THOR - movie review

Normally I like to do more than one movie review at a time, but having been a fan of  Marvel Comics, and specifically The Mighty Thor since I was a child, I thought this might deserve its own entry... plus its probably going to be pretty long, and I don't want y'all falling asleep on me...

THOR



I'll admit I was worried about how the movie studios would pull this off. Marvel Comics has built up such an incredibly rich backstory for this character that it seemed literally impossible to cover everything in one film. With comic books, they had the luxury of splitting the story into countless issues and adding and changing stuff wherever they saw fit; here they had to throw it all at us in one shot and hope for the best, as well as try to keep us entertained with action, humour and a hint of romance (as we expect in all Hollywood films). With THOR, they have succeeded - in spades.

Of course we all know by now that Thor (God of Thunder), Loki (God of Mischief), Odin (the All-Father), etc. are all figures from Norse (Viking) Mythology. Many of us know this simply because we've read the comic books, and are familiar with things like Mjolnir (Thor's Hammer), Bifrost (the Rainbow Bridge), Asgard (home of the Gods) and Jotunheim (home of the Frost Giants). Who says ya can't learn nuthin' from comic books? I think the movie did a fine job of covering these somewhat fantastical concepts without dumbing it down for the layman (ie; non-comic book fan). Going into this film as a self-professed comic book scholar, I was pleasantly surprised by their coverage of the extensive source material while still delivering a top-notch fantasy/action movie.

Marvel studios have built a rich screen mythology of its own with its big screen adaptation of comic book heroes and concepts. We all know about The Avengers, which they've been alluding to for years now. A few years back when I first heard about this, I was skeptical, but after witnessing the increasingly good quality of other Marvel films, I'm sure its going to be great. I love the fact that we get little cameos from iconic comic characters in every film so far - Nick Fury, Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye), Sam Stearns (the Leader, from the Incredible Hulk film and comics), the Black Widow (in Iron Man 2), etc. etc. etc.... One of the coolest things about watching comic book-based movies is these little references that only us 'real fans' would recognize. THOR is full of those as well.

Getting back to the actual film at hand, I think that the writers did a great job of working (or rather, re-working) all of the characters and concepts from the comic into the film without making it too cheesy. There's a few changes, like the absence of Donald Blake (more commonly known as the mortal identity of Thor), the fact that Jane Foster is a physicist instead of a nurse, and how the Asgardians were portrayed as a little more 'extraterrestrial' and a little less 'divine'... these are all just petty details... garnish if you will. The real entree here is the action, and we get lots of it, starting about 10 minutes into the film with a hammer-slinging, dimension-spanning, giant-smashing expedition to Jotunheim, and then of course much later as Thor and his fellow Asgardians find themselves battling the Destroyer (the indestructible construct of Odin, manipulated by the treacherous Loki). There's also a good helping of humor in the movie as well - mostly in the form of Thor getting whacked in the head as he walks among mortals and tries to cope with the loss of his powers... a little more slapstick than I was expecting, but it worked rather well for me...

One difference that was notable for me was the fact that the Thunder God only wore his trademark winged helmet for about 5 seconds in the film. Not a big deal, because it actually is pretty dorky-looking. Thor himself also spouted off a lot less of the "thees" and "thous" and other examples of the somewhat florid speech patterns that one sees in the comic books. I guess its enough of a stretch to get your average (non-comic geek) moviegoers to accept the Norse God of Thunder walking amongst us mere mortals - we don't want to scare them all away with a bunch of ridiculous sayings, like "I say thee, Nay!" and "by Odin's beard!" and whatnot. I'm happy that they got away with as much as they did...

Overall, this is a great film. To me, this ranks up there with the best of the Marvel Comics movies, like Spider-man and even enters into the greatness of Lord of the Rings and (dare I say) Star Wars territory... This film makes me really wish I hadn't sold off 80% of my collection of The Mighty Thor comics. I did so just before the movie came out, just in case it sucked and no one wanted them after it came out. Turns out I made a huge mistake! With the apparent success of the film, I'm sure I could have doubled my money at this point! Damn! Curse thee, Marvel Studios!!  I'll hold no grudges, however... it really is a great film.

As impressed as I was with it, I can do no less than give THOR a resounding  A+

Choke on that, non-believers!!

...but anyway,

May the Force be with you...