Thorsday

By Gregg Beever

I thought I might try giving some feedback on all these movies I’ve been talking about for the last year, particularly since it is blockbuster season. Unfortunately I picked a very difficult movie to start with in Thor.

Difficult because Thor is good. Excellent, even. I find favourable reviews much more difficult to write. As a purely cynical writer, my vocabulary consists of very few positive terms, so I don’t have much to say other than Thor is awesome…really, really awesome. It’s just…awesome.

I wonder if maybe that is why movie critics are stereotyped as being overly critical. Generally, it’s way easier, and more fun, to shit all over a film than to sing it high praise. Writers, perhaps, can’t help but choose the path of least resistance.

Songs of Praise

Thor is the kind of comic book character general audiences may not easily accept. He’s not a relatable Peter Parker who struggles with the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Thor is a god, the son of Odin, and future king of the realm of Asgard. His hobbies consist of kicking ass with his rather large, mighty hammer and doing a little cross-dimensional travel. Unless you are a fierce megalomaniac, you probably don’t relate to summoning lightning with your mind.

But every good story, no matter how steeped in fantasy it may be, finds its humanity. Thor is a brash, hot-headed warrior eager to leap into conflict. When he defies his father and nearly starts a war with the Frost Giants of Jotunheim, Odin banishes Thor to earth, where he must learn to check his ego at the door before he can return home.

Chris Hemsworth is impressive as the lead, who doesn’t play Thor’s cocky nature over the top, as I’m sure it might be easy to do when playing a god. Instead, Hemsworth reins the character in so that we always feel Thor is capable of being a much better man…er, god. Whatever.

Other good performances include Anthony Hopkins as Odin; Natalie Portman, who continues to be solid in everything, and Kat Denning is quite funny whenever she is on screen, which isn’t often enough.

A World of Digits

The God of Thunder’s world is full of gold palaces, rainbow bridges, and giants; the kind of world that is difficult to pull off on film without looking incredibly cheesy. A great deal of the film takes place in Asgard, and while the environments are very digital, they are nonetheless beautifully rendered and mesh surprisingly well with the live action elements; allowing me to forgive that I was watching Matte Painting: The Movie.

The costume designs are excellent. The gods dwelling in Asgard feel larger than life, clad in heavy, sweeping metal armor. Despite what surely must be monumentally cumbersome to wear, and probably really hard to get out of when you need to take a dump, the actors move effortlessly and naturally in their costumes, adding elegance to a collection of badass suits of armor.

Nitpicking

If I had to get picky about Thor, I could probably say something about the shoehorned love sub-plot, but it serves its purpose in connecting Thor to Earth. Really, there just isn’t much to complain about here; Thor is a solid super hero flick, as good as, or better, than Iron Man.

Some folks complain that Thor is one long trailer for The Avengers. To that I say: “So? Who cares?” If that’s the case, then it was an excellent trailer, one that has me totally pumped for Joss Whedon’s Marvel debut next summer.

Excelsior!