Thor is probably the most unusual of all the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a curious hybrid: half-superhero movie, half-high-fantasy adventure film. It’s a mixture that could have very easily failed spectacularly, or dissolved into silliness, but incredibly enough it works. Indeed, it almost works a little too well, as the high-fantasy, Shakespearean elements occasionally threaten to completely overwhelm the Earth-bound storyline.
After a brief opening in New Mexico, the story proper kicks off with an account of the war between the Asgardians, led by Odin Allfather (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and the Frost Giants of Jotunheim, led by Laufey (surprisingly subtle Colm Feore) fought on Earth in centuries past. The Asgardians are victorious, taking the source of the Frost Giant’s power, the Casket of Ancient Winters.
Flashing forward to the present, Odin prepares to hand over the kingdom to his eldest son, Thor (Chris Hemsworth); a brave, but arrogant and hot-headed warrior. The ceremony is interrupted when a group of Frost Giants attempts to steal back the Casket, only to be eliminated by its guardian, the Destroyer. Thor insists that Asgard should retaliate for the attack, but Odin refuses, not wanting to spark another war. Accompanied by his friends, Sif (Jamie Alexander), Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), Fandral (Joshua Dallas), and Hogun (Tadanobu Asano), as well as his younger, more level-headed brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston in the film’s stand-out performance), Thor decides to take it upon himself to investigate Jotunheim, resulting in a pitched battle that destroys the truce between the two races.
For his actions, as well as his arrogant refusal to acknowledge his mistake, Thor is stripped of his power and exiled to Earth, where he lands in New Mexico and is picked up by astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and her friends, Darcy Lewis (hilarious Kat Dennings) and Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard). Thor then sets out on a quest to recover his power, represented and contained in the hammer Mjolnir…which is now in the possession of S.H.I.E.L.D., as represented by Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg).
The movie’s key strengths are the grand, Shakespearean tone of the Asgard plotline and the easy-going humor of the Earth-bound scenes. Yes, I said Shakespearean, and I meant it. The Asgard scenes play like a “Shakespeare’s greatest hits” collection, being all about war, kingship, fatherhood, questions of identity, treachery, and other mighty themes. In its central question of who shall be king, the story makes overt allusions to King Lear in particular, as well as snippets of Othello, Richard III, and Richard II (Loki’s character in particular is basically Prince Edmund with magical powers). Don’t think I’m being overly complimentary: the film doesn’t come within miles of Shakespearean-level writing, but it does at least take clear inspiration from the Bard, which both elevates the tone considerably and serves to make the story feel much more important and interesting than it would have otherwise. This Shakespearean influence (in the deft hand of Shakespeare veteran Kenneth Branaugh) is the key reason the film works as well as it does and prevents it from being merely an exercise in silliness.
It’s perhaps inevitable, therefore, that the Earth storyline simply isn’t as interesting. The story of Thor’s exile on Earth, while enjoyable, just can’t match the scope and power of the goings on back in Asgard. That said, the Earth scenes are almost never boring, and are held together by a combination of good-natured humor and the strength of Chris Hemsworth’s performance. In particular, the film does a very good job of presenting both Earth from an Asgardian perspective and Thor from a human perspective. Obviously, the initial assumption is that Thor’s just crazy, but the characters quickly take note of odd evidence that seems to corroborate his story, and though they still take a long time to truly believe him, his earnestness and old-fashioned courtesy leads Jane to at least trust him to some extent.
I especially like how Thor’s reaction to Earth is handled. When Thor arrives on Earth, he doesn’t suddenly turn into a complete idiot and start, say, attacking cars thinking they’re monsters or panicking when someone takes his picture. There’s some definite culture shock, but he’s able to mostly take it in stride once he bothers to try. For instance, there’s a funny scene at a diner where he chows down on a massive breakfast. Finishing his coffee, he calls for another by smashing the cup to the ground. When Jane and the others rebuke him, he’s at first amusedly dismissive, then apologetic upon realizing that he had been rude. This is actually good writing: Thor may be an arrogant hot-head, but he’s also a well-brought up nobleman trained in courtesy, one who has travelled to other worlds before and, as such, would be aware that different cultures have different manners. Realizing he’s made a mistake, he apologizes and takes note of what’s expected.
