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| Thor (2011) |
Starting out, this is probably the best looking MCU film so far. The world of Asgard was brought to life beautifully, and I love the use of colour in making the kingdom look as magical as it could. The sweeping shots, the grandeur of the buildings, the landscapes, they all look gorgeous, and they contrast really well with the muted nature and bleakness of Jotunheim, and even with Earth. New Mexico was a great pick as an on-Earth setting for this portion of the film as, aesthetically speaking, it's probably the most mundane setting they could have picked, and really helps to highlight Thor's plight. In general, the film balances its multiple settings fairly well, and its pacing is reasonably consistent. This is the first MCU film where I can't accurately say that I preferred its first half over its second. Though it is fairly consistent throughout, I actually find the third act to be just that little bit stronger. I'll touch on this more later, but once they got off Earth and deal solely with the Thor/Loki pairing, the movie shines.
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| Tom Hiddleston as Loki |
A large part of this is down to the characterisations. For the first time, I can say that I loved everything about an MCU villain. Loki is amazing to watch here. He's conniving, he's passionate, he's funny in moments and Tom Hiddleston nails it all at every turn. You can really tell that Hiddleston is eating up the role and loving every minute of it. It's not constant grumpiness like with some of the other MCU villains we've gotten. More than anything, Loki's a villain that you can't really predict, which is another one of this movie's biggest strengths. As for Thor... I don't know. I think the movie does too good a job of making him unlikeable in the first act. It's not like Tony Stark where he's an asshole but charismatic and fun enough to have the audience on his side while he's going through his journey. Thor here is arrogant and self-centered, sure, but that's really kind of all he is in the beginning. There's nothing else there for the audience to latch onto. The best moment from Thor before he reaches the end of his arc is that little smile he gives himself when diplomacy doesn't work on Jotunheim. If there were more moments like that, things might be different, but for the most part he just comes across as a spoiled, whining brat. Let me put it this way: when Tony Stark gets taken captive, my reaction is 'Oh, no'. When Thor gets exiled, my reaction is 'Good, he deserved it.'
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| Chris Hemsworth as Thor |
The thing that ultimately saves it is Chris Hemsworth's performance. He's just charismatic and charming enough to pull it off by the end. I still think that the character is a bit of a blank slate by the end, but Hemsworth does his darnedest to pull something out of it and leave us with something entertaining. He absolutely nails the 'fish-out-of-water' humour, and I honestly think that Chris Hemsworth is in his element when he needs to be comedic. His timing is absolutely perfect, with the pet shop scene and 'Phil, son of Coul' being notable highlights. The rest of the cast do a well enough job as well. Natalie Portman plays her role fine despite Jane Foster herself really not doing much or being that interesting a character on her own. Idris Elba is expectedly fantastic, Anthony Hopkins plays a great disappointed father and a great god, Stellan Skarsgard does a fine job with what he's given, Kat Dennings is funny at times and other times is just loud and annoying, which I chalk up to the lines and character more than the performance. Even Sif and the Warriors Three do a great job, and I really like watching them interact when they're onscreen. The problem, of course, is how often they're onscreen.
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| Natalie Portman as Jane |
Because this is the biggest problem the film has. I just don't find the stuff on Earth to be that interesting to watch. When the film deals with gods and the Nine Realms and Loki especially, it's great, but the stuff on Earth can get a little boring at times. Stuff like watching Thor run house on a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility and have an existential crisis at not being able to lift Mjolnir is great, and the eventual moment when he recovers his abilites is handled perfectly, but when the story boils down to S.H.I.E.L.D. confiscating Jane's notes, I tend to lose interest. There's so much bigger-picture stuff happening that I just don't care. In fact, the entire point of the movie was to introduce the bigger picture to this world, so why would we want such a focus on this one town? I want to see Asgard, I want to know how it works, I want to learn how it connects to our world, I want to see Thor and Loki interacting with each other; Hiddleston and Hemsworth have downright amazing chemistry. But the scientists are so poorly defined and just... there, that it really sucks that they're given such a huge chunk of screentime. The highlight of the entire New Mexico sequence was Thor and Loki talking about their father falling into Odinsleep. The problem is that because we spend so much time on Earth, it's not made all that clear what Odinsleep is, or why it happens or if Loki caused, which was always the impression I got but is apparently not the case. I'm not saying the Earth stuff is unnecessary, but a lot of it sort of is. I like seeing Thor trying to deal with mortals for the first time, and watching him trying to recover his god status is fun as well. But watching him hit it off with Jane just doesn't do anything for me, mainly because her character isn't all that strong like I touched on before. I want to love this movie; it has so many elements that I love in a film, but I just can't.
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| Kat Dennings as Darcy |
Thor (2011) is a messy, yet fun movie. It's odd that despite its fairly consistent pace I consider it 'messy', but there you go. There's enough here that I can still say I like it, and I'll take this over Iron Man 2 for what it did with Asgard and Loki, but the Thor franchise definitely can only go up from here. 6.5/10
Next: it's Captain America: The First Avenger.
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