Thor

dir: Kenneth Branagh

More comic book movies. More Marvel comic book movies! See, the waddling Comic Book Guys of the world don’t have enough to entertain themselves with and bitch about across the vast expanse of the tubes of the internets already.

There weren’t enough goddamn Spider-Men, Supermen, X-Men, Iron Men, Batmen, Hulk Men, Man Men flicks out there stinking up the joint as it was?

Of course it’s never going to end because the golden age continues. They make billions of dollars, and they convince grown adults to buy merchandise for themselves to put on their desks at work, without the least amount of shame or reluctance. That’s a fucking money spinner, that is. Comic book franchises make money rain from the skies, so it makes sense that the Microsoft of the comics world, being Marvel, invested a shitload of money setting up their own studio to make these delightful and delicious flicks themselves with greater regularity and with more direct profits to themselves.

And thus, Marvel Studios brings us The Mighty Thor!

As tempted as I am to keep ripping the shit out of them and this flick just for the mere fact of their lazy existence, I’m not going to. Mostly, I’m not going to because I actually enjoyed Thor, ridiculous as that seems. Embarrassing as it might be.

Chris Hemsworth as Thor is actually pretty good. Sure, his unfortunate Australian / Kiwi accent leaks through every now and then, but at the very least he has the physical appearance and presence you need for one of these kinds of capers. Like insecure girls with self-esteem issues, sometimes it comes down to nothing more than a shit-eating grin and a charming manner to get into my good graces. After watching much of the flick with a disbelieving eye, there was a scene where Our Hero carries in from the cold, a comatose-from-booze Stellan Skarsgard. He has such a rascally good natured grin on his face as he says, upon being asked what they got up to, “We drank, we fought, and we honoured our ancestors”.

I pretty much gave up disliking it after that. It’s not a great flick by any reasonable standard, but for one of these kinds of flicks it’s probably as good as it gets. I’m not going to claim it makes any kind of real world sense, since it deals with gods, giant hammers, technologically advanced aliens mistaken for gods and Natalie Portman as an astrophysicist. But as a melange of Norse Mythology and high Flash Gordon-like camp, it didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out or perforate my eardrums, which is as much as I can hope for in this day and age.

Thor (Hemsworth) is an arrogant jerk who swans around with an almost unbearable air of entitlement. Being the son of Odin (Sir Anthony Hopkins) will do that to you, I guess. They all live in an impossibly grand realm called Asgard. They wear shiny, shiny armour, and declaim loudly every time they want to speak about anything, whether it’s about the need to attack their enemies, or scratch themselves in an uncomfortable place.

Thor has a younger, weedier, magically-inclined brother called Loki (Tom Hiddleston) against whom (though he doesn’t know it yet) he is eternally competing against for their father’s unattainable approval.

I would imagine that when the father the approval is desperately being sought from is the leader of all the Norse gods, it’s always going to be a losing battle. But you keep trying, don’t you? Even knowing it’s never going to happen, if at all, until it’s too late, you still have to try, don’t you? It’s how we’re wired as sons and daughters of those less-than-gods we call our goddamn parents.

So who can fault these mighty (in their own ways) sons for desperately fucking things up in their pursuit of a kind word, or a ‘way to go, son’, or an ‘onya, Sonya’? After Thor and some buddies of his fuck up a whole bunch of ice giants from the Jotunheim realm, ‘ice giants’ just being the generic and racist term for these differently-abled and scantily clad macro Smurfs, his stern but fair father turfs him out of Asgard, banishing him to the human realm, which I think is called Midgard. And, worst of all, he makes it so Son Number One can’t even play with his hammer Mjolnir any more.

On earth he stumbles around New Mexico (I think, or Arizona, or some other generic dry dusty sandy place, which is probably still filmed in Canada) and friends things up with a bunch of scientists. Natalie Portman is a Harvard graduate, so perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch for her to play a highly intelligent person who screams about Einstein – Rosen bridges at the top of her perky lungs. I’m not sure, though, if I buy her as an astrophysicist. Stellan Skarsgard can sell anything, though, from any film role in cinematic history to a vacuum cleaner as far as I’m concerned, so he actually does okay as the token person from a Scandinavian background who knows enough of the Norse myths to know how or why Thor couldn’t and then could be the person he claims to be.

