This summer, Avengers: Age of Ultron infamously sent Thor to a cave for a bath while everyone was arguing over how to defeat Ultron. Selvig warns that it’s dangerous, there’s a disappointing lack of Mr. Bubble products, Thor screams a lot, and then The Vision is born. True believer Marvel fans nodded their heads in wonderment while those of us with smaller comic book collections reveled in the most experimental Marvel movie sequence since the trippy dream montage from the same movie an hour earlier.
Naturally none of it made any sense whatsoever. It was such a terrible scene of magic vaguely saving the day that you could practically hear bloggers drooling over the special Saturday explainer posts they’d immediately set to work on.
In other words, the Deus Ex Balneum was a case of something important hitting the cutting room floor, or a case of bad plotting where “Spooky Exposition Bath (maybe change to something better later?)” became the solution to the slap fight between Iron Man and Captain America over whether to make a god inside a machine. Granted, there was already an insane amount of things to wade through in this film, so this was just one more hammer to the forehead to accept while bright colors whizzed by and laughter filled the audience as The Vision picked up something meant for gods like it was no big deal.
But now that Marvel has released a deleted scene where Thor and Selvig talk more in the cave about what they’re there for, it makes 37% more sense than it used to. Granted, you’ll probably still need a quick trip to Wikipedia for “Norn cave” (they’re basically Stan Lee’s take on The Fates, and they either consume you or give you all the information you need or maybe both), but, what, you want Marvel to just spoon feed you everything, simpleton?
Beyond taking the opportunity to point out how much of a messy jumble this last Avengers movie was, I also need to give massive amounts of respect to Chris Hemsworth for putting himself out there in a major way, wholly vulnerable to weird nonsense, unseen lightning strikes and Evil Dead-esque spasm strokes of possession. As an actor, that takes trust and guts.
And then it doesn’t even make the final cut. Shame.
Related Topics: Chris Hemsworth
