Monday, May 23, 2011

Thor

Saw Thor on Saturday, and I was a little disappointed. The 3D wasn't great. There was plenty of depth to the picture, but there were some scenes, like Thor's coronation in Asgard, that the 3D effect caused to feel miniature. I'm pretty sure I would have felt a greater sense of scale in plain 2D.

But that wasn't the major source of my disappointment. The big thing was, by the time it ended, I was wondering where the story was. Loki's motivation never really worked for me, and the stuff with Jane Foster was just sort of rote and by-the-numbers. When he suddenly declared his love for her, I was like, "Where did that come from?" And where was Balder? If they could include the Warriors Three, they should have had Balder in there as well.

So yeah, the effects were great, and Heimdall was bad-ass for a token black inserted randomly into a Viking story, and Thor's powers were depicted pretty much as in the comics, with the lightning and the hammer-twirling and the flying. But by the end of it, I felt as if I'd watched a bunch of scenes in search of a story. I wondered where the movie went.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They had a major problem with Loki's motivation that I can't believe never got addressed at the script stage. Actually it feels like the script got too many rewrites and came out all lumpy and missing some important parts.

Marc Carlson said...

It makes more sense it you watch it like Shakespeare. And Loki's motives were WAY better addressed in the movie than they ever were in the comics.

He's evil because a) he's really just a runt Frost Giant, and he was raised as the second son, and so automatically is unloved and unappreciated ( e.g. Prince John in much ado about nothing, and King John in the play of the same name).

Remember, Shakespeare is an excuse for sloppy storytelling.