This is not a deep and meaningful flick. There is the merest patina of characterisation and believability to the proceedings, because these aren’t really meaningful characters and, despite Kenneth Branagh’s involvement, none of this frippery is raised to the level of what hack lazy reviewers have been calling Shakespearean storytelling. There’s no way Slick Willy Spear Shaker would have has this many characters standing around with so little to do or say. There would have been a bunch of thee-s and thou-s thrown around as well.

But you can’t fault Branagh for trying. I also applaud him for not turning this into a wall-to-wall generic action fest. I liked that the action set pieces didn’t go on for too long, so that we didn’t have the kind of numbing excess that what’s his name’s King Kong remake inspired, or even the duller sections of the two Iron Man flicks, where ironically, the action was less interesting than the other shenanigans the main character got up to.

Reference is made to the Thor character walking around New Mexico in a fish out of water fashion, but considering the way he basically gets along easily in this not-that-strange realm, and can wear a flannel shirt quite easily, it seems odd that they opted to depict him as such. It plays in to the idea that the film wants to put across to make the premise somewhat more palatable to retarded-religious audiences – sure, they call him a god, the God of Thunder, of course, but he’s not really a god: he’s just a being from a more advanced species, whose technology is so advanced that it would look like magic to the average comic book reader or comic book movie franchise watcher.

Sure it is. And that hammer is just programmed with password-protection which makes it change its mass and weight based on the presence or absence of nobility particles, it doesn’t have a spell on it. And The Destroyer, which sets about destroying bits of a one horse New Mexico town is just a well programmed robot.

Yeah, right. Talk about trying to have it both ways. Okay, I will. What was that Supernaut song again, I Like it Both Ways from an age ago?

Well I don’t like it both ways, but I can respect the lifestyle choices of other people, and I applaud their flexibility, the fucking indecisive selfish gluttons.

There’s the barest of character arcs in Thor as well, speaking of wanting to have your cake and fuck it too: Thor is sent to Earth to learn humility, or at least respect for other people. When The Destroyer is, er, Destroying things and threatening innocent little New Mexican people’s lives, Thor beseeches the giant thing, telling it to leave those people alone, because their mayfly-like existences have become precious to him. For some reason.

Why? Well, it just happened. For some reason. Because now, in a hurry that would impress a premature ejaculator, Thor not only realises the error of his ways, and now respects human lives, and the rights of fluffy kittens presumably, but he also pledges allegiance presumably to the American flag, in order to pave the way for his involvement in the upcoming Joss Whedon-directed Avengers flick, which, instead of having Steed and Mrs Peel, will have Iron Man and Captain Avenger and the Hulk and other more plausible participants. In some ways this flick amounts to a feature length trailer, ladies and gentlemen, or, should I say, paying suckers.

I paid good money to see this, but I chose not to blight my eyes with the 3D version, instead electing for the old skool 2-dimensional version. Two dimensions are more than adequate for my purposes, really, and I don’t think I missed out on anything. I’m not sure if I really understood what the story was going for in terms of any meaning beyond ‘let’s smash shit up and make a billion dollars’ entirely, but I appreciate what they were trying to do, to some extent. Chris Hemsworth is perfectly adequate in the role, in fact, better than adequate, and I enjoyed watching him striding around manfully and fucking shit up with a wink and a forsooth every now and then.

It’s not a long flick as well, which I appreciated. There’s not much filler there, which is something which predisposes me positively sometimes. I also really liked the Loki character (but then I always did), and the guy playing Heimdal (Idris Elba), being He Who Controls The Rainbow Bridge. Despite having the stupidest headgear since Gary Oldman in that stinker of a Dracula flick, he gets and delivers some good lines. Overall, it’s an amiable and enjoyable comic book movie, rare as that is.

Now there’s just another X-Men flick to look forward to, and Captain America: The First Avenger to look forward to, and The Avengers, and the Green Lantern flick and more Iron Man movies and another Batman flick and the new 3 D Spider-Man flick and - and - and... no further reasons to ever go to a cinema again unless the film is made and approved by some fucking comic book company.

Jesus, someone just shoot me now, why don’t you…

7 times if there’s anything slightly more implausible than Natalie Portman as a scientist, perhaps it’s Kat Dennings as her assistant out of 10

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“This mortal form grows weak. I require sustenance!” – I’m going to scream this out loudly the next time I go to the Pancake Parlour - Thor