The Road To Endgame – Part 4: Thor

And thus we move onto the fourth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: the introduction to Asgard and the titular God Of Thunder, Thor Odinson.  So surely a film about thunder and lightning will have a spark to it, will be electrifying fun? Surely you can’t make a film about a god dull? Well, and I’m so sorry to have to say this, you’ll never guess what they managed to do with Thor. They managed to make it dull. They managed to make it tedious. They managed to make a film about a god of epic proportions boring.

That’s not to say Thor is completely without merit. The cast is alright, Chris Hemsworth is god-like (get it?). Natalie Portman is pretty decent as Jane Foster, even if the dialogue she’s given is mostly exposition and fawning over Thor. Tom Hiddleston is charming as Loki and really feels like a slick god of mischief. Anthony Hopkins is brilliant as Odin Odin, father of Thor. He’s a completely cruel individual, but he still manages to make the character likeable somehow. However, the other cast is far worse. Stellan Skarsgard is awful as Eric Selvig, just poor characterisation which isn’t helped by the fact Skarsgard isn’t a good actor. Idris Elba is just meh as Heimdall, he doesn’t get enough screentime nor character to justify an actor of his calibre. And literally every other actor in this film is just wasted, pure and simple.

Thor is about a god losing his powers and being forced to earn them back. Yeah, the plot really is that cliched and dull. Along the way he makes new friends, learns humility and fights the single most cliched villain I’ve seen in any superhero film ever. Somehow it manages to be worse than the ‘cliched mirror of the hero’ villain archetype. It’s just a robot with literally zero personality fighting Thor for a bit.

I’d have preferred, well, literally anything to this villain. He’s so bland that I’ve actually forgotten the name of the robot in question. It’ll come to me eventually, just give me a second.

The action in the film isn’t even any good, it’s far too scattered to be interesting and the camera work makes it hard to get invested in any of the action. I’m not quite sure what it is with Kenneth Branagh and Dutch angles, but he sure as hell uses them a lot in this film. The biggest, and almost only, piece of action comes near the end of the film, when Thor is fighting the whatchamacallit but it just looks bland? It’s far from the explosive action of Iron Man and the chaos that was The Incredible Hulk.

Overall, Thor is an almost complete misfire, the worst possible introduction to the character of Thor Odinson. It occasionally has decent moments of comedy and character, but that’s all I can really say in its favour other than the aforementioned cast. Check it out, but only because you have to. But hey, at least it introduced Hawkeye right?

THE ROBOT’S CALLED THE DESTROYER, THAT’S IT!

4/10