{"id":34,"date":"2011-06-13T23:24:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-13T23:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/movieox.com\/?p=34"},"modified":"2011-06-25T18:06:54","modified_gmt":"2011-06-25T18:06:54","slug":"thor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/?p=34","title":{"rendered":"Thor"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was never much on Thor.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t read his main title much.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t read The Avengers much (though I really got into The Ultimates<\/em>).\u00a0 I came across Thor mostly when he crossed the paths of other Marvel characters like Bruce Banner or Daredevil.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t hate the character or anything, but I thought the writers (or maybe just Marvel) were kind of pussy-assed with it.\u00a0 It\u2019s Thor the god of thunder!\u00a0 (shhh\u2026\u00a0 he\u2019s not really a god, he\u2019s from another dimension where people are magic\u2026shhh)\u00a0 God is ill defined within Marvel.\u00a0 Which is really an issue for as many story lines they have with people going to hell.\u00a0 (shhh\u2026its not really hell but another dimension with many attributes of the Christian notion of hell and people\u2019s spirits go there when they die\u2026shhh).\u00a0 And then there\u2019s all the crap with Donald Blake.\u00a0 Is he actually Thor, or does the hammer cause Thor to posses whosoever wields it.\u00a0 It seems to change with each writer.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019m wrong but to me Thor was one of those characters whose retcons I could never keep up with.\u00a0 But then I have a job\u2026<\/p>\n

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There was a really cool cameo in a Frank Miller Daredevil<\/em> run by Thor and the Avengers that was actually pretty cool.\u00a0 Miller was able to make the Avengers seem larger than life and a bit scary.\u00a0 It was as if Daredevil was an infantryman who called in an airstrike and had to witness what happened and wonder if it wasn\u2019t a bit much.<\/p>\n

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But, for all the convoluted mythology with the character, I\u2019ve found him ill defined.\u00a0 (Though I have heard that he\u2019s become more interesting in his current run with Asgard floating over Oklahoma or some such nonsense.)<\/p>\n

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But color me glad that Sony has the movie rights to Spiderman and the X-men are elsewhere, because I really like what Marvel is doing with their Avengers properties.\u00a0 (Although Iron Man 2<\/em> was mostly a waste of my time)\u00a0 Because we\u2019re getting a period WW2 movie out of it (this year has 2 period comic films and at least 2 period sci-fi movies, weird) and we got a very good take on Thor.<\/p>\n

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The film took a flat out stance on what Thor is.\u00a0 He\u2019s an alien.\u00a0 He hales from a cosmic entity (not quite a planet) where all lines of force converge.\u00a0 If this were Stephen King, he\u2019d be from the world where the Dark Tower is actually a tower and not a rose.\u00a0 Being a super human race, his people thwarted an invasion of frost giants on earth in northern Europe in the dark ages and gave birth to the Norse pantheon of \u2018gods\u2019.\u00a0 As tends to happen, the political intrigue of this alien world spills over into ours when Thor starts a war with his arrogance and is banished to Earth, striped of his strength.<\/p>\n

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Chris Helmsworth plays Thor; and a good part of the movie only works because he’s so natural in the part.\u00a0 Sir Hopkins plays his father, Odin; and Natalie Portman plays Thor\u2019s reason to get out of bed in the morning.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a really cool small role for Stringer Bell.\u00a0 All of the acting (especially Hopkins who I wish was in the film more) is way better than one would expect in a movie of this type(guys in viking armor walking around in New Mexico).\u00a0 But then I noticed Kenneth Branaugh was directing.\u00a0 I respect Kenny, he knows what he\u2019s doing.\u00a0 The film does a very credible job of adding some science to the mix to keep things in the realm of quasi-realityish possibilities.\u00a0 If you want to know what they got right and what they got wrong science-wise, there\u2019s a good column by Copernicus on Ain\u2019t it Cool.<\/p>\n

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This movie could have been a disaster.\u00a0 It could have been Superman 3<\/em>.\u00a0 It could have been X-men Origins: Wolverine<\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s waaaay easier to tell a bad Thor story than a bad Wolverine story.\u00a0 Ken took things in a brave direction and made a movie that is actually beautiful in moments.\u00a0 I don\u2019t use that word lightly.<\/p>\n

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5.5 of 10 because its still a comic book movie, but some of the space stuff should be seen in the theater, it\u2019s gorgeous.<\/p>\n

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But don\u2019t bother with 3-D.\u00a0 This will end up being a running theme, but 3-D is stupid. \u00a0It was stupid in 1950 and it\u2019s stupid now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was never much on Thor.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t read his main title much.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t read The Avengers much (though I really got into The Ultimates).\u00a0 I came across Thor mostly when he crossed the paths of other Marvel characters … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieox.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}