Basically, Thor can understand human culture quite readily once he takes the trouble to. His ‘fish-out-of-water’ moments almost all come early in the film, while later he becomes more or less perfectly functional by the simple expedient of being courteous and not messing with things he doesn’t understand. This makes the film markedly more intelligent than most that have similar storylines.
The main problem with the Earth-bound story is that not a whole lot happens in it until the climax; apart from one rather perfunctory action sequence, it’s entirely made up of occasionally repetitive dialogue scenes as the human characters try to figure Thor out and Thor tries to recover his hammer. They aren’t bad scenes (though, as noted, they sometimes grow repetitive as Selvig repeatedly calls Thor crazy and Jane repeatedly insists they keep an open mind), but after the grandeur of Asgard and the spectacular early battle on Jotunheim, they’re a bit of a letdown.
One of the rather surprising things about this movie is how very funny it often is, both on Earth and in Asgard. I’ve already noted Thor’s amusing faux pas once he arrives on Earth, but there’s also the charming “Warriors Three” as listed above, who get some great boisterously humorous moments (“Do not mistake my appetite for apathy!”). On Earth, meanwhile, we have Jane’s friend, Darcy; a mildly apathetic, detached snarker who has little interest in science, but seems to have taken the job of assisting Jane (“She was the only applicant”) primarily for her own deadpan amusement. She gets some of the best lines in the film (“I am not dying for six college credits!”), and is one of the more charming comic-relief characters in recent memory. Then there are the running gags of Jane running into Thor with her van (“I swear I’m not doing this on purpose!”), Darcy’s taser, and Thor being knocked out repeatedly upon arriving on Earth. My favorite scene in the film, meanwhile, involves Thor bursting into a pet shop in search of a suitable mount.
Performance wise, Chris Hemsworth gives a surprisingly strong showing as Thor. He’s very good at being loud and boisterous, as befits the god of thunder, but his best moments are the quieter ones, particularly the scene when Thor comes to the end of himself and believes that the life he knew is lost to him forever. Hemsworth showcases some great skill at alternating between subtlety and haminess, and good judgment at understanding when each is appropriate. That the film works as well as it does is due in large part to the fact that Hemsworth is able to sell Thor as a real character, both in the larger-than-life world of Asgard and on present-day Earth. He’s the link that binds the two stories together, and he manages that difficult task with grace and skill (he also deserves credit for holding his own acting alongside a powerhouse like Sir Anthony Hopkins).
The best performance in the film, however, is Tom Hiddleston as Loki, who is quite simply the best villain in all the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A lean, inscrutable, soft-spoken bundle of envy, self-loathing, genius, arrogance, and neediness, he is at once alarmingly amoral and oddly sympathetic. We feel for him in his desire to prove himself to his father and his sense of being overshadowed by Thor. “I never wanted the throne,” he tells Thor during their climactic battle. “I just wanted to be your equal!” Loki excels at deceiving not only the other characters, but the audience as well. Up until the very end, we’re never quite sure where he stands: does he want the throne? Does he just want to humiliate Thor? Does he want to kill Odin? He plays his hand so skillfully that neither we nor the other characters can quite get a read on him until the end. Not only that, but when his plot is revealed it turns out to have been set up so skillfully that there actually isn’t anything Thor can do about…at least without making a tremendous sacrifice of his own.
Loki is a complex, fascinating character. The best part about him is that even in the midst of his schemes he often comes across as so genuine, so emotionally sincere that you can fully believe the people around him would trust him. What’s more, his relationship with Thor is unusually ambiguous: Thor clearly still loves his brother, even after Loki’s treachery is revealed, but Loki’s feelings towards Thor are harder to pin down. On the one hand, he seems to hate him and even tries to kill him, but on the other, he seems to respond in some way to Thor’s overtures of peace and continued affection.
