Faced with an enemy that even Odin and Asgard cannot withstand, Thor
must embark on his most perilous and personal journey yet, one that will
reunite him with Jane Foster and force him to sacrifice everything to
save us all.
The release of this silly but enjoyable new movie based on the Marvel superhero
Thor,
the ancient god of thunder, has triggered an extraordinary explosion of
Thor-related puns online. Thousands of critics and bloggers all over
the world have been competing to get in the best Thor joke. They have
wondered if our troubled hero is entirely Thor about his destiny. They
have noticed that certain things are a bit of a Thor point with him.
They have remarked that bad things happen to good mythic superheroes,
Norse the pity.
This week, I became convinced that I had the best one: the
supervillain that Thor should really face is … Mr Freeze. Thor, thaw,
geddit? Look upon my matchlessly crafted play on words, ye Thor
punsters, and despair. Yet the weird thing is that Thor really does
appear to have ice-related opponents, the Frost Giants, leading me to
wonder what is happening in the subconscious, psycho-linguistic levels
of Stan Lee's mind.
The 27-year-old Australian star Chris
Hemsworth plays the mighty thunder god himself, with flowing locks, and
tungsten-hard abs. Up there in the halls of Asgard, this divine hothead
is impatient with his wise, sonorous old dad Odin, played by
Anthony Hopkins.
Odin favours a Chamberlainesque peace with the Norse gods' ancient,
malevolent enemies, the Frost Giants, despite the fact that these
low-temperature villains have recently made a provocative trespass on to
Asgard. Thor wants to get in there and kick some arse, to the unease of
his prickly brother Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston.
Impetuously,
irrepressibly, and without anything approaching a patriarchal say-so,
Thor leads a posse of Norse god mates over the ancient bridge and
prevails upon the Asgard gatekeeper, Heimdall, played by Idris Elba, to
let them through, so that they can parley with the subzero baddies in
their own icy domain. Inevitably, a fight kicks off and to punish his
errant son for his diplomatic
bêtise, Odin exiles Thor to earth
where he is stripped of his powers, and must earn the right to regain
them, and to wield his mighty hammer, Mjolnir, which has plunged down to
earth with him. Like Excalibur, this can only be pulled out of the
earth by a worthy candidate and so, like a fish out of water, or indeed
like a Norse Crocodile Dundee, Thor must make sense of Earth, and he
must also get it on with gorgeous earthling scientist Jane Foster –
played by
Natalie Portman – whose Scandinavian mentor (Stellan Skarsgård) tutors her in Norse myth.
Returning
now to Stan Lee's subconscious mind, the Freudian implications of
Thor's mighty hammer are plain enough. But ever since I bought the first
UK edition of Spider-Man Comics Weekly in 1973, in which Thor was an
eccentric supporting turn, I have wondered about that little leather
strap that goes on the end of the handle. This is, presumably, to make
the hammer a hands-free device. Thor will sometimes need to do things
with both hands; it would be a bore to keep having to put the hammer
down, and he scorns a Batman-style utility belt. So, as a child, I
always expected a scene in which Thor was, say, queuing up in a canteen
holding a tray with Mjolnir dangling mightily from one wrist.
These former thoughts came back into my mind watching this – though at
no point does Mjolnir's design-feature, the strap, actually get used.
Perhaps when Thor 2 comes out, we will see him loop it round his hand
for added crime-fighting convenience.
This movie is directed by
Kenneth Branagh,
and it is interesting to consider how, or if, this very intelligent and
now unjustly maligned director has put his personal mark on the
picture. I think he has, in the interesting way he has directed British
newcomer Hiddleston in the ambiguous role of Loki. Hiddleston is a
performer who came to prominence in the art films of Joanna Hogg,
Unrelated and Archipelago. Making the leap to a commercial mainstream
movie, it would have been very easy for Hiddleston to play Loki pretty
much as a typical villain. But Hiddleston makes of this cartoon
character something interestingly complicated: his Loki is nervous,
sensitive, thin-skinned. Most of the Norse god characters stand around
as if they are nothing more than action figures, but Hiddleston is
trying to do something more. Inevitably, these nuances get a little lost
in the mega-decibel thunder, but they are there, nonetheless. Now is
the time for Branagh to direct another Shakespeare. My suggestion is
Timon of Athens, with Hiddleston in the lead.
This Thor can be
entirely ridiculous sometimes, and the world of Asgard does look
sometimes like the digital universe of Tron, in the recent dodgy update.
It underuses actors like Jeremy Renner and the Japanese star Tadanobu
Asano in minuscule roles. But this is entertaining stuff, a serviceable
summer movie and Asgard to be a good thing.
A nice action movie with sympathic main actors. A lot of action and an intersting story. If I saw the film just in HD I will give 5 stars, but I saw the movie in 3D and there were less 3D-effects, so I draw down one star. But last not least it is a great ....
