Thor

Here is just a small sample of some words that rhyme with Thor. Bore, abhor, snore, chore, poor and Norse Folklore. Now, having read that I want you to try and deduce my critical opinion of the movie Thor. Oh go on! Don't just sit there waiting for the answer. You've done it? Good. Thor is shit.

A number of times previously in this ancient tome some people call "a blog" (and others call "are you still writing those?") I have touched on the idea that DC comics seem to produce better shit than Marvel comics. Now if I were a Marvel supporter I would be very careful about mentioning this movie in any argument because it has very little to recommend it. If I had to sum up the plot, which let's face it I DO because the alternative would be to reproduce the script, I would say it's about a prick living in a kingdom populated entirely by mythological Norse pricks who gets stripped of his powers and banished to Earth for being too much of a prick. OK so that's a kind of shitty summary but that's essentially it. Thor is the son of Odin who is a little too keen to assert his dominance against the Ice Giants. His father forbids it for sound diplomatic reasons and Thor chooses to gather a crew of adventuring buddies to storm the Ice Giant's home and exact brutal revenge for making Thor look like a war hungry, arrogant dickhead. I particularly "enjoyed" the hasty and lazy characterization of the war buddies as Thor set a minute of screen time aside to go to each in turn and list their name, rank, specialty and fondest childhood memory. It was the biggest shock for me to see that his band of merry men actually consisted of one young, hot, nimble woman in skimpy tight leather who would then be characterized as "the woman." But it was all for naught really as each of these characters probably only has about 10 minutes of screen time and enough dialogue between them to fill a single script page. AND they probably had to share it.

So to the absolute shock of nobody Odin is quite displeased with Thor and decides the best thing to do would be to strip him of his magical hammer and throw him through a wormhole to Earth along with the hammer, that he will not be able to use until he (do I even have to say it?) PROVES HIMSELF WORTHY. Which I suppose sounds perfectly functional but basically means that the superhero in this superhero movie has no powers or abilities for most of the movie, which as far as mistakes in superhero movies goes is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty big. "So what do we fill in the other 80% of the movie with?" I hear scriptwriter A pontificate. "Clumsy love interests? Vague science stuff? Fish out of water comedy antics? Secret government branches?"
"How about all those things?" says scriptwriter B.
"Nah" replies scriptwriter A "I think we need to make things a little more focused than that."
It was at this point that the director, obviously drunk and sleeping with scriptwriter B, walks in a beats scriptwriter A to death. So yeah 80% Thor is essentially packing foam for a flimsy, fragile plot that still manages to break. The aforementioned secret government business is perhaps the most baffling part. Does America have a branch in the secret service devoted to the science behind interstellar hammers? Because after the hammer is found, lodged King Arthur style in a rock, there is a massive labyrinth of plastic domes and quarantined zones set up around it within a day or so. There are scientists scanning it on computers, looking at it though different heat and colour spectra. What the fuck is going on exactly?

Perhaps the biggest surprise I got from Thor came days later when I read the wikipedia article and discovered it got "generally favourable reviews." I was geniunely baffled and shocked by this news. That is, before I read closer and discovered that the people who reviewed it favorably are those kind of "critics" that work for The Hollywood reporter and prefer to fellate the film with fad sentences like "kicks off this superhero summer with a bang." Which isn't a review as much as it is a stale piece of marketing. But actual, proper critics like Roger Ebert who can still spot a pile of shit after the polishing, gave it the negative write up it deserves, which comforted me immensely. The fact of the matter is Thor as a movie was unfocused and boring. The story can be summed up as 114 minutes of an idiot getting his magic hammer back.Which could be forgivable if it wasn't relying so heavily on the development of characters that you couldn't possibly care about. If you manage to stick around after the credits they have some little bit with Samuel L. Jackson that's supposed to get us excited because "Thor will be back in The Avengers." Great, well I definitely won't be watching that then.