I think that recently a consensus has been reached by the movie going public that when it comes to 3D there's good 3D and there's watching something like "Clash of the Titans" and mistaking it for someone taking a shit in your eyes. "Thor" decides to take the better of those two roads and in doing so executes some spectacular visuals and presents an all around ocular feast. Plus, seeing Natalie Portman's face hovering slightly in front of the screen made it all the more possible that I just might have been able to lean forward and give her a right good snog. You couple that with a charismatic young cast and you get an all around fun movie. Unfortunately what you don't get is a very good movie.
Now I know that calling a movie good or bad is subjective, but I'm going to highlight some aspects of "Thor" that I found odd or unnecessary in the hopes that you'll see it could have been handled with a bit (read: a lot) more poise.
Just above I said the performers were charismatic. But charismatic does not a character make. The cast clearly had a blast making this film, I don't know if it was the atmosphere of working on a superhero movie, or maybe because Kenneth Branagh spiked their water, but somewhere along the lines you have to venture out of the kiddie pool for at least a while and find some remnant of emotional depth. I guess what I'm saying is it would have been nice if someone at any point could have made a face other than that of Urkel after asking if he in fact did do that. Anthony Hopkins is even in this movie, and they have his character literally sleep through half of it, though judging from his energy levels, I'd guess he was actually always asleep, and has been so since the beginning of 2006.
Let's now discuss the allocations of resources in manpower, specifically the ratio of supporting cast members to screenplay writers, a ratio I calculated somewhere around 6 to 0. I won't go much deeper into the dialogue than to say Terri Schiavo could write a better script with fridge magnets. The more pressing matter to me was the abundance of sidekicks.
It's a common formula to give a protagonist a sidekick, we all accept that. Han has Chewie, the Lone Ranger has Tonto, the Beatles had Ringo, etc. But there's an inherent risk in the sidekick formula, mainly being that the associate may be annoying and terrible. Batman and Robin can often be hit and miss, Snarf did nothing for the Thundercats, and nothing good can ever come of pairing Indiana Jones with a racist asian boy. So when you get two characters who need sidekicks, you're already pushing the envelope. What you don't need to add is more fucking sidekicks. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is a scientist looking for evidence of a wormhole in the middle of New Mexico out of the back of her Winnebago. Apparently filmmakers thought that not only did she need an old fatherly figure tagging along, but also comic relief. And heaven forbid they should combine the two and put Kat Dennings out of work, so already we have twice the number of sidekicks to main characters. Then we meet Thor who has, get ready for it... four best friends! That's four fucking distractions that we have to watch bumble around and try to hatch a plan with sparse yet evenly distributed dialogue whenever Thor gets into trouble.
Speaking of Thor getting into trouble, I'm always a fan of a good slapstick moment. A well-timed physical gag can help break tension when it's needed or just be good for an extra laugh. It doesn't really work four times in a row, though, because even then you've overshot the classic comedy rule of three. In the span of about 15 minutes, Thor gets hit by a van, tazed, sedated (causing his face to mash into a window and slide down "comically") then hit by a van again. It's as if the filmmakers decided to play a game of how many times can we knock Thor out in funny ways. But if that's not enough, it seems that those instances alone are able to humble a man who only hours before had enough arrogance to have him banished from a city of gods. And he certainly wasn't humbled by love, because let me be clear here, there was no love story in this movie. I repeat, there was no love story in this movie, and if you think that what Thor and Jane have is romantic, then I'm sorry to inform you that you don't actually exist.
One more thing, if you're going to spring for a Jeremy Renner cameo to play Hawkeye, an obvious and epic precursor of things to come in later movies, then utilize that cameo. The dude just sits in the rain for two minutes, itching to fire an arrow at Thor, meanwhile Thor's rolling around in the mud with some nameless goon. Fight Hawkeye for Christ sake! Have Hawkeye do something besides almost shoot an arrow. Do you realize how awesome a quick Thor/Hawkeye showdown could have been?!
