Thor - Film #12

Remember when Natalie Portman won an Oscar???



Yeah, it wasn't for this movie.

In fact, I spent the better part of the movie wondering exactly what Natalie Portman did with her Oscar during principle filming...you know, because of the shame and phoning-it-in. But then I figured she probably filmed it before she won the Oscar and I felt much better.

Also, Chris Hemsworth's abs helped ease any lingering anxiety I felt over Portman's dearth of talent manifesting itself so blatantly in the role of an..ahem...astrophysicist.



There, don't we all feel better now?

I figure that Kenneth Branagh's Thor (yeah, I just typed that) is a Faustian attempt to reconcile human understanding through science to its dirty skank mistress mythology. Of course, in that reading, Branagh is Faust, which makes TOTAL sense because of the ego and necromancy and the cheating on Emma Thompson, which I still haven't forgiven him for even if she did totally marry up but then lose major points for naming her child "Gaia" or "MoonGoddess" or something.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh, right...Thor.

Anyways, Thor is your average, overblown superhero movie, except instead of a wimpy, anemic vegan in a spidey-suit, we get, you know, Abs Hemsworth who actually looks like he actually could be a superhero.

I mean, I thought Vincent D'Onofrio did a pretty good impression in Adventures in Babysitting, but that barely holds a candle to this effort.

See:



Vs.



I mean, come on! In comparison, poor D'Onofrio comes across like a butch trucker named Barbie who pumps steroids and eats sixteen eggs a day for breakfast so she can't taste the hormone supplements.

And that's with Hemworth's shirt on!

Look, I'm a sucker for Norse mythology, I really am, but this film misses the boat on several accounts.

First, Loki, who is reduced to a sniveling second child here (and, yeah, I can say that because I too am a sniveling second child, and someday, I too want to ruin the best day of my sister's life by inviting frosty blue gatecrashers to her big girl hammer party).

Loki was one of my favorites in the myths...you know, the oft-tortured demi-god jotunn halfbreed trickster of fun, but, here, well, he's like the obnoxious genetics experiment of Nicholas Cage, Alan Cumming, and Robert Smith.

Gone horribly, horribly wrong.




He should be off menacing Baldar with some mistletoe, not scheming to exile his brother so that he can save his father's life from the more sinister Frost Giants while Daddy-Odin catches some supernaturally-induced Z's in his Rainbow Brite-star-sprinkled-generated hyperbaric chamber sanctioned solely for the exclusive use of Norse Gods during their inconvenient nap cycles.

And he certainly shouldn't be off writing quasi-erotic elegiac poems of mourning to some pretty little Goth jotunn, which is what he looks like he's doing through 79% of the film.

GAH!

And what about the other Big Bad, the not-so-elusive Frost Giants, who emerge like a creepy combination of Jack Frost and any random Na'vi Avatar. I can't believe at no point in the film did ANYONE, not even pre-Portman-love-spelled Thor, yell, "Stay Frosty!" to anyone about anything at any point!

Oh, the injustice!




Oh, and then, there's the Rainbow Bridge. Now, I've already thrown in my gratuitous Rainbow Brite reference, but, damn. I know the Rainbow Bridge is actually authentic to the mythology, but, whenever anyone mentioned having to traverse it, all I could think of was this:



And that does not inspire world-ending fear.

Or, maybe more accurately, it does, but not in the desired way.

I took it as a bad sign when, within moments of Abs Hemsworth's Asgardian entrance, I could safely predict the entire plot of the film (which, in case you missed it, is basically "Hubris-addled Muscle-Man needs to learn a lesson in humility by being banished to Earth where he can learn how to order coffee effectively AND the true value of love, friendship, and honor, sometimes while shirtless") - and, as my sister warned, if you don't pay attention to the first segment in Asgard, you might as well go home and reread 50 Shades of Grey or something because it's probably not going to happen for you.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a BAD film (it wasn't a GOOD film, either, I'm not saying that, but it could have been so much worse than it was and I actually kind of liked that cute Thor fella). I just didn't see anything particularly new or interesting therein.

You feel me?

And what's up with the cast?

I mean, aside from Portman, because you already know my feelings about that one. We also have Sir Anthony "One-Eye" Hopkins as Odin, Rene Russo as Frigga, and Stellan Skarsgard as "The Beave."

What's up with that???

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I were Rene Russo, I'd love to get paid to wear gold lame and have Chris Hemsworth shoot me dirty winks for an afternoon, but what's Hopkins's excuse? Was it the pirate patch?



Because you know when the director yelled "Cut!" that Sir Anthony was bitching his little British mouth off about the hunk of spray-painted gold metal lodged in his eye hole.

And don't even get me started on Skarsgard, whose greatest contributions here are three-fold:

1. The drinking scene (which is the funniest bit in the movie)

2. To lend a sense of Nordic authenticity to a Marvel Comic hero whose backstory is so deeply entrenched in the myths of his people

and, of course...

3. Alexander Skarsgard, who, in case you don't read my reviews often, looks like this:


Of course, he's not in this movie, so there is that.

I'll be honest, I didn't pay what I would call particularly close attention to this film. In fact, I couldn't tell you any of these characters' names:


As far as I'm concerned, their names are Gimli, Xena, Tiny Thor Beard Jr., and Jet Li.

But, hey, you don't read my reviews for their accuracy.

And, look, I didn't even make one crude phallic joke about the Hammer...because it goes totally without saying...



the hammer is his penis.