We watched Thor last night, which confirmed my original suspicions. Thor wasn’t an appealing comic book, and I didn’t expect much from the movie, but friends of friends became very enthusiastic after watching, so Eileene and I allowed ourselves to hope it had risen above its origins.
It didn’t. It wasn’t out-and-out bad, but it was pretty lame—simultaneously nonsensical and unimaginative, which is something of a feat. Good actors tried to carry bad dialogue, only succeeding sporadically. (Chris Hemsworth, particularly, carries the lead role as convincingly as anyone might.) The comic relief moments, in which Thor fails to adapt to mortal social norms, are predictable but nevertheless charmingly delivered. The big chest-thumping heroic moments are bland and really rather pointless if you think about them…so the film does its best to prevent you from thinking with booming music and splashy CGI. A yawner that isn’t justified by the suggestion that all these origin movies are a necessary groundwork to The Avengers, featuring the combined might of Thor, Iron Man, et al. Is there any reason, really, to think The Avengers is going to feature any more talent and art than the rest of the flood of Marvel comic-movie crossovers? If there’s better writing talent available, why isn’t it being used now?
In that sense, the movies are true to their source: the writing in comic books is generally bad, although we should remain conscious of the many stellar exceptions, and the writing of early Marvel comics was very nearly always dreadful. Personally, as someone who’s read Norse mythology and values fidelity to the classics, I had trouble getting past the way the movie played merry havoc with the original mythology, but that shouldn’t be considered a failing of the film; I’m pretty confident Thor comics weren’t true to the mythology, either.
I bring it up because Eileene feels she’s missed something, perhaps something big, through ignorance of Norse mythology, and I suspect others might feel the same way. If you come out of the theater likewise suspecting you’ve missed something, don’t. The characters of the film (and, presumably, comic books) have nothing in common with the original mythology than their names and a taste for battle. Everything else is up for grabs. Sif isn’t Thor’s wife here; she’s just a battle companion. Asgard is apparently only at war with the frost giants of Niflheim and not the giants of Muspelheim or other monsters. At the movie’s opening, Odin is actually stepping down from the throne to name Thor king. (Odin did, in later myths, become something of an absentee ruler of the gods as he searched the world for some way to prevent or at least ameliorate Ragnarok, but he never abdicated, and certainly would not have made Thor his successor!) If the producers are going to mess with basic elements like this, theater-goers who haven’t read the Heimskringla or Volungsaga or attended a full performance of the Niebelungenslied aren’t missing anything. This is brainless popcorn-crunching spectacle; either enjoy it as such or skip it entirely.
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