Thor!

[akashiver]

(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.

Comments

[kendokamel.livejournal.com]

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.

I agree. Like I mentioned in my post about it, Thor was exactly what I was expecting from a summer movie adaptation of a comic book series with characters loosely based on Norse mythology.

Going in, I wasn't sure what to expect with Loki, but I'm kind of glad that they gave him at least a little bit of depth as a conflicted villain, rather than flat-out psychotic supervillain.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

I'll be blogging about this fairly soon myself, but yes, agreed that the romance is weak. We thought it worked only because Thor had, as various characters noted, awesome abs, and Natalie Portman was cute, so, you know. That was the only foundation I saw for their relationship, as much as the two actors really tried to sell it.

My guess is that a significant part of the film dealing with S.H.I.E.L.D. was cut from the film, because certain points of that didn't make much sense if you tried to think about it too hard. Not that we did.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

(Trotting out my Hel icon for the occasion!)

Yeah, teleidoplex and I were just discussing how the middle of the movie waves its hands very energetically to distract you from the fact that, um, nothing really happens (on the Earth front). Thor fails to pull Excalibur Mjolnir from the stone: good. It's a classic setup for the events that will bring about his character transformation . . . except we skipped those events and went straight to the transformation. You kind of have to fill in for yourself a vague explanation for why exactly he started to care about people and frost giants and so on. And (related) I was disappointed that Natalie Portman's character didn't get to do more. I wouldn't be surprised if mariness is right, and that there will be multiple deleted scenes from that part of the film when it comes out on DVD.

But speaking as someone whose introduction to Norse mythology came the exact same way as yours, yes, I was pleased with this Loki. (And my enjoyment of the film pretty much depended on how they handled him.) A few minutes in I leaned over to teleidoplex and said, "This probably only looks like Chekhov's gun to me because I'm a giant mythology geek -- but you know he's Loki Laufeyson, right?" And then it turned out to indeed be part of the story, in a way that gave you good reason to sympathize with Loki while still having him as the antagonist.

We're wondering now if he's going to be the villain for the Avengers movie. He could be a good one, methinks, if the script isn't stupid.

[teleidoplex]

Also agreed. And in the 'geeks can never be pleased' category, our only other beefs were:

Sif's hair. Wtf?
Why u no giv us moar abs?