Box Office Review: Thor

All I wanted from Thor was to leave the theatre with the urge to destroy things with a hammer. Unfortunately my only response while walking out of the theatre was to rub the sleep out of my eyes. That is pretty sad, as this is a film about Norse Gods fighting giant ice monsters, robots, and each other on multiple planets. You would think it would be easy to make an exciting film with these elements, but apparently it isn't. Thor, even at just under two hours, is a slog to get through.

The film is clearly broken into three acts. First we learn why Thor was banished from Asgard, which is mainly because of his being a major hot head, and because of his trickster brother Loki. Thor ends up banished to earth by his father Odin where without his powers he must learn humility. While on his quest for humility, he meets a beautiful scientist who studies something involving some stuff, as well as her Swedish boss and her useless assistant. With these three mortals Thor ends up taking on the SHIELD organization as well as the robot Loki sends to kill him. Through these adventures Thor learns humility, regains his powers and heads back to Asgard to stop Loki. What fills out this simple three act structure that contains at the most fifteen minutes of information is a lot of needless exposition and some misguided humour.

Even with this lack of content, the film doesn't take its time developing any of the characters. This is because all the characters are overly simplistic and uninteresting. This is most evident with the posse of Gods that Thor runs with. One eats a lot, one is Asian, one is a woman, and the other guy I cannot remember what he did. We are supposed to believe that this crew goes around a fights different things on different planets, but their big fight scene in the film has two of them not even fighting, but helping people to safety. Are you kidding me! These are Norse Gods, but they might as well be power rangers for how useless they are. Another element of the film that goes unexplained and underdeveloped is the romance between Thor and Natalie Portman. Over about a day, Portman and Thor fall madly in love with each other. The only explanation I could find for this mad infatuation is that they are both attractive individuals, so of course they would fall in love with each other.

Here is where I would usually talk about the special effects, but as I saw this in 3D, and I don't think it is fair to judge something I could barely see. I hate sounding like a broken record, but 3D makes a film like Thor, a film that has bright lights and colours, much to dark and melancholy. I guarantee this is a film that would have been more of a spectacle without the use of 3D technology.

Marvel's Thor is yet another step closer to the expected to be massive Avengers movie. Personally I believe that the Marvel films would work better as stand alone films, rather than films that link together in the same fictional universe. Thor shows that some of the lesser characters in the Marvel world can't support there own film, and Thor isn't exactly an unknown character. Thor fails because there is nothing interesting about anything in the film. I feel that this is becoming a trend with the Marvel films.

A Banana Peel