5.10.2011

Thor Was Pretty Good

Pretty good. Not great but good. Don’t go into it expecting a Christopher Nolan movie, or even a Jon Favreau movie. Branagh does a great job with the characters; you definitely buy Chris Helmsworth as Thor.  Loki has to be my favorite though. It would have been easy to play him over-the top 100% of the time, subtle worked much better. The visuals are really well done. I didn’t catch it in 3D but I may actually go back to check it out again. I was kinda worried about how they would handle the rainbow bridge, because you know that could have turned out all sorts of wrong, but they pull it off nicely. There are some truly epic shots and the costumes come off way better than I expected based on the early stills we saw last year. 

It would have been interesting to see a film that was a 100% Kenneth Branagh production, which I’m guessing we didn’t get here. Too bad. It’s probably not Branagh’s fault though. You can tell he was given a laundry list of shit from Marvel that he had to include: Frost Giants, the exile/redemption plotline, Jane Foster, and oh yeah tie it in pretty heavily with the Avengers movie ‘cause that’s coming up next.  There are a million “bridge” references in this movie and that’s exactly what it feels like. Introduce Thor & his supporting cast, speed through the origin story, and give him a reason to come back next summer for the Avengers™, a Marvel Studios production. 

I’m not going to bitch about the overall racial makeup of the cast, you can read plenty of that elsewhere on the interwebs. Haters gonna hate I guess. Yes, in a movie about Norse gods two of them are played by a black guy and an asian guy. Two guys, that’s it. I understand that the Norse pantheon probably isn't the most racially diverse crowd but just to be clear….this is a movie based on a comic book, which was very loosely based on Norse mythology. It’s not like they threw in a Hispanic guy, somebody with down’s-syndrome, and a kid in a wheelchair like it was a McDonald’s commercial or something. I’m not sure how accurate you expect these things to be but please, let it go. There’s a rainbow bridge in it for fuck’s sake! Plus, Heimdall was kind of a badass in this one. /Rant off.   

All told Thor is exactly what it’s supposed to be: a summer blockbuster , available in multiple dimensions, and also an advertisement for next year’s Avengers movie. It’s probably not going to end up in my movie collection next to my other 10,000 nerdy comic book movies but that’s ok.

PS – [spoilers] WTF what that shit at the end after the credits? Vibranium?  

No comments:

Post a Comment