I Love Summer Movies (Spoilers!)

I can't deny it.  For a long time, I was turning into a hoity-toity film snob.  Now, maybe because I have kids, or maybe because I'm just getting older, I've embraced the bombast.  Big summer movies?  Hell yes.  Explosions?  Sure.  Of course, I watched Black Swan last week and loved the hell out of it, but give me a man who can fly in red tights punching robots that shoot lasers from their eyes, and I'm a happy kid.  Incidentally, I didn't take either child to see Thor, but mostly since I saw it at 9:50 PM.  I did take 240 mg of caffeine, though, so my viewing of Thor didn't end up like The Social Network.  Or Avatar.

Thor

The fourth release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor is the tale of the arrogant warrior son of Odin, king of the otherworldly Asgardians, played by Chris Hemsworth.  Regarded as gods by the ancient Norse, the Asgardians have fallen into human myth and legend, but still keep watch.  Thor threatens an uneasy peace between the Asgardians and their mortal enemies, the Frost Giants, to investigate a Frost Giant raid on Asgard.  Thor declares his father (Anthony Hopkins) is old and weak, and in response, Odin strips Thor of his power and banishes him to Earth.  Machinations in Asgard place Thor's brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), a magical trickster, on the throne.  Thor must learn humility to regain his powers, his place in Asgard, and to stop the bad guy.

What I liked:
- The word that struck me in the first 20 or so minutes of Thor was "classy", at least in the context of a comic book movie.  Kenneth Branagh has tackled a half-dozen adaptations of Shakespeare; his directorial debut, Henry V, at age 29, is still among the best Shakespeare committed to film.  He can handle gravitas, and injects fate-of-the-world gravitas into the Asgard scenes.  Anthony Hopkins lends his own brand of gravitas to the Asgard scenes; he treats the role of Odin as no less a task than King Lear or Othello.

- Efficiency!  Thor has alot of ground rules to lay down, and it lays them very quickly, very efficiently, and moves on.  The history of the Asgardians, how the Nine Realms interrelate, why the Asgardians were worshiped as gods, what's happened since; it takes Thor about two and a half minutes to effectively do what Daredevil took nearly a half hour to accomplish.  (And I don't hate Daredevil.)  I know virtually nothing past the basics of the Thor comics, and the movie didn't leave me the least bit confused about the larger world.

- Chris Hemsworth.  Prior to Thor, I'd only known Chris Hemsworth from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, where he played Captain Kirk's father for the first few minutes of the film.  He was solid there, but there wasn't alot of meat to really assess.  He isn't expected to carry Thor by himself, but he does a good job with what he's given.  His pre-fall Thor is the high school senior who everyone loves and hasn't had to work for a single thing in his life.  His self-sacrifice to the Destroyer Armor (40 foot tall robot-y thing shooting fire from it's...eyes?) is subdued, and isn't as maudlin as it could've been.  Across the entire range of Thor's development, he maintains a regal air, but the self-entitlement fades as he matures.  Is he Olivier?  No, but he makes a pretty damn good comic hero, and will be able to hold his own with Robert Downey, Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, and the rest of the Avengers cast.

- You can't discuss a comic movie without discussing the superhero battles (except Superman Returns).  The action setpieces, and how they work, are a big contributor to a film's success.  They aren't the only contributor, but they're a biggie.  Thor doesn't disappoint, and there's enough variety in the action scenes to prevent it from being repetitive.  Thor and the Asgardians square off against the Frost Giants early on, and that works well.  Thor is gleeful as he smashes through waves of Frost Giants, and demonstrates just how much of a nuclear bomb he can be to bring the battle to an end.  Later on, a de-powered Thor strikes a government facility where Mjolnir, his enchanted hammer, is being kept and studied.  Hand to hand against two dozen government agents, Thor still kicks ass.

What I didn't like:
- Loki is the embodiment of magic and trickery, but he wasn't really all that tricky.  His manipulations are pretty transparent.  I know, this is a comic book and not Othello, but there's nothing that says that the medium can't be elevated.  In the end, we find out he's really a little boy looking for Daddy's approval, which comes out of nowhere.  When, 90% of the way through the film, the hero asks "why are you doing this?", and as an audience member, I don't already know the answer, there's a problem.  It was almost like the end of Star Trek: Nemesis, where Picard's clone Shinzon, after decades of abuse at the hands of the Romulans,  decides to use his doomsday weapon on Earth.  Huh?  Why not Romulus?  But, everyone just rolls with it.

