Dear Marvel Studios,

My name is Royce and I have been a fan of your films since X-Men came out in 2000. It marked a coming of age for the superhero genre as a whole, and were it not for that film, we wouldn’t have Batman Begins, V For Vendetta or Sin City. You have proven for the past eight years that the world of comic books is not only profitable, but accessible for those who have never picked one up in their lives. Not just for Marvel, but for DC and many other imprints. But because it started with you, I think the moviegoing public owes you thanks.

For my money, the best Superhero film ever made is your own Spider-Man 2. That film is what I firmly believe would have been the product, had the late, great Billy Wilder been a comic book fan. Worries over love and employment, ordinary men and women taken to extraordinary means, pure hearts leading a corrupt world. I know that movie came out four years ago, but you should still be proud of yourselves.

This isn’t to say, of course, that Marvel hasn’t been complicit in some stinkers. No, far from it. I have watched the silly (Ghost Rider), the dull (Fantastic Four), the beefheaded (The Punisher), and the flat-out pretentious (Spider-Man 3) come out of the movie wing of The House That Stan And Jack Built. But your average is still pretty high, and every film with the Marvel name on it is still a point of optimism for myself and many others.

But I am afraid that you may be slipping into bad habits again with Thor (which is scheduled for release on June 4, 2010), being as I have gotten my hands on a 2007 draft of the script by Mark Protosevich.

I started out as a fan of Protosevich when his first credited script, The Cell, came out in 2000. Only myself and Roger Ebert loved that movie, and to this day, it is the last worthwhile project that Jennifer Lopez had her name on. But then, just two years ago, Protosevich also had his name on the craptacular remake of The Poseidon Adventure. Y’know, the one with Kurt Russell in it? But I figured the studio took it away from him, as is so often the case, and I wasn’t ready to pass judgment on him yet.

But this draft of Thor is a mess. It contains precious little of the qualities that make a Marvel film what it is, and it gets bogged down in its own exposition. It may come as some surprise to you and Mr. Protosevich, that no, we are not all majors in Norse Mythology.

I know your executives have already read the script, but here’s just a friendly reminder of what it’s about, just in case it’s been a while. Thor is the Norse God of Thunder and Son of Odin. In thanks for helping out with a little military skirmish in Asgard, he is made a hammer by the Gnomes, called Mjolnir. Mjolnir contains all the badassery in the world in a small package and is a fitting gift for Thor, but he gets carried away with it and kills one of the other Gods with it. Everyone is pissed at Thor, and they strip him of his Godly attire and ship his ass to Midgard (or “Earth”) to be sold into slavery.

Meanwhile, God o’ Trickery Loki pulls off some Machiavellian plotting to take over Asgard and all the races in the nine Norse worlds. And it’s up to Thor to reclaim his Godliness before Loki succeeds.

Straightforward enough, I think, but the Devil is in the details, and those details are sketchy at best. Protosevich unwisely assumes with his script that anyone who reads it (and subsequently everyone who watches it) knows the ins and outs of Norse mythology. This makes it almost impossible to follow along in any conventional manner. Thus the normally two-hour task of reading a script took the better part of my day off from work as I had to stop almost every five pages to go to wikipedia because I don’t know what in the blue hell a Dokkalfar, Jotun, Einherjar, or Norn is.

There are times where Protosevich does tell the reader what some of these fantastical creatures are, such as the Rusulkai. The Rusulkai are basically Greek-style sirens, only half woman and half tree. But the problem is, from Protosevich’s script, the AUDIENCE doesn’t know what they are. Sure you may think, “Oh, the audience won’t care. We’ll just show them some monstrosity and they’ll keep their mouths shut.”

No, we won’t.

Another thing is that Protosevich has little to no insight as to how actors do their jobs. Every line, it seems, requires either grave intonation or flat-out screaming. And I laughed for almost an hour when I read that one of the characters looked upon a battle “with fascination, disgust, excitement, and dread.”

Now how the fuck is an actor supposed to pull THAT one off?

Which leads me to my major problem with Thor. It’s just the origin story. You know how with every superhero flick, there’s an origin story that has to be taken care of in the first hour, so the second hour can be devoted to emotional conflicts and superheroics? Yeah, there’s none of that here. Boy is born to God, Boy gets hammer, Boy loses hammer, Boy tries to get hammer back from bad guy. This is just the origin story of a Norse God, not a Marvel adaptation. Anyone could have made this, being as Norse Mythology is public domain.

No, do rewrites and put either Radioactive Man or The Wrecking Crew in it.

Because as it stands, you’re basically remaking Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. You haven’t seen that one? Oh, you need to. It’s an exquisite turd of the highest order that should be viewed in every screenwriting class in America, so they know what not to do while writing a script. Contextless monsters enter and leave for no reason whatsoever and it has more backstory than brains.

Only Thor doesn’t have a catfight in the mud to make it appealing.

With all due respect,
Royce