Hiddleston deserves great credit for his performance; he makes Loki into a character we sympathize with and feel for, even as we are horrified by his actions. I particularly like the way Loki, while he’s soft-spoken and collected (in contrast with the louder, more emotional Thor) most of the time, occasionally slips into more open expressions when he’s honestly upset. It lets us see that, while Loki is manipulative and deceitful most of the time, he is still capable of real, sincere emotions; of loving and being hurt…
As Odin, Sir Anthony Hopkins is, well, Sir Anthony Hopkins; what more do you need to know? He pretty clearly isn’t using his full talents, but he seems to be having a good time in the role and lends it his natural gravitas. He does best in his confrontations with his sons; particularly in the scene where Loki discovers information Odin had kept from him about himself. Hopkins expertly crafts the image of a father who genuinely loves both his sons, but cannot entrust his kingdom to either. His disappointment, sorrow, and care are effortlessly portrayed and make a strong impression, despite Hopkins’ limited screen time.
Natalie Portman, unfortunately, doesn’t make much of an impression as Jane Foster. She’s cute and amusingly flustered by Thor, but we never quite believe that Thor would be so taken by her, or that she would have the effect on him that she’s supposed to. Basically, despite a number of entertaining moments, she’s just not very interesting as a character (as a side note, I can’t help mentioning an interview with Portman I read in which she seemed to think playing a female scientist was unusual. Maybe in the 1930s it was, but in 2011...).
Stellan Skarsgard does better as her mentor, Dr. Erik Selvig. He lends a level of maturity and clear-headedness to the Earth storyline, and Skarsgard does a good job at portraying his obvious affection for Jane while still setting him at odds with her over Thor. His best scene is a male-bonding moment he and Thor share at a bar, where they discuss being at rock bottom over large glasses of beer (leading to a funny moment where they start an impromptu drinking contest).
Clark Gregg, meanwhile, has his largest role yet as Agent Coulson, giving the character more room to spread out and grow. Here we get to see that Coulson is a very smart, capable man, able to think outside the box, make good judgment calls, and even shrewdly manipulate other characters to his own ends. He’s a good guy, but he plays a mildly antagonistic role here, appropriating all of Jane’s equipment and data (including Darcy’s ipod), in essence rather coldly taking away her life’s work. Coulson is pretty much Thor’s main opponent on Earth, and he shows himself to be more than up to the challenge. He also gets a number of very funny moments, such as when he finds himself face-to-face with the Destroyer. “One of Stark’s?” an agent asks. “I don’t know,” Coulson sighs. “Guy never tells me anything…”
Other roles generally don’t make too much impression, but are well played enough. I mentioned Kat Dennings as Darcy being one of the funniest elements in the film, but again I’d like to give her a shout out for being comic-relief without becoming too annoying. Ray Stevenson, Joshua Dallas, and Tadanobu Asano as the Warriors Three don’t have a whole lot to do, and are never really as badass as they’re supposed to be, but they are fun enough company and get a number of good moments. Jamie Alexander as Sif fares a little better, but she likewise doesn’t have much to do (and the mythology buff in me has to wonder: was it really that hard to make Sif blond, seeing as that was practically her whole shtick in the myths?). Idris Elba, by contrast, is rather startlingly memorable as Heimdall the watchman, being pretty much the only character who is exactly as I pictured him from the myths: a no-nonsense badass who has zero vulnerability to – or respect for – Loki (the fact that Elba is black demonstrates pretty firmly the maxim that it’s better to get the personality of a character right than the appearance). Colm Feore as Laufey is coldly menacing, but has surprising depth considering his small screen time. Credit should also be given to Feore for giving such a subtle, effective performance while under such heavy makeup and prosthetics. Jeremy Renner, meanwhile, has a very brief cameo as Clint Barton AKA Hawkeye, which he makes the most of with a series of awesomely snarky lines (“You want me to slow him down, or are you gonna send more guys in for him to beat up?”), while Samuel L. Jackson makes his by-now traditional post-credits appearance as Nick Fury.
