It can be an awfully long haul when you lose interest in a movie the minute you’ve licked the last sticky bit of choc-top off your fingers.
That it happened on this occasion should not have come as a surprise, for nine times out of ten in anything based on a Marvel comic my eyes glaze over and my brain wanders as soon as the bad guys are identified.
As usual, the back-story of Thor tells of a humungous clash between good and evil in the heroic past. Darkness was vanquished, but the villain saved himself and the mysterious black ‘ether’, which he would use again to pursue his dastardly schemes.
Then we’ve got Thor (Chris Hemsworth) smiting what look like troglodytes in a swashbucklingly violent but bloodless battle – and this is an anomaly typical of the genre; Thor and his mob can zap through eons of space, but when it comes to armed combat they are still reduced to spears and swords and bows and arrows.
In the introductory stink, Hemsworth (by God, who’s the lucky maiden who’ll bed him, I wondered) brings proceedings to a close when he slays a giant using David’s old trick of slinging a stone into the brute’s head. ‘Why didn’t we just do that in the first place?’ some wag in the ranks calls out – which is exactly what the exhausted viewer might ask at the film’s end (oh, bitter irony).
Everybody celebrates at the futuristic gothic castle, eating venison with their hands whilst balancing a couple of pretty wenches on their knees. Cut to a restaurant in today’s London, and there’s Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) with a dag who has no chance of keeping the gorgeous heroine out of Chris’s arms.
There are heaps of punters who love this sort of thing – why else spend $150 million making it – but alas, I’m not one of them.
Admittedly, it was fun to see that old limelighter Anthony Hopkins hamming it up as Odin, with a metal eye patch, no less.
~ John Campbell
