Thor (2011) ****/*****

Of all the top tier Marvel Super Heroes that have been established over the decades, Thor has always been my least favorite. Many of the other guys have powers that put them on the level of Gods, but at the end of the day, they’re just regular people who have been put in extraordinary situations. There’s something relatable about that, maybe even something inspirational. But Thor is actually a God. He’s from another realm, he is the product of a culture completely alien to us, and his everyday trials and tribulations look nothing like our own. Tony Stark is just a cocky inventor dealing with the demons of his addictions and the destructive force of his own vanity. Peter Parker is just an insecure kid bogged down by guilt. But Thor is a mystical warrior whose place in comic stories generally just boils down to being the strong guy that stands in the background hitting stuff with his hammer and saying “thee” and “thine”. So when a feature film chronicling Thor’s solo adventures was announced, I wasn’t so enthused. The best-case scenario, I figured, would be that we get a sword and sorcery story set totally in Asgard that might, if we’re lucky, work as well as something like the Lord of the Rings trilogy did. The worst-case scenario, as I saw it, was that Thor would be a fish out of water story about a lumbering oaf coming to Earth and having a bunch of wacky misunderstandings while trying to integrate into our society. What I got instead was about a fifty-fifty mixture of the two. And while I didn’t feel like the fantasy world worked quite as well as something like the Lord of the Rings movies, the fish out of water stuff on Earth was far more effective than I imagined it would be. What that left me with was a satisfying summer blockbuster that doesn’t break any new ground, but which delivers the goods when it comes to big adventure and competent crafting.

I was still pretty worried during the film’s first few minutes. We’re told of the war torn history between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants. We get big battle scenes set in the Frost Giant’s realm, and we get some too on the nose character stuff with childhood versions of Thor and his brother Loki that set them up as jealous competitors. When we were on the Frost Giant’s world everything looked too dark, the battle sequences were poorly done and came off as distracting blurs of action, and the voice over narration was heavy handed and kind of nerdy with all of it’s mythological jargon. I was worried that Thor was going to be just as lame as I had feared. But, after everything gets established in the first twenty minutes or so, things start getting exponentially better from then on. I initially found the presentation of Asgard to be a little garish and tacky. It reminded me a lot of the film version of Masters of the Universe, where everybody wore shiny plastic body armor and the sets looked like slightly tweaked for fantasy versions of the Death Star. The Asgardians wore brightly colored, flowing capes. They walked down a twinkling, rainbow colored bridge. It all seemed a little too hokey to swallow. There were many points in the first act where I felt like I was watching a relic of the 80s, a time when fantasy was done much less self-consciously as a genre in cheeseball classics like Krull and The Beastmaster. I hadn’t seen anything like this in a long time, and it was jarring. The Lord of the Rings is fantasy, but it’s all muted colors and lived in sets. The houses are made out of stone and wood, the costumes out of metal and leather. Here everything is shiny and other worldly and strange, and Asgard often comes off as a universe populated entirely by action figures. My brain kept telling me that it shouldn’t be working. But the costumes and sets were all intricately and artistically designed enough that they grew on me, and the actors living in these clothes and in this world treated it all with so much straight-faced commitment that it became easier for me to do the same. The worst thing Thor could have done is give you a self-aware wink like with the “What did you expect, yellow spandex?” line in the first X-Men movie. Any mention by the film that what you’re watching is ridiculous could have made it feel ridiculous, instead Thor is confident that everything it’s giving you is deadly serious and seriously badass; so it becomes easy to go along for the ride and get swept up in all of its shiny, big muscled, flowing caped glory.

