Thor

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Movie Info

The epic adventure Thor spans the Marvel Universe from present day Earth to the mystical realm of Asgard. At the center of the story is The Mighty Thor, a powerful but arrogant warrior whose reckless actions reignite an ancient war. As a result, Thor is banished to Earth where he is forced to live among humans. When the most dangerous villain of his world sends its darkest forces to invade Earth, Thor learns what it takes to be a true hero.-- (C) Paramount Pictures

NYTimes

Thor (2011)

Have Golden Locks, Seeking Hammer

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: May 5, 2011

More About This MovieAs I stumbled out of the Imax multiplex all-media advance screening of “Thor,” depositing my 3-D glasses in the appropriate bin, I thought of seeking shelter: in a nearby bar; under a passing bus; in the velvet shadows of an art house playing the longest, slowest, most obscure movie imaginable. But when something like “Thor” comes to town, there is really no refuge to be found in drink, death or subtitles, and so I tried to reason myself out of the leaden gloom that lay upon my soul as heavy as Mjolnir. (That’s Thor’s magic hammer, for those not versed in Marvelized Norse mythology.)

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Oh come on, I said to myself, it’s only a movie! It isn’t that bad, right? Look at the bright side. Anthony Hopkins is in it, wearing a metal eye patch, growling and bellowing the way he always does when the money is right. And there is alsoIdris Elba covered in gold armor, looking like a cross between the Wall Street bull and an Oscar statuette. Speaking of which, who else should turn up but the elusiveNatalie Portman? She plays an astrophysicist named Jane,and, as far as I could tell, does all her own astrophysicswithout the aid of a double. Ms. Portman’s cute-nerd sidekick is Kat Dennings, and their nerd mentor is Stellan Skarsgard, who at this point must be a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Pretend Science. “Thor” was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who has read a lot of Shakespeare. What could be so terrible?

The thing is, though, that the kind-of-O.K. aspects of “Thor” have the effect of making it more depressing, rather than less. The movie cannot be an interesting, appalling train wreck because it lacks the spoiled grandeur of ambition gone off the rails. You can’t sit and marvel (as it were) over what went wrong because nothing, at the level of execution, really has gone wrong. Mr. Branagh has not failed to make an interesting, lively, emotionally satisfying superhero movie, because there is no evidence that he (or the gaggle of credited screenwriters, or Paramount, the sponsoring studio) ever intended to make any such thing. On the contrary, the absolute and unbroken mediocrity of “Thor” is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad.

And that is depressing. A howling turkey is at least something to laugh at, and maybe even something to see. But “Thor” is an example of the programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination. A postcredits teaser gives viewers who have lingered in the theater a taste of “The Avengers,” which at some future date will braid together the “Iron Man,” “Incredible Hulk” and “Thor” franchises under the eye-patched aegis of Samuel L. Jackson. Or something. This is franchise building of the kind that has long been practiced by comic book publishers to keep their long-running serials fresh and their readership hooked.

Translated into the hugely expensive, culture-dominating realm of big-budget moviemaking, however, the tactic of treating the price of a ticket as an installment-plan payment has more in common with a Ponzi scheme. The purpose of putting this movie in theaters is to make sure you and all your friends go to the next one, and then the one after that.

At this stage in the superhero bubble the strategy seems to be to protect the investment by minimizing risk. And the biggest risk would be a movie that dared to be interesting or original in its exploration of archetypal characters and their allegorical predicaments. That has been tried from time to time and with some success (in the second “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” films and yes, I’ll admit, in “The Dark Knight” as well). But the norm in this genre is a hodgepodge of adolescent emotions, cheeky humor, cool special effects and overblown action sequences, a formula that can, when the casting is right, make certain specimens (like the first “Iron Man” movie) seem better than they are.

“Thor” tries to go this route. The requisite themes — revenge and betrayal, might and right, love and duty — are duly checked off. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) incurs the wrath of his father, Odin (Mr. Hopkins) and contends with his duplicitous brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), a family drama set against the backdrop of war between the long-haired, amber-lighted immortals of Asgard and their enemies the frost giants. Banished from his home and stripped of his powers (and his shirt), Thor lands in New Mexico, where his golden locks and ripped abs challenge Ms. Portman’s commitment to scientific objectivity, and where a bunch of government agents quarantine his hammer.

It will not do to point out that a frost giant sounds less like an existential threat to the universe than like a super-sized frozen beverage, or to question the merits of Jane’s research. The particular magic of the superhero genre — in print and on screen — is its blending of the sublime and the silly. The challenge is in altering the ratio of gravity and wit to come up with something genuinely engaging.

You would think that Mr. Branagh, with his pop-Shakespearean credentials, would be just the man to tease out the somber tones and the amusing grace notes implicit in the situation of his hero, who is both an exiled prince and a fish out of water. Instead you are hammered with one cliché after another, from the architecture of Asgard, with its floating stone staircases and vast, vaulted chambers, to the computer-generated monsters.

The 3-D camerawork produces a few flinches — a flying hammer can have that effect — but no flights of wonder. The hero is a likable meathead, none of whose words or actions are the least bit memorable. Nothing in “Thor” is, and I suspect that is not an accident. If you can’t remember what you saw, then there’s no harm in seeing it again. There is no reason to go to this movie, which might be another way of saying there’s no reason not to. Something like that seems to be the logic behind “Thor,” and as a business plan it’s probably foolproof.

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