When you are a Broke Nerd, such as myself, you begin to plan out your entertainment months. This is in part because I need to know when we will need my mother in law to watch the baby if we go out as well as being able to afford it after the bills have been paid and the food purchased.
As far as movies are concerned, the most likely scenario is that it sits in theaters for so long, that it’s on DVD or instant streaming by the time I get around to seeing it.
This whole process still feels pretty foreign to me since I used to be the guy who had to be in the theater for the midnight showing only so that I can see it again later that night after work. Of course, this doesn’t happen any more. Ever.
Nowadays, I have to be judicious in my choice of movies to watch in theaters, the last movie I had seen was “Red State” in March, but before that, it was “Tron Legacy” in January. As a movie geek, this drives me crazy, but I really have no choice.
Marvel movies are something of an event for me and I do everything in my power to be able to see them in the theater and thankfully, the stars aligned and I was able to see the latest in the line of “Avengers” set up movies, “Thor”.
THOR
“Thor” as a movie seems like it really shouldn’t work. It goes between the mythical world of Asgard and Earth, it has larger than life characters, and it does the whole “fish out of water” story that we’ve seen hundreds of times, but despite all of these factors working against it, it turned out to be a mighty entertaining movie. Warning…spoilers ahead!
“Thor” starts, in earnest, very similar to “The Fellowship of the Ring” as it allows a lot of exposition in a short time frame. I quite like this device as it was visually entertaining, got some action out there, and it introduces us to the true heart of the film, Odin.
It is soon after that we meet Odin’s two sons, Thor and Loki. Immediately we get a sense of what the relationship is like between the two as Thor is the favorite and Loki desperately wanting his father’s approval.
After screwing the pooch pretty badly and thrusting the kingdom of Asgard into war, Thor gets stripped of his birthright and sent to the Earth realm in banishment.
Odin adds insult to injury by taking the source of Thor’s power, the hammer Mjolnir, and sending it to Earth with the caveat that only one worthy of the power can wield it, making it all the more frustrating when Thor goes to retrieve it from the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and he can’t lift it.
Thor’s time on Earth includes many of the same “fish out of water” jokes as any other, thankfully it doesn't build the entire premise around how wacky it is that the guy is out of his element. In fact, Thor gets comfortable enough to cook and teach the kind folks who have taken him in, the science behind his magic.
Back on Asgard, Loki discovers something about himself that is too much of a spoiler for me to give up and the information makes him freak out, causing his father to fall into a coma. This part kind of didn’t make much sense for obvious reasons when you see the movie (size matters), but I’ll allow it as it helped set up the actions that allowed Thor to prove himself worthy of his position of Thunder God.
The only gripes I really had with this movie seem to stem from the fact that it wasn’t longer. The scenes on Asgard are all quite beautiful beyond description, and are all more entertaining than most of what occurs on Earth. I feel that there should have been more time dedicated to the budding romance between Natalie Portman’s character and Thor.
In the same topic of the story needing to be broadened, the sudden appearance of Hawkeye seemed odd and tacked on, and I’m reasonably sure that it was.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed “Thor” as a fun fantasy/action movie and pretty well done as far as introducing him into the world populated with more realistic super heroes. It isn’t as good as some of those other super hero movies, as “Iron Man”, and “The Incredible Hulk” are better, but it is better than “Iron Man 2”.
3/5 Mythological Figures
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