THOR Movie Review

As anyone should know by now, I am a huge comic book fan.  But my ultimate favorite of all the heroes is Thor.  So when the movie was announced I was very excited and when we got to see the Monjor at the end of Iron Man 2 I was ecstatic.  Still I worried how all this mythology would transfer into a movie, I can see many pitfalls in this that could end up being a mess. 

I am going to say overall I enjoyed it a great deal, as much as I did both the Iron Man films.  That isn't to say Thor (or Iron Man for that matter) is perfect but overall it was good. 

Up front I will say I am completely annoyed by the whole 3-D trend.  It's really not that great, tends to give me a headache cause it looks like everything is out of focus and all around takes a way from a good movie experience.  It is obvious the whole thing is an attempt to get higher ticket sales but at this point I have seen two films with 3-D (This and Tron Legacy) and both times I felt the 3-D really didn't help much and in fact was a bit of distraction on it's best level.  

To avoid possible spoilers, I won't say much of the plot.  It's not very complex (with the exceptions of Loki's scheming) and is very straight forward.  One other thing about Loki's schemes, while his plan gets a bit convoluted at one point, he does give answers as to why and the audience does understand exactly what is going on.  This is important as some recent films have had some big schemes that made little to no sense (Destro in GI Joe Rise of Cobra for instance) and because of that ruined the potential of the film.  

Chris Hemsworth is epic win as Thor.  He is given some great stuff to work with and pulls it off well.  Of course Anthony Hopkins rocks as Odin and Tom Hiddleson as Loki is great as well.  In fact it is hard for me to find anyone who didn't play their parts well, including Natalie Portman.

Now I am going to be blunt, I have never seen Natalie Portman in any film where I liked her part.  The Professional was kind of creepy to me.  The Star Wars Prequels were, well, I have said so much about them but her part as Padme' was weak as hell.  Even Black Swan which she was hailed for was a film that did nothing for me (maybe more on that later).  Point is that while I hold nothing against her, she has never really done anything for me in films.  I won't say her portrayal as Jane Foster was ground breaking but when I heard she was part of this I feared the worst.  But really she did a good job in the part she was cast.  I did think she "fell" for Thor a bit easy, but that is one of those minor things I can ignore (hope that wasn't too big a spoiler LOL, should be pretty obvious from the press pics).  

Another very strong point of the film was the supporting cast.  

The area I thought this movie really rocked was with the supporting cast.  It's easy to focus on Thor and to ignore Sif, the Warriors 3, or other characters that are not in the top of the marquee.  While they don't steal the show, the supporting characters are well done and have just enough character to get sense of them as characters.  Hiemdell probably got the most attention (and understandably so given his role as guardian) and was portrayed great.  Sif is another one and I dare say is one of the few female roles that is shown as "strong" that isn't just a man with boobs.  The Warriors 3 get a few lines each but still have enough to do that they stick out in your mind at the end of the film.  Even Frigga has a brief moment to shine.  Even Jane Foster's science crew is kind of interesting but also do not distract from the main man; THOR.  Oh and our old friend Agent Coulson of course makes an appearance and it's a much more memorable one than his role in the last two Iron Man films.

Another great aspect of the film was the effects.  I wondered how on Earth they were going to show the Rainbow Bridge (AKA Bifrost Bridge) and the way it was portrayed was inventive and made the presence of the bridge convincing rather than distracting.  Asgard was also a great looking place.  While your mind knows that Asgard is CGI, it was still very cool to see on screen.  

But as good as it was there were some problems.  I already mentioned Jane Foster falling in love too easily with Thor.  Another major problem I had was the Frost Giants.  Not that they weren't actually giants, although I wondered why after seeing them cause they could have easily have been 20-30 feet tall since they were mostly done in computers anyway.  But my big problem is that several times the Frost Giants looked to be changing height.   I will have to watch again to point out the exact moments, but at one point they looked to be about 8 feet tall and in another scene they looked about 12 feet tall.  While this could be explained by differing heights of the Frost Giants, the major problem here is that if that is the case they apparently only hang out with other Frost Giants who are the same size and only attack with those groups.  Such fantasy creatures should be relatively uniform to avoid such confusion, but it appears the animators were in disagreement about how tall the Frost Giants should be.  I can handle them being shorter, I just want a sense of how tall they are.  

Another complaint I have is the idea of magic being high tech and that the Asgardians are aliens.  I don't think this was done to make the film more accessible to the religious nuts who hate Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.  I actually think this was done to make Thor less of a contrast to Iron Man.  Thing is that this contrast is an important idea to both characters in my opinion.  I have often loved the idea of Iron Man and Thor being opposite ends of a literary spectrum (with Captain America being a bridge between them in the role of Legend who is also grounded in reality).  That and the fact that I don't care what Arthur C. Clark said, there is magic in the universe :-).

There were some complaints online that the fight between Thor and the Destroyer is too short.  I partly explain this in my mind that Thor, being the son of Odin, probably would be able to take out the Destroyer easily (at least in the movie reality).  Also, that was not the main fight of the film, which was reserved for Thor and Loki, as it should be in such a film.  

Some other good points, Stan "the Man" Lee has what I consider one of the best cameos of the Marvel movies.  Also don't blink at the beginning, you might just notice a cameo by Eric Allen Kramer who played Thor in the TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns (he is in the Norse Village, it goes by quick and you need to be looking for him).  

While I won't spoil the ending, some have questioned the ending and how it relates to Thor's appearance in the upcoming Avengers film.  If you have read the comics you know what happens in the film has happened before.  In other words, the options are there and if you pay attention Loki himself reveals that there are other options if "You know where they are."  So essentially I am saying don't let the ending be a distraction, all will be settled.  

So overall I would have to recommend this film as a must see.  Try to catch it in 2-D if possible, the 3-D adds nothing to the film.  It's an action packed cool story that is really accessible to long time Thor fans as well as those who are not so initiated.