One area in which Thor excels in contrast to the other films of the MCU is in its visuals, which are striking and creative. There’s Asgard with its gleaming palaces, its brightly lit, cavernous halls, and its ocean constantly spilling over into space, and Jotunheim, all ice, snow, and ruins; reminding one of the Mines of Moria from The Lord of the Rings if they had been frozen over. Connecting the two (and Earth) is the bifrost rainbow bridge, which is a simply gorgeous creation, even though we only get to really see inside it once (the more mundane bridge connecting it to Asgard is likewise a beautiful sight, with its ever-changing colors that glow and shift when touched). During the end credits, meanwhile, we get a tour of Yggdrasil, the world tree, here envisioned as a vast nebula spanning the galaxy and connecting the different worlds in a beautiful and poetic visual effect.
As you can probably tell, the effects are quite good here, though that is pretty much par for the course these days. The Destroyer is a particularly impressive creation; a ten-foot suit of armor that blasts a fiery beam at anything that gets in its way (the beam reminded me most of Godzilla’s atomic ray during the brief period that it was colored orange). The filmmakers also did a good job of integrating the actors into the fantastic, otherworldly environments so that they actually seemed to be inhabiting them, rather than just looking up at matte paintings (for a particularly dramatic example of how this can go wrong, see the live-action Dungeons and Dragons movie…no, on second thought, don’t).
Of course, for a mythology buff like myself, it was pretty fun noting where the film matched up with the original myths. For the most part, I confess, it’s an ‘in name only’ adaptation: this Thor, Loki, Odin, etc. are clearly not the ones I grew up with (though they’re characters I can appreciate in their own right). There are points of similarity, but they’re clearly different people. On the other hand, an appearance by Sleipner, Odin’s eight-legged steed, delighted me so much when I first saw it that I actually missed a good part of the following dialogue out of excitement. More importantly, the film takes an oft-forgotten aspect of Loki’s character and applies it in a rather startling manner (Incidentally, I’m probably the only one who reacted to a shot of Thor and his companions riding out of Asgard with the thought “I wish they had given him his goat-drawn chariot.”).
Thor is a rather odd film to review, because while it’s a good movie, and it’s definitely enjoyable to watch, I found it doesn’t really stick with me afterwards. It’s good, but not very memorable, and it has a number of clear flaws. I already mentioned the disconnect between the Asgard scenes and the Earth scenes, but really that’s probably the film’s biggest problem. The effect is rather akin to flipping back-and-forth between a production of King Lear and, say, a showing of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. It’s not that either is bad, it’s that one is a lot more than the other and you’re rather impatient to get back to it.
Then there’s the fact that Thor’s redemptive character arc doesn’t quite work as well as it should. There simply isn’t enough of a clear difference between the Thor we meet at the beginning and the Thor we have at the end: he’s a little more polite and humble, but you really have to be observant and to consider the character to spot the points of change. On the one hand, that shows a respect for the audience’s intelligence, and I’m glad they don’t just make Thor a complete asshole like Tony Stark, but on the other it rather damages the effect of the story. Thor’s moment of truth, the moment that’s supposed to reveal him as a changed man, isn’t as effective as it should be, because we don’t quite buy that he wouldn’t have done it at the start of the movie (on the other hand, another moment later in the film in which he has to make a real sacrifice on behalf of people he has no reason to care about shows his changed character much better).
There are other problems: as noted, the romance between Thor and Jane doesn’t quite work; we never really believe they have a real emotional connection. There are some sweet moments between them, but compared to the great Tony Stark-Pepper Potts relationship, or even the Bruce Banner-Betty Ross romance, it falls pretty flat.
