The Four Color Media Monitor

It's not good when an overused plot device in comics starts flooding over into the movie adaptations to boot. In an interview with the Huffington Post (via ScienceFiction), Alan Taylor, the director of Thor: The Dark World and a staffer on a few TV series of yore, was willing to tell this to the reporter:

You mentioned death scenes. You have filmed a lot of famous death scenes.

That's funny. I got lucky for a while. After we killed Christopher Moltisanti in "The Sopranos" (that is my favorite death scene, where Tony has a car crash and he kills his own cousin just by pinching his nostrils shut); after doing that, I looked back and I realized that I killed Caesar on "Rome" and Wild Bill Hickok on "Deadwood" and Ned Stark on "Game of Thrones," and I felt like my job was executioner or something. The episode, major things were happening in them and major emotional events are taking place and the scale of the storytelling is really satisfying. And in this one, we got to kill, or sort of kill, two major characters. And that, I think, is part of the darkening of the movie from the first one -- that we were taking on things like that. The idea, in my mind, is that Thor is a character who continues to grow and he's not just a static superhero and, in the first film, he went from being an impetuous prince to being somebody who is more responsible. And, in our film, he continued to grow up and went through the darker phase of growing up where you start to realize the world is more complicated than you thought and what you wanted might not be what you really want. In my mind, when we started calling it "The Dark World," it wasn't just elves -- it was adulthood [that] is the Dark World. And that's what he's growing into and part of that was losing people he loved.

I've grown weary of this gimmick in comics, and to be honest, it doesn't appeal to me at this point in movies either. Characters don't have to be killed in order for the heroes to grow and not be "static". Plus, if the characters for whom the bell tolls are deities, then it's not like they couldn't be resurrected more easily.

Taylor may have gained fame from his TV ventures, but that doesn't mean it all translates well to comic adaptations.

Labels: golden calf of death, marvel comics, msm propaganda