Back in July when Thor: Love and Thunder trailer was released, Marvel fans started accusing the franchise of using CGI to bulk up Natalie Portman’s muscles in the trailer.
Even this skeptcism took over her highly marketed and publicized physical transformation when behind-the-scenes of the movie released.
Natalie Portman who’s been a part of MCU as Jane Foster, a scientist and love interest of Thor in earlier movies, now becomes “The Mighty Thor” in the upcoming movie Thor: Love and Thunder.
So, according to these behind-the-scenes videos, the theory comes from the fact that Portman can be seen having motion-capture dots on her arms which increase all the doubts regarding her ‘transformation’.
It has been circulated by the fans that her arms are bulked-up using the CGI, otherwise why would they put black dots on her arms.
After the video got viral, she has been heavily criticised for lying about her transformation.
The clip indeed makes her arm look quite larger as compared to how so far we have seen her.
These black motion-capture dots were also seen on her co-star Chris Hemsworth, so many people also claimed that he was faking the muscles too.
However, Thor: Love and Thunder producer, Brad Winderbaum denies using CGI arm for Natalie Portman. He talked about how her character was made look taller using the CGI as, it is supposed to be 6-feet tall, but not to bulk up her arms.
Here’s what producers commented on the claims of using CGI arms on Natalie Portman – “Natalie certainly put in the work and bulked up for the role, but there’s still nothing she could do to grow 9 inches.”
Kevin Fiege, the President at Marvel stated “The only thing we assisted with was making the Mighty Thor a little bit taller. That was the only movie magic we used. Everything else was all her,”
Well, something similar happened again, another criticism towards the CGI of the show which is explained by the producers.
This time, it is noticed by the fans that her Helmet appeared to be fully CGI created which seems to be quite tacky and pulls you away from the story as well.
Jane Foster, the character made her debut in 2011 released Thor, and after Thor and her separating from each other, they get reunited in this movie.
Only for Thor to find out that Jane Foster now wields repaired Mjolnir and is now known as Mighty Thor with a similar suit as Thor.
Recently, Disney+ released an episode of their show Marvel Studios: Assembled which is about the behind the scenes of these marvel shows, this one was about Thor: Love and Thunder.
In this documentary, the producer of the film, Brad Winderbaum who gave clarification on the CGI arm few months back, now explained why they chose to use CGI Helmet for Mighty Thor
He explained how this cricitzed choice of using CGI helmet was actually to help actors on the performance standpoint as those are not very comfortable to wear while acting.
“Those helmets are really well-designed, but they’re not always the most comfortable things in the world. Sometimes they’re heavy, they change your posture. But if you can eliminate all of that and have a VFX artist put it in later, then that’s what you do. Our CG artists have gotten so great at creating reflective surfaces like the helmet, that it actually helps us from a performance standpoint.”
The costume designer behind the movie Mayes C.Rubeo also talked about why they went with this look , and the helmet and what the inspiration behind it, in the first place.
“The helmet that we have, we went back to the old comic books and got that vintage feeling for it. And we adapted to the beautiful face of Natalie Portman, but we didn’t want to hide too much of her eyes and her features. It’s very easy not to lose her because she’s unique.”
So fans were still wondering if it would be better to choose physical sets and costumes rather than CGI.
The fans on twitter raised the question that Marvel is overworking their digital artist to put CGI on almost all of their stuff.
They questioned the use of CGI helmets on Mighty Thor, Black Bolt’s suit and some other character’s mask being CGI in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness as well.
There have been a lot of complaints of Bad CGI as well as a lot of these things seems to be fake where it could have been physical prop easily.
It certainly gives into the controversy rencetly happened in Marvel studios about some vfx artist coming forward about their depression due to overwork from the franchise.
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