THOR: The God Of Summer Multiplex Mediocrity

Adapting a comic book to the screen is not an envi­able task.  It can go wrong in any num­ber of ways, from tone to bud­get to the gulf between what works in a comic and what works on screen.  Even the ones that catch on with the mass audi­ence can fall prey to the prob­lems of the comic-to-film process.  For exam­ple, con­sider Thor — it’s another hit for Marvel and has done a suc­cess­ful job of pack­ing in view­ers at the mul­ti­plex.  Unfortunately, it’s also a schizoid mud­dle that shows off the pit­falls of the mod­ern comic book movie.

The prob­lems with Thor begin with the script, which feels like two dif­fer­ent sto­ries bat­tling each other for supremacy.  After a teaser of the mor­tal world, the first story gets going in Asgard — with Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the head­strong son of Odin (Anthony Hopkins), as our main char­ac­ter.  After snow demons attack Asgard dur­ing a cer­e­mony in which he will be crowned the new king, Thor sneaks to their land against Odin’s wishes to con­front them.  When that plan goes awry, Odin ban­ishes Thor to the planet Earth with­out any pow­ers to teach him humility.

Thus begins the sec­ond story, a fish-out-of-water tale in which the dis­placed Thor dis­cov­ers that humil­ity and finds love, to boot — with comely sci­en­tist (Natalie Portman) — as he tries to prove him­self wor­thy of the pow­ers locked in his mighty ham­mer, Mjollnir.  The story rolls on above him in Asgard as Odin is inca­pac­i­tated and Loki, brother of Thor, is revealed to have a tragic secret that has dri­ven him to betray Asgard.  Thus, it all becomes a bat­tle against the celes­tial clock to see if Thor can earn back his heroic sta­tus before Loki destroys the king­dom that is rightly his.

The end result plays like a typ­i­cal major stu­dio event-movie prod­uct.  It moves fast, there’s lots of CGI-enhanced action and dumb gags… and you’ll for­get most of it when the end cred­its roll.  The script doesn’t hew that closely to the orig­i­nal Marvel Comics ori­gin of Thor and instead decides to change it into the super­hero ver­sion of the “imma­ture boy-child learns how to be a man” trend that is so pop­u­lar in mod­ern Hollywood comedies.

That aspect of the film might explain all the awk­ward humor in the Earth-set scenes, which fea­ture cringe-inducing ele­ments like Stellan Skarsgard get­ting drunk with Thor and an incred­i­bly annoy­ing generic-ditz sup­port­ing char­ac­ter played by Kat Dennings (a sam­ple of her wit: she insis­tently mis­pro­nounces Mjollnir as “myeh-myeh” — hilar­i­ous).

That said, even if you can tune out the goofy humor, what’s left isn’t that com­pelling.  The CGI-laced set­pieces often look videogames — par­tic­u­larly a scene where Thor and his cronies are chased by a big ice-beast — and the sec­ond half of the film lacks any kind of huge Superman II–style “hero and vil­lain” brawl.  Instead, you have to set­tle for Thor and Loki briefly duk­ing it out a disco-looking mul­ti­col­ored bridge near a CGI rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Asgard… smack­down of the Gods, it ain’t.  It’s painfully lack­ing in scope.

To add fur­ther insult to injury, the powers-that-be at Marvel have forced the film­mak­ers to front­load the sto­ry­line with mate­r­ial designed to set up their even­tual Avengers movie.  This comes in the form of S.H.I.E.L.D., a shad­owy gov­ern­ment agency is shoe­horned into the sec­ond act as a com­pli­ca­tion to keep Thor away from Mjollnir.  Marvel also forced S.H.I.E.L.D. into Iron Man 2 — they act as more of a deus ex machina in that film — and it’s just as awk­ward here.

These prob­lems could be coped with if the char­ac­ters were well-defined and fun to watch but Thor offers a pretty dull lot.  Most of the Asgard-based char­ac­ters are inter­change­able, with all of them doing the same sub-Shakespearean schtick, and Hopkins sleep­walks through his role as Odin.  Hemsworth makes a con­vinc­ing action hero but his arc as Thor is ill-defined: he’s too much of a blowhard at the begin­ning and we never get a sense of what turns him around to being a nice guy.  Portman is com­pe­tent but she’s not con­vinc­ing for a sec­ond as a sci­en­tist, prob­a­bly because the role is so gener­i­cally writ­ten any­one could have played it.  It’s also worth not­ing that Tom Hiddleston is the most dour, cheer­less “God of Mischief” you’ll ever see as Loki — but in fair­ness to him, his role is writ­ten in a very col­or­less fashion.

The most sur­pris­ing ele­ment of Thor is that it was directed by Kenneth Branagh.  Sadly, he doesn’t seem to bring any­thing spe­cial to the table here.  The Asgard scenes lack the heft of the Shakespearean work he’s known for and the rest of it just rushes from set­piece to set­piece with­out the kind of inspi­ra­tion he brought to genre fare in Dead Again.  His idea of styl­iza­tion in Thor is to make exces­sive use of Dutch angles.    Like so many other ele­ments in this film, the direc­tion could have been han­dled by any­one because it’s so bland.

Simply put, Thor is the kind of block­buster fare that is des­tined to age poorly because it’s so utterly mediocre.  Even the peo­ple who enjoyed it will prob­a­bly for­get it after a month or so.  It’s not an embar­rass­ing film but it ulti­mately ends up feel­ing like an epic pro­logue to set up the char­ac­ter of Thor for his even­tual appear­ance in The Avengers — and hope­fully Hemsworth will be able to flex his action hero chops more there.  As for Thor, film­go­ers deserved a lot more inspi­ra­tion and a lot less cor­po­rate synergy.