lisbeibeth replied to your post “I wanted to elaborate a bit about what I wrote in this post about The...”
@postmodernmulticoloredcloak re the editors; that's an idea. I remember reading about Star Wars, and how the editor really saved that one, while they couldn't do that with phantom menace because of the way Lucas shot it, which is why it's such a mess. Re the other comment about making Steve 'cool'; IMO, the most egregious one is Mjolnir, which I'm still not over, because while Steve wielding it in AOU would have been awesome, post Thor Ragnarok, it's meaningless,
@postmodernmulticoloredcloak because it erases everything about Thor's development in that movie; in Thor3 we were told that the power was never in the hammer but it was always Thor's; so why does Steve have lightning powers? If they were going to go back on Thor's whole character development, why let Waititi go there at all? It's going to sound ridiculous, but I was actually depressed after watching Endgame; I expected death, I didn't expect character assassination.
Yes, editors are an underestimated part of production but their work is way more important than one would think in shaping what the movie really looks like, especially when directors just film a fucktilion hours of footage. We know editor Debbie Berman has been decisive in how Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Spiderman Homecoming came out, for instance, and she even made them re-shoot scene to make them more women-friendly...
Mjolnir is kind of a complicated matter because technically Iron Man 3, Captain America 3 and Thor 3 were supposed to take away from the three protagonists the “thing” of their superhero-ness, because Tony decides to destroy the suits and fixes his chest, Steve drops the shield and Thor’s hammer gets destroyed, but obviously Tony’s decision last 0.3 seconds, Tony gives the shield back to Steve to symbolize their reconciliation, and Thor... *groans* suffers from amnesia that makes him forget the previous week, I suppose, because he decides he needs an axe to fight Thanos for absolutely no reason. And then gets Mjolnir back for a while because they all hate Taika Waititi that much.
Steve wielding Mjolnir for 372 minutes is frankly offensive fanservice because sure, he could wield it once in a crucial moment of the fight and yay closes the circle with that scene in Age of Ultron. But we get this big sequence of him using the damn hammer like they wanted to distract us from the rest of his characterization that paints him as a lying hypocrite who doesn’t even try to process emotions in a healthy way. I’m sorry but I think it’s more heroic to process loss than be a good fighter. The way Endgame paints them, random gay dude who went on a date despite being in pain from the loss of his husband is more of a hero than that sorry excuse for a Steve Rogers.
It’s like they forgot that what really matters in a superhero story. The superhuman abilities are just a narrative device to tell stories of people who represent humanity - with our flaws but especially the capability for good. But selling tickets and merchandise is more important than telling a good story, so. They didn’t forget, they just didn’t care.
(The reason they let Taika go at it is because they need to insert actually progressive stuff once in a while as candy for us to keep us invested. But obviously Russos&co didn’t understand shit about Ragnarok because they tried to keep the “upbeat” vibe of Ragnarok for Thor’s arc and
