Thor: A Humble Hammer Fest

I have not been looking forward to Thor. My lack of interest in the action blockbuster had started with the trailer, which had two problems. First, it looked a bit naff. Thor takes place on Earth and the fictional realm of Asgard, which due to its ambitious design is entirely constructed by CGI. This would be fine, if every single rock or blade of grass had been painstakingly motion captured by James Cameron for three years. It wasn’t, but this isn’t my main point.

My actual gripe is that I was a bit concerned with the look of the trailer. It looked a bit ‘small’. All of the action looked very contained in a small space, with lots of desert action juxtaposed with a little bit of the big stuff on Thor’s planet. Thor gets attacked on Earth by a big metal robot, in the middle of a small American community, which doesn’t really scream “Norse Viking epic hammerfest”. This is Thor’s problem.

The film naturally opens with an epic battle, as a badly wigged Odin (Anthony Hopkins) defeats the Frost Giants, taking their powerful relic away from them as a punishment for being naughty and trying to invade everywhere. Fast forward to years later, and a retiring Odin is now passing the mantle to Thor (Chris Harmsworth), whose coronation is halted by a failed attempt to steal the relic back by some rogues. Odin lets the matter slide, but Thor is angry. He storms up to the Frost Giants home and starts a vicious and spectacular fight, which plunges his kingdom onto the verge of war. This angers Odin, who strips Thor of his powers and sends him with a bump back down to Earth. Shortly after, he sends his hammer down, but only after placing a charm that will stop him from using it till Thor proves himself worthy, pretty much like a parent taking away a child’s toy until he learns to behave. Timed by 1000.

All this kicks in the excellent and cleverly designed premise. Thor’s problem is that he is a giant man mountain that took no time to put any brain cells in there. He has to learn to be smarter, know when conflict is unavoidable, but also know when to avoid conflict. This is established in his time on Earth, trying to find his hammer with the help of scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman).

There’s not an awful lot I find myself complaining about with Thor; it was quite entertaining. The fish out of water moments when Thor is on Earth are funny and charming (including a scene in which Thor enters a pet shop demanding a horse, and when told they only sell cats or dogs, demands one big enough to ride). The best compliment I can give Thor is that it never drops into predictability or cliché that a lot of big budget films tend to do. Even the CGI bothered me less than expected (although there is a shot of a comatose Odin covered in a transparent gold shield, which with the hair and the colour shade makes him look like he’s in a Bee Gees video).

Unfortunately, Thor never feels like it steps out of second gear. It’s not that the film doesn’t progress, or that it doesn’t create more conflict later on, but it fails to live up to the vision that it had fostered in my mind. The reason for this is twofold. First, it’s Thor. He’s a superhero, and a Viking god who can crush tens of thousands in seconds due to a giant hammer. So when he winds up running around a backwater town in the American south, you only have the audience’s attention for so long before they demand he fight something larger than life. The film tries to appease this with a battle against a giant robot that breathes fire, but it comes off a bit small in its scale.

The second reason is the law of diminishing returns. Thor’s opening thirty minutes are grandstanding in nature as epic battled is followed by another epic battle, and lots of visual effects and the power of Thor’s Hammer there for all to see. These opening scenes make the rest of the film, however well written and executed, feel a bit flat. Thor fails to top its opening salvo and instead becomes content with its small and contained story in small town America, and returns home to the big battle far too late in the day. Thor needed to either build on its epic beginnings or allude to them instead of showing its hand too early to the public, if it was to match our expectations.

Ultimately, it is important to point out that Thor is a good film despite its big flaws. I liked Thor. I liked the story. I even liked the villain (Tom Hiddleson) who started out as the jealous brother stereotype but actually gained a level of complexity to his character, which made him quite interesting, even if he was erratic in his decision between being a conflicted warmonger or just an all out bastard. More importantly, I managed to go through an entire review of Thor without a single pun on his name. I think we know who won this particular battle.