye TV show), and Black Widow only had just the one film. Yet, for Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Captain America: Civil War, their tones and approaches remained largely the same, and all six films remain celebrated. In fact, Civil War gets just as much respect as any of the Avengers movies.
The same, unfortunately, cannot largely be said for Thor. The first Thor movie is widely considered one of the better installments of the four, with the second movie, Thor: The Dark World, and the most recent movie, Thor: Love and Thunder, both receiving heavy criticism. Thor: Ragnarok was generally well-liked as well, although some didn’t like that the tone had shifted so radically from dark and brooding in the first two films to, frankly, silly (even with Asgard being destroyed) in the third. Even with Thor generally ranking highly among the four Thor movies, though, one major fan complaint has persisted in the 15 years since the movie was first released—and now, director Kenneth Branagh has addressed it head on.
Branagh Defends the Canted Angle of Thor
In a recent interview with On Film… With Kevin McCarthy about his new movie Mayday, which he stars in alongside Ryan Reynolds, director of Thor Kenneth Branagh discussed one of the biggest complaints that fans have had about the film over the last decade: the canted or Dutch angle/tilt that was used throughout the movie. Regarding this complaint, Branagh said, “I could never understand why people were so baffled by that choice in Thor. Go back to any run of the comics, but the classic one, the Kirby runs, and look at the framing. It’s all canted. It’s all, you know, German Expressionist, which of course already sounds like it’s mega pretentious, but it was really just more about visual impact.”
Branagh continued, “It was just what would hit you in a story about gods. You needed to make some things more or less important…I felt as though there was a reason for everything, and it was also the way you could put yourself behind it.” However, Branagh added that he knows that there were conversations within Marvel about what it would cost to change this Dutch angle, or, as Branagh put it, “horizontalize” the movie, saying, “I am glad to say that the cash price for that process was so prohibitive,” and that was why they couldn’t do it.
According to Branagh, this unique tilted angle of Thor that has led to waves of backlash and criticism from fans is here to stay, as it seems the price tag to make the change was too high, even by Marvel’s standards. Ultimately, though, this “fix” is probably an unnecessary one. As Branagh himself said, there was a reason he chose to do it that way, and ultimately, an MCU film with a slightly different approach is far from the end of the world.