Once I had gotten used to the initially jarring visuals of the film, I started to notice that I was pleasantly surprised by the story. Other than in the first few minutes of narration, Thor doesn’t follow the now standard super hero origin formula that we’ve seen over and over again, and that I’ve grown maddeningly tired of. This is a story about a fully formed Thor doing Thory things. We don’t see the creation of his magic hammer, we don’t watch a young Thor as he practices using it and learns to fight. And none of it is confusing. You don’t have to painstakingly go through every detail of who a character is, and how he got to where he is today. No other genre does this. All you have to do is have a strong idea of who your character is yourself, and then slowly reveal that to your audience over the course of the film and through his actions. For some reason movies in the comic book genre often get too caught up in boring us with the hows and the whys, and we have to wait until the second film in a series to really get a fast moving, exciting story out of them. Not here. What Thor gives us is a simple story that is easy to follow. Odin (Anthony Hopkins) is an aging king. He has two sons who might claim his throne after he dies, the brash Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and the calculating Loki (Tom Hiddleston). When Thor’s stubbornness causes him to butt heads with his father, he ends up stripped of his powers, banished to Earth, and control of the Asgardian throne is given to his suspiciously sneering and seemingly evil brother. The plot is Shakespearian in its simplicity and effectiveness, and that’s all you need to tell a satisfying action story. Well, that and some established stakes and a little character development. And Thor gives us all of that. When we first meet Thor he is pig headed and in love with battle, it makes him a poor choice to rule over Asgard. But his brother Loki is kind of immoral, and probably an even worse choice to be given so much power. Over the course of the film Thor needs to learn some lessons, grow as a person, reclaim his power, and stop the destruction of quite a few worlds and races in the process. Oh, and he tries to woo Natalie Portman at the same time too. You know, for the girls in the audience.

But back to the commitment of the performances and how they manage to save this movie from looking like parody. If you’ve got some over the top material that you want an actor to jump into 100% and hold back nothing no matter how ridiculous they might end up looking, then Anthony Hopkins is the man to hire. His late career has been built almost exclusively on chewing scenery, and his turn as Odin, ruler of Asgard, is no exception to that rule. He’s got a bushy white beard, an eye patch, a big metal staff, and a lot of yelling to do; but he’s able to pull it all off. When you look in Anthony Hopkins’ crazy eye you can see that he believes he is Odin. When he casts his son out of the realm and down to Earth, you can feel the cosmos trembling with his rage. When he pounds his staff on the ground and an entire kingdom goes quiet, the satisfaction beams off of him like sunlight. Hopkins is the rock at the center of this movie, teaching everyone around him how to keep your dignity while looking kind of ridiculous, and making sure that a movie where everyone is wearing plastic looking armor and goofy capes doesn’t come off as camp.

Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston see his efforts and match them. While a lot of their dialogue is somewhat ridiculous and certainly over the top dramatic, neither actor ever acknowledges it. They are beings who come from a ridiculous world, and they do things that are over the top serious. None of this stuff is crazy or fun to them; it’s just their everyday lives. The casualness that Hemsworth exudes when he’s being a cocksure warlord and the simple way in which Hiddleston carries out evil actions makes you swallow all of it as easily as they do. And while Hemsworth is playing what we would consider an ancient, brutish figure of fantasy, he never makes Thor seem brutish or anachronistic in his performance. At every moment Hemsworth plays Thor as a real person, who happens to have a radically different life from ours, but who is intelligent, has the ability to adapt to new situations, and who is actually amazingly charming rather than misogynist or loathsome. This is at odds with my memories of Thor the comic book character, who always came across as a dense lump of God who understood little other than the righteous smashing of things. Hemsworth’s Thor is self-assured, personable, and someone who could feasibly become a leader of men. And consequently, when the film does shoot for some fish out of water humor, it actually works and is funny rather than coming across as pandering and lame. We don’t get any scenes where Thor has to get a makeover, or where he doesn’t understand how to use the toilet. This isn’t that kind of movie.

Hiddleston was a great find for Loki, as he’s always able to temper his sneering villainy with conflicted emotion and complex motivation. He always keeps you guessing as to what side he is on, he never lays all of his cards on the table, and Loki’s plan subsequently plays out piece by piece over the course of the film. It would have been too easy to let Loki degenerate into a hissing personification of jealousy that didn’t resonate in any way, but in Hiddleston’s hands he maintains just enough humanity to remain relatable and not become a cartoon.