- There's a scene in just about every first superhero movie where I have a visceral response to the character's becoming.  Superman's first flight toward the camera in 1978, Tony Stark's triumphant cry as he circles the Santa Monica Pier, even Cliff Secord's first launch as the Rocketeer (which is a comic book film, BTW).  Thor is kind of a strange bird.  This is an origin story, and it isn't.  When we first meet the adult Thor, he's already a superhero, but he's an arrogant, entitled jerk.  He's cast out of Asgard, learns how not to be a jerk on Earth, and at the moment of his noble sacrifice, is restored as a better, more humble Thor.  This is really his moment of origin.  This should be a chest-pumping, "yeah!" kind of moment, and it really isn't.  He's restored, and then immediately becomes ass-kicking, tornado-making Thor to defeat the Destroyer armor.  As he emerges from the dust, I had little more than a 10 year old's goofy grin.  To be sure, this is a tough moment to capture, and few movies get it quite right.  I think Thor had the chance, I'm just not sure what the right approach should have been.

- Ramin Djawadi broke me for Marvel's movie music.  His Iron Man score set a precedent that even Iron Man 2 didn't live up to.  Patrick Doyle's score isn't bad (his opener to Much Ado About Nothing is soaring, eighteen years later), but it's nothing stellar.

- As the growing Marvel universe...grows, there's bound to be threads running through it that aren't as interesting as others.  Nick Fury's reveal at the end of Iron Man was (and still is) a pretty big deal, and Tony Stark's appearance in the closing moments of The Incredible Hulk really reinforced the fact that something big was going on with these films.  Even the appearance of Mjolnir in Iron Man 2 was pretty damn cool.  Thor has two threads of the Marvel universe running through it, and unfortunately, they're the most workaday references in any of the four films: a cameo by a lesser known superhero (which I didn't even realize was happening until it was almost over), as well as a post-credits scene that just kind of lays there.  This isn't really the meat of the film, and isn't really criteria to judge Thor on it's own merits, but there it is.

- This isn't something I didn't like, but it gives me pause (and this is kind of a big geeky mini-rant).  One of the main objectives of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is to integrate a bunch of comic hero franchises, culminating in next year's The Avengers.  So far, we've got Iron Man & Hulk, and Captain America premieres in July, and all these characters logically fit together.  Even Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the X-Men (all distributed by different studios and so not a part of the MCU) would fit.  Tony Stark's power armor is amazing, but it's a conventional weapon with conventional limits, and his adversaries were chosen to be on relative parity with this.  Hulk was mostly fighting the Army, and The Abomination, each of which were reasonable challenges...just enough to make Hulk have to work for it.  Cap's fighting the Nazis.  What I'm cautious about is how Thor will fit into this.  In this cinematic universe, Thor is, on Earth, a god.  He could really only be matched with someone like Superman.  An Asgardian may give him trouble, but nobody on Earth could stop him.  It's not unlike the Justice League (or more egregiously, the SuperFriends) over in DC comics.  How does Superman fit in with Batman (normal human), Aquaman (worthless), Wonder Woman (subsequently up-powered to fit in with Superman), and the like?  He doesn't.  I guess the biggest thing encouraging me that The Avengers can work well is Joss Whedon.  He's had humans square off against gods before, and it's worked.

What confused me:
- What.  The.  Hell.  Is.  Natalie.  Portman.  Doing.  Here?  Anthony Hopkins is, in many ways, the Marlon Brando of this film.  Even though Thor doesn't need credibility the same way that Brando led credibility to 1978's Superman, he does bring a solid set of credentials to the same sort of role, and his presence makes sense.  Natalie Portman, however, left me completely confused.  Coming off of her Best Actress win for Black Swan (also deserved), she plays Jane Foster, astrophysicist and Thor's human love interest.  There's very little meat to the role, and it's not a role that any of a hundred other actresses could play.  She does well with what she's given, to be sure, but she's not given a significant amount to do.  Is she slumming?  I don't know.

Thor certainly isn't the best superhero film ever.  Marvel will have a tough time topping Iron Man, Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight, but what it tries to do, however, it does pretty well.  It also serves as connective tissue for the growing Marvel universe, which is growing more interesting as each film is released.

Oh, and seeing Mjolnir slam through hordes of Frost Giants in 3D is pretty awesome.

I'm back in the reviewing/pontificating game...160 characters is just too few to really express myself (as if that's not narcissistic enough). 


And if I were omnipotent, I'd have a mariachi band, too!


And you'd have a cigar!  Or women!


(But mostly, if I were omnipotent, I'd erase from existence my glowing, 19-years-of-anticipation review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  It sucked.)