Thanks, I Hate It: Thor

This is low-hanging fruit. I admit it. The Marvel movies are about as worthy of thought as their own promotional lunch boxes. But, you know, sometimes you want to give the work your heart, meet the artist in the void between your own mind and their vision, experience what it’s like to live in the luminous prison of their skin and reflect on that deeply enough to risk altering your own personality, and sometimes you just want to grab a bat and fucking whale on something. 

Thor sucks. The costumes suck, the music sucks, the acting sucks, the CGI sucks, the camera sucks. Everything that could conceivably suck? It fucking sucks. Anthony fucking Hopkins sucks. As I write this I’m watching Thor at 3:30am on a Sunday night, and my God, it sucks even worse than I remember. The lifeless wonderland of Asgard is such an unbelievable bore. No color, no people, no sense that any of this is real or touches the lives of real people in any meaningful way. It’s a dead, empty place where five idiots bicker about their contrived family drama. I know that people love Tom Hiddleston, and there is something to his sharp-faced, vulnerable Loki, but not enough to make any of this shit sing.

Then we get to Earth, and a whole new level of blandness unfolds itself. Natalie Portman’s role is nothing, a challenge to which she rises admirably by delivering a complete blank of a performance. Stellan Skarsgård is also there. He is a science man, I believe. The chemistry between Portman and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor is as uninteresting as the relationship between Thor and his compatriots, including the completely and totally wasted Ray Stevenson (Titus Pullo of Rome fame). The movie doesn’t take any of it seriously either, busting out goofy pratfall music whenever Thor and his pals are together even when the material is stone-cold serious.

Thor has no respect for its own story, no sense that any emotion deeper than a wink and a grin serves any purpose to establishing its tone. Hemsworth can’t carry that. His would-be boisterous performance never feels lived in, never transcends his cookie cutter good looks. His big, lean-waisted frame and oblivious charm might work in a movie with more intelligible action, but Thor’s camera loops and shivers all over the place whenever anyone comes within a mile of getting smacked, and its staging is painfully tedious. The showdown between Thor and the metallic destroyer dispatched to Earth to hunt him is, I think, meant to resemble an old school Western’s fateful gunfight, tense and empty, but it ends up looking sterile instead. There’s no wind, no emotion, no connection between the parties in play.

Everyone’s phoning Thor in. Hopkins’ delivery is narcoleptic, the film’s direction is careless, and its slipshod message about responsibility and dignity is lost in a stew of forgettable characters and action scenes which run wetly into one another, forming a single exhausting slurry. The limp, airless final fight between Thor and Loki is primed for all kinds of wide, distant shots dramatically positioning the brothers against the void beneath and beyond, but instead it’s all low-angle pans of incomprehensible hammer-on-spear action and silly helmets. There is no soul in it. You can tell at every level that this is a movie a company decided should exist, not one that came from a production team’s hard work and vision. It’s dead. Ugly. An insult to film.