Portman does fine as the girlfriend. Whenever somebody is sent across the universe from the realm of Asgard to Earth (or Midgard as they know it) there is a pretty big tornado of energy that sends them there. Portman plays a scientist who has been researching this phenomenon, and who is subsequently the first person Thor meets when coming to our planet. I never really bought her as the science obsessed academic type that she would have to be in order to be doing this sort of research, but the script never pushes that aspect of her character, so her portrayal of a scientist as a fashionable young beauty is never given enough time to grate. This isn’t Jessica Alba in a lab coat bad, but if you dwell on it, Portman’s character could look a bit ridiculous. What she is mostly written to do is be Thor’s love interest and swoon whenever he does something manly, and in that Portman does very well. In some things (the Star Wars prequels and the recent No Strings Attached come to mind) you can tell that Portman is just robotically delivering her dialogue with blank eyes and a mind that is engaged in thoughts of little more than cashing a paycheck, but that isn’t the case here. Her performance is full of spark and energy and it seems like she’s having fun eyeballing Hemsworth up and down. As a matter of fact, not since Jennifer Grey set her gaze on Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing have I seen someone have this hungry a set of eyes on film.

Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgård inexplicably play Portman’s sidekicks, an intern and a sort of mentor respectively. They don’t do a bad job or anything, but their presence in the movie seems a bit strange and tacked on. Neither character gets very fleshed out, and neither ever really adds anything to the story, but there they are taking up screen real estate and getting lines regardless. To be fair, Dennings is there to be the film’s comic relief, and I thought she did pretty well in the role. The character of wise cracking goofball that doesn’t take anything seriously usually just comes off as annoying and pandering, but I actually got a few laughs out of her cracking wise. And she’s pretty to look at as well. Usually these roles are played by gangly dudes dressed up in the slacker uniform of baggy pants and backwards hat, so getting Dennings instead of that was certainly a welcome change of pace. Skarsgård’s presence is a bit harder to explain. He does a fine job and is believable in his role, as Skarsgård always is, but he constantly looks out of place hanging out with two young girls. His character never really offers anything, never really serves a purpose, so I just kept waiting for him to turn evil or something; but it doesn’t come. There’s one scene where he gets drunk with Thor that is pretty fun, but other than that I strain to remember anything he actually did in the film. Puzzling, for now, but perhaps his inclusion will become more clear in future installments.

Other than all that, Thor is pretty standard, summer movie, super hero type stuff. There’s a nice amount of action, but not so much that it bogs down the story. The camera work is capable and non intrusive. The movie looks nice enough, and the action is easy to follow. Probably it won’t win any awards for it’s artistry with the camera, but at least the photography doesn’t actively take away from the film either; a situation that has become all too common these days. Thor has a fun crew of warriors that he pals around with. They never really get fleshed out or amount to much, but I enjoyed their inclusion and think they’re probably worth mentioning. There is one big cameo from a name actor, towards the middle of the film, that ties in directly with the overarching story that’s been getting developed throughout all of these recent Marvel movies; but it doesn’t feel out of place or take away from this as a Thor centric film in my eyes. I heard the criticism that the SHIELD storyline that is leading up to the Avengers movie took over Iron Man 2 and derailed that film a little, but I didn’t really agree with the sentiment.

There’s even more of that here though, so your mileage may vary on the subject. Personally, I enjoy the way that Marvel has been building this story over the course of multiple years and throughout multiple film franchises. It’s a unique, ambitious way to attack genre material that nobody has yet been able to pull off on this scale. By the time Iron Man, The Hulk, Captain America, and Thor finally all get together at the same time and at the same place in Avengers, I think that audiences will be primed enough from these solo stories to make it one of the biggest movies ever. Or at least, hopefully they will. If the payoff of doing this much planning and this much investing is great enough, then it probably won’t be long before other studios try their hands at sprawling, ambitious, years spanning projects; and I think that would be a fun change of pace from the hodgepodge of thrown together, last minute sequels that we’ve seen churned out in recent years. But for now we have Thor, and it is a perfectly acceptable example of a summer popcorn film. All you need is a little character development, a simple story, and just the right amount of things getting blown up. It shouldn’t be hard to pull off. But in recent years I’ve seen it done badly so many times that it feels extra satisfying whenever somebody gets the formula right. Here’s to Marvel for exceeding my expectations.