For Better or Norse

So, on the one hand, I've been cutting back on the number of superhero movies I see. For more than a year there, I didn't watch any. On the other hand, the fact that Joss Whedon is making The Avengers for next year pretty much requires that I go see it. And speaking of requirements, it sort of seems like the separate movies for all the individual characters might be required pre-reading for this "assignment." Alright, Captain America wasn't too bad. So time to backtrack to Thor, now that it's on DVD.

No such luck. Thor turned out to be pretty lame. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that every "first superhero movie" is an origin story, and Thor's origin story seems pretty lame to me.

The movie is on a tight timetable, running only an hour and 50 minutes. The first half hour of that is all preamble, just building up to Thor being cast out to Earth. It's disconnected in terms of content, and thoroughly paints Thor as an entitled jock that is absolutely unlikeable as a character. Sure, that's the point; he has a lesson he has to learn. But the opening left me more wanting to see him get bitch slapped rather than redeemed, and that's a seriously wrong foot to start the movie on.

So, about that lesson learning stuff. The movie has to have a big action climax, of course, so there's 20 minutes off the back end. That leaves just one hour in the middle of the film for Thor to have his character arc -- arrive on Earth, develop feelings, and turn his character around. It's not enough. The scenes we see in the movie just aren't enough to make believable the journey from frat boy to humble hero. The story tells us this happens but doesn't effectively show it.

The acting is average. There are a lot of good people here. Chris Hemsworth definitely has leading man charisma. There have been many movies where Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgård, and Anthony Hopkins have all excelled. But this one-dimensional script just leaves them all with nothing to do but chew scenery. They do it very well, but there's no depth to any of it.

But the movie does look pretty spectacular. The visual sensibilities are phenomenal, from top to bottom. The costumes are cool, the sets are cool, the painted-in CG landscape of Asgard is cool, the visual effects are cool... there's tons of eye candy in this movie, and it's delicious. A lot of that is probably coming from the comics and from the art teams, but if Kenneth Branagh's direction had anything to do with it, praise there too -- it's hard to praise him otherwise when he had so shallow a script to work with.

I suppose the movie was therefore a perfect match for Thor himself as a character concept -- pretty, but empty. I give the movie a D+. I'd recommend it only if indeed it is required knowledge for seeing Joss Whedon's The Avengers. And I'm guessing the script he wrote will be clever enough that required pre-viewing won't be necessary. So don't bother with Thor.