THOR review, by Chloe

 Just over a thousand years ago, Thor’s dad Odin (a very regal, very cool Anthony Hopkins), king of Asgard, led his army to victory in an epic battle with the Frost Giants. Today, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is about to succeed Odin as king of Asgard when – rudely, in the middle of his ‘coronation’ - some wily Frost Giants slip through the palace’s defenses to steal some badass weaponry. Luckily, they’re taken care of by a huge, fire-breathing bodyguard, but Thor is angry. He goes and picks a fight with the Frost Giants, nearly getting himself and his warrior friends killed. As punishment for his supreme arrogance and recklessness, Odin banishes Thor to Earth. He is stripped of all his power and the ability to handle his famous, insanely heavy hammer, Mjolnir, until he is truly worthy of it. Of course, in the meantime, he meets Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), a physicist whose interest was piqued when she saw a huge guy fall out of a foreign constellation of stars into the New Mexico desert.

Being a girl and everything, I do tend to appreciate the emotional and aesthetic parts of film and television. That’s not to say I don’t occasionally love a good explosion, or some epic smashing up of stuff. But when Lost was on, for example, I only ever watched to see who Kate would end up with, or whose lives would cross paths in the next flashback. I cared very little about the actual mystery of the island. Mostly because the island was never going to take off its shirt.

This is so not Thor’s problem. In fact, I think we need to question the sexuality of its director, Kenneth Branagh. The almost-gratuitous shirtlessness of Hemsworth’s Thor during his banishment to Earth is presented on an enormous, often slow-motion, widescreen platter.

Ahem. But you don’t care about that! All of the movie looks awesome; of course, it would have to, in a movie where the view from one’s dining room window is the Milky Way and exploding stars and galaxies. However, towards the end, the ‘epicness’ of the Bifrost (the heavenly highway from Asgard to Earth) started to jar and kind of clash with the familiar, Earthly plains of New Mexico. While a strength of the movie is its ability to merge both worlds believably, my disbelief lost a bit of its suspension when I tried to picture both ‘realms’ existing in the same universe. One really cool thing Branagh does is use the framing style of Thor’s source material, comic books. One awesome zoom in on Natalie Portman’s face looked particularly graphic and comic-nerdy, all tilted and focused on her wide eyes.

But for me, Thor mostly succeeds where few ‘superhero movies’ do. It has actual wit and actual heart, in a way that kind of reminded me of Iron Man – just as Jon Favreau took the time to make Tony and Pepper’s relationship funny and cute and smart and real, so does Kenneth Branagh with Thor and Jane.

Weirdly, the most refreshing, pleasing thing about the characters in Thor, particularly the humans, is the tiny little ‘real’ exchanges they have. Jane is nervous around Thor, more for his supernatural attractiveness than his size and apparent insanity; she gets to know him, makes fun of his way of speaking – “This realm?” – and Jane’s research assistant, Darcy, takes a picture of Thor for facebook. I’m enjoying how all the (soon-to-be) Avengers movies seem to have the same playful tone, presumably so they all mesh together for what everyone hopes will be a super awesome ‘finale’ movie, scheduled for next year.

            Could the sense of recent superhero movies feeling almost ‘personal’ and intimate – at least on a character level – be the result of previously indie actors/directors getting involved in huge, mainstream movies? I think so. I mean, can you imagine Michael Bay taking the time out from transforming cars and explosions and Megan Fox’s boobs for a nice, quiet spot of character development? I don’t know, maybe in Transformers XVIII. Maybe these personal touches and between-the-lines moments aren’t important in this genre, but they’re my favourite part of it, and Thor is made an even better film because of them. 

And just because...

How excited am I for The Avengers? ... A little.