Thor

Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?

Thor is where the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s mythology starts to get interesting. It’s a shame that the movie is so bland, because it has just enough new stuff to get me excited about the future of Marvel movies.

What did Thor do right?

• Loki. Oh my god, Loki. His role wasn’t written wonderfully (and few parts of the film were), but WOW what a performance from HiddlesTom. He really dove right into the role. Best Marvel villain- because he’s not a villain. He’s a lost child, scrambling for identity and love, and this expresses itself as all the fucked-up and terrible things Loki does during the movie. I think he tells the truth in the movie maybe one or two times, and only toward the very end. I love every second Loki is on screen. Even the dumb stuff.

• Mjolnir! I loved everything about Mjolnir. The sound, the feel- I wanted to lift it. The fantasy of the magical hammer that only responds to those who are “worthy”- even if “worthy” is ill-defined- is wonderful.

• Heimdall! Heimdall doesn’t really get a chance to shine until Thor: Ragnarok, which is really unfortunate because Idris Elba is a phenomenal performer who grasped the role flawlessly- possibly even better than HiddlesTom plays Loki.

• Multiracial Asgard! One of the most interesting creative decisions because Marvel didn’t have to do this. We would have accepted an all-white all-blonde race of people just because that’s what we expect when we think of Norse mythology, but instead, they cast a diverse group of people to play all the background folk in Asgard. Yeah, most of who we see are still white people, but it’s refreshing to have a wider range of faces on screen- especially for someone like me who usually can’t tell all these blonde people apart. Step in the right direction, Marvel!

What did Thor do okay?

• Integration into the Marvel Mythos. It’s a shame that this isn’t the highlight of the movie because it’s the most important part. Asgard, Mjolnir, Yggdrasil- they’re all cool but they fail to build a foundation into something greater. Phil Coulson and S.H.I.E.L.D. show up, reminding us that this is the same series as Iron Man and Incredible Hulk. Stellan Skarsgård even tells a story about how he once knew Bruce Banner (though he didn’t say the name for some reason). This was important, necessary, and deserved more attention than it got.

• Hemsworth. He sure looks the part. The dyed hair and beard was weird though. The star of Thor is mostly unremarkable in his own movie.

What did Thor do badly?

• …Almost everything else. The redeeming qualities up top lift Thor into being a kinda-okay movie overall, but it feels amateurish in almost every other aspect. The director of photography keeps doing the Dutch Tilt in, like, really inappropriate spots. The Dutch Tilt is where the camera is angled at 45 degrees instead of being parallel to the ground, and it’s a part of film language that builds tension or unease, and Thor regularly uses it for normal walking shots that are in no way ambiguous or have any other kind of tense subtext. It’s embarrassingly bad.

• The score was used really inappropriately. There were scenes with characters having pretty low-stakes conversation with really intense music underneath. Again, a shame, because I kind of like a lot of the music. It’s just used so badly it has to be filed as a negative.

• The jokes! Wow, the jokes and dialogue were so over-the-top. It’s infuriating. Kat Denning’s character opens up with a great line: “I am not dying for six college credits!” and then everything else she says for the whole movie just falls flat. Same with Portman. They’re supposed to add levity to the film, but all they do is tell not-too-clever quips that yank the audience right out of their immersion. There’s another line from the… I don’t care enough to google his name. The skinny white swashbuckly guy from the Warriors Three. Heimdall lets them use the bifrost against Loki’s orders and skinny white guy says, “Complicated fellow, isn’t he?” If that actor had winked into the camera after that line, it would have fit perfectly with the tone of what was going on in that scene. That type of bad dialogue is a disease that infects the entire film.

I’m harsh because I care. All-in-all, I actually really enjoy Thor. It’s a worthy inclusion to the MCU, but its flaws run deep.

Next movie in line is Captain America: We only started calling it The First Avenger about three years after the fact. AND I AM SO STOKED.