The attempts to play the ‘this is where ancient myths come from’ card, which is a lame plot development at the best of times, mostly fails since we have the insurmountable problem that the film depicts Thor and Loki growing up after the Asgardians retired from Earth, making their presence in the mythology completely inexplicable (let alone how the myth writers knew Loki would turn evil). Fortunately, the idea isn’t pressed too hard, though it crops up enough and is emphasized enough to be considered a legitimate plot hole.
Finally, the big central action scene of the film, Thor’s infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s facility around Mjollnir, is, as noted, pretty perfunctory. It’s well-staged and proficient, but not very exciting or creative (it’s a bad sign when the most thrilling moment in an action sequence is an unseen figure selecting a bow-and-arrow from a weapons rack).
On the other hand, the other major action sequences, the infiltration of Jotunheim, the battle with the Destroyer, and Thor’s climactic battle with Loki, are much better done, and while they aren’t as creative or well staged as the ones in The Incredible Hulk or Iron Man 2, they have enough moments of inspiration to get along with. The Jotunheim sequence has a number of good conceits, such as the giant monster that shows up mid-way through the battle (and at one point ends up running upside-down beneath the planet’s surface), and serves a good showcase for Thor’s powers. Actually, almost too good a showcase: at times it feels like they’re ticking off Thor’s different moves like the training level of a video game. The climactic battle with Loki, meanwhile, probably packs more emotional punch than any previous climax in the MCU, as Thor tries to avoid fighting Loki, while Loki spits out his complaints about his life at Thor.
In summary, Thor is ultimately a successful attempt a very unusual type of superhero movie. It combines Shakespearean grandeur and high-fantasy visuals with good-natured humor and the now-familiar world of S.H.I.E.L.D., Iron Man, and the Hulk. It’s true that the balance of these two storylines is uneven, but not fatally so, and the movie is ultimately an enjoyable, thrilling, and emotionally affecting story that is well worth seeing.
Final Rating: 4/5. Recommended to mythology buffs, fantasy fans, fans of the MCU, those who want to see an interesting story-balancing act, and those who enjoy a really excellent villain.
Memorable Quotes:
(convincing his friends to join him in going to Jotunheim)
Thor: “Who led you into the most glorious battles?”
Hogun: “You did.”
Thor: “And Volstagg, who introduced you to delicacies so succulent you thought you had died and gone to Valhalla?”
Volstagg: “You did.”
Thor: “And who proved wrong all those who scoffed at the idea that a young maiden could be one of the fiercest warriors this kingdom has ever seen?”
Sif: “I did!”
Thor: “…True, but I supported you.”
Thor: “As king of Asgard…”
Odin: “BUT YOU’RE NOT KING! Not yet.”
Thor: “I have no plans to die today!”
Heimdall: “None do.”
Laufey: “You have no idea what you’ll unleash. I do…”
(surrounded by Frost Giants, Thor and his friends are given the chance to retreat)
Frost Giant: (to Thor) “Run back home, little princess.”
Loki: “Damn.”
(after a fight with Jane over the wheel led to them hitting Thor with the van)
Darcy: “I’m pretty sure that was legally your fault.”
(at the hospital, explaining how Thor got there)
Jane: “Darcy tased him…”
Darcy: (proudly) “Yes, I did.”
Loki: “What am I?”
Odin: “You are my son.”
Loki: “What more than that?”
(taking aim at Thor)
Hawkeye: “You better call it, Coulson; cause I’m startin’ to root for this guy.”
Agent Coulson: (to Thor) “You made my men, some of the most highly-trained professionals in the world, look like a bunch of minimum wage mall cops. That’s hurtful.”
(Thor brings a drunken Selvig home)
Jane: “What happened?”
Thor: “We drank, we fought, he made his ancestors proud!”
Thor: “I’ve changed.”
Loki: “So have I.”
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