akashiver | Thor!

(Because really, the title seems like it should have an exclamation mark at the end).

I enjoyed "Thor" much more than I thought I would. Marvel is doing its darn-tootin' best to produce good comic book movies, and its effort shows: the dialogue had some good lines, the acting was surprisingly good, and the plot was (gasp) not insultingly stupid!

In particular, I was impressed with how the screenplay handled both 1) the Asgard material and 2) the villain. We could have ended up in the cheesy-bad family politics of the recent "Clash of the Titans" remake here. Instead, "Thor" handled the Asgard material so well that it was one of the best parts of the film.

My brain was colonized by DWJ's Eight Days of Luke at an early age, so it's fair to say that no film version of Loki could possibly compare to the one in my head. But Thor's Loki, while different, was interesting to watch, and I was happy to see that the filmmakers didn't just make him a straight-up bwa-ha-ha villain.

I liked also that the filmmakers played with our expectations: in one scene Thor's friends realize Loki is up to something because, duh, he's Loki, and jump from there to the assumption that he's out to usurp the throne because dude, that's what power-hungry supervillains do.

Except that Loki turns out to be motivated by the same things that we see motivating him in the first scene: jealousy of his brother and a burning desire to get daddy's approval. Which is nice, because there were numerous points in the film where I was thinking, "this plan doesn't make much sense if Loki is after the throne."

Specifically, I was trying to figure out how Loki could predict that a Frost Giant attack would spur Thor to make an illegal trip to Asgard that would spur Odin to tell him he was a child that would spur Thor to stick his foot in his mouth and get exiled... and the answer was, he didn't. It was an accidental train of events, and he took advantage of it.

The other thing that gave me pause was when Loki made his deal with the Frost King, offering him the return of the Ice Cube in exchange for the Frost King killing Odin. And I thought... hold on... you're going to let him kill Odin AND you're going to give him the Ice Cube? Why bribe him to do something he wants to do anyway? And the answer was, to ensure the Frost King showed up so that Loki could kill him. Nice.

The bad: no trickster god worth his salt would give a killer robot the order to "Destroy Everything." That's Supervillain 101 right there.

The weak part of the film is definitely the romance. It's testament to the acting of Ms. Portman and Mr. Fuzzy-Chops that it works at all, given that there is no development of the hero/love-interest relationship. Seriously - I think the Norwegian scientist gets a better "bonding" situation with Thor than Jane does. The whole Earth storyline seems to be given short shrift, actually. I liked the SHIELD material, but if the Earth portion of the story was supposed to be about Thor learning the value of mortal life and the importance of using power to protect rather than destroy, they needed to spend more time on that.

Stupid did finally break out at the climax, beginning with the words "Destroy Everything" and ending with a certain hammer, but I'm willing to forgive a certain amount of hand-waving at climaxes providing the film doesn't try to pretend it's being clever.