Fellowship & Fairydust

I must confess, I shared popular opinion when it came to comic book movies when Thor came out. I’d just finished the high school tier of homeschooling and was in caffeine hangover after the spring formal when it was in theaters so I didn’t go. Dad finally got the Blu-ray of it and I watched it all the way through for the first time, casually at first but soon I was mesmerized. It was on a Sunday in Lent, one of the only occasions during the week that I could have meat and watch movies at all, so my imagination was fresh. Over a paper plate of bacon, which my Dad fried, I was impressed by the handling and the visual appearance of the frost giants, the intricacies of the political status quo of Asgard, and the stunning visuals of the Blu-ray copy. But as I trudged outside to put out the garbage with my brother, I found that the aspect of the film that lingered in my mind was the character of Loki.

I knew the background of the Thor dimension of the Marvel universe from watching my brother play his Marvel Ultimate Alliance game over and over. I’ve also had a previous streak for sympathizing with the villains; my favorite actor at the time was Conrad Veidt. I think villains stand out to me because they are the ones who cause the conflict and keep the story going; the villains act and the heroes react to, and try to undo, their evil deeds and this is the essential conflict of the drama. But still, the characters who act are the ones who are the liveliest.

I’ll present an example of another villain I liked; Magneto played by Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class. But sadly he, like Charles Xavier are merely reacting the presence of Shaw and his character diminishes as Xavier is recruiting mutants for his team. Maybe if they had started the X-Men movie with the scene where Eric Lensherr decides to take Shaw’s place as a fighter for mutant domination, and where Magneto truly comes alive, he would have had more to do. In Thor, Loki is in the eye of the storm, he is the one who secretly incites a small group of frost giants to attack Asgard, which begins the conflict between Thor and his father. His plan starts out simply (get rid of Thor and take his place as crown prince) and then becomes more complex and devious (maintain kingship of Asgard, and keep Thor from coming back). The best kind of character has wheels spinning within wheels. Loki certainly has that and Kenneth Branagh presents them very subtly.

From watching Marvel Ultimate Alliance, I had grown to expect Loki to be this hammy, effeminate, annoying and obviously malicious character, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the movie improved on that. Tom Hiddleston, as directed by Kenneth Branagh, plays Loki as a very quiet, cautious, brooding, sensitive person who is surprised at his own cunning but quick to adapt his schemes to accommodate newfound potential. There was an excellent scene at the beginning, not included in the final cut, where we see the two brothers together, before Thor’s glorification, reminiscing over their lives together and how long they have both waited for Thor to be presented with the enchanted hammer. There’s more to the scene where Thor convinces his friends to go with him to Jotenheim, where even Loki insists that he will accompany his brother on his mad venture. We get to see how friendly and intimate they were before the conflict arises and how deep and hidden Loki’s jealousy is seated.

My favorite scene in the film is in the weapons vault, when Loki tries to find out why his hand turned blue when a frost giant touched it during Thor’s attack on Jotenheim. Odin comes in and stops him from touching the ancient artifact he took from Laufey, the king of the frost giants and an old enemy of Asgard. Loki pleads for answers and Odin tells him that he really isn’t his father, and that he took him as an infant from Jotenheim and Laufey is his actual father. This was the scene that won me over, because from what we understood of Loki at that point, we can understand and feel his anger, sadness, self-disgust and betrayal.

We hear his jealousy for his brother, which motivated him to scheme to cause Thor’s banishment, in his accusation that “No matter how much you claimed to love me, you would never have a frost giant sitting on the throne of Asgard!” His outburst, in turn, drives Odin into his comatose state and when he collapses, we still see that Loki is still a loving son who wishes to please his step-father, even if he wants to permanently keep him all to himself. The scene afterwards in Odin’s bedchamber as he lies sleeping, with Loki and his step-mother by his side, further illustrates this. There is a fine scene after this that was also deleted, where Loki is actually surprised and horrified when he finds out, that because of Thor’s exile and his stepfather’s incapacitation, he is now the ruler of Asgard and is presented with the king’s staff.

Here, I think, is where Loki loses control; upon reflection, we can imagine his thoughts being ‘I’m the child of a monster, why shouldn’t I be a complete monster to get what I want? I have the power now.’ He brings his plan to remove Thor one step further, when he makes a deal with his birth father to attack Asgard and assassinate Odin, while secretly planning to betray him. Ironically, he wants do what he manipulated Thor into wanting at the beginning, which is to justify wiping out all the frost giants. He probably also considers killing Laufey, whom he hates, and wiping him out of his blood as it were. Which is why, when Loki finally kills his true father, he names himself ‘Son of Odin’, which has always been Thor’s title of pride.

Loki’s mischief in this film is not as playful as it is vindictive; he carries his plans out with an implacable pragmatism that doesn’t mince words. And yet we can also see a lot of guilt festering inside him, which is why I think he is a very sensitive villain. Verbosity among villains, my Dad and I agreed, is a symptom of their guilty conscious. Loki is brought to tears when he monologues, justifying himself when his brother confronts him and accuses him of madness when he is about to destroy Jotenheim with the Bifrost bridge. During his final fight with Thor, Loki actually demands that Thor fight him, in order to prove himself his brother’s equal as much to himself as to their all-seeing father and Asgard. And when their father finally wakes and intervenes, Loki again is in tears pleading with his step-father that he did what he did for him to justify himself. And when Odin refuses that Loki refuses his mercy and lets himself fall into the void after the Bifrost bridge is destroyed.

It’s this fear Loki has of being useless and overshadowed by Thor, his dark self-discovery and his feverish desperation to prove himself that I found more compelling than Thor’s lesson in humility on earth. “So I am nothing more than another stolen relic, locked up in here until you have use of me!” he says to his stepfather in my favorite scene. How smug I think he must have felt when he comes to visit his exiled brother on earth who has been stripped of his powers and is unable to lift his glorious hammer and sits in disgrace among the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who captured him. ‘You stole father’s attention from me and now how does it feel, brother, to be useless?’ But of course, Branagh, Hiddleston and the script handle him with expert subtlety.

Sadly, I fear that Loki will become more one dimensional in the Avengers movie. But if Guillermo Del Toro does direct a remake of James Whale’s Frankenstein, I’d recommend Tom Hiddleston to play Henry Frankenstein.