I find it amazing sometimes just how much faith a movie will have in the audience’s ability to accept spectacular visuals but how little faith it will have in the audience’s ability to accept spectacular audio. “Thor” takes place in three different interstellar realms. One is Earth. It looks like New Mexico. One is a name I can’t remember how to pronounce or spell. It is where a bunch of surly frost giants live. It looks like a craggly icecube. The last is Asgard, which is where all the Norse gods of mythology live. Asgard is what the earth would look like if it were flat, made entirely of a city on a mountain, and contained the most extravagant and impractical architecture ever. The inhabitants of Asgard are Norse gods. There is King Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and his two sons Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Then there is a crew of other Norsemen that aren’t very memorable. Finally there is the great Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from “The Wire”) who plays the dutiful gatekeeper that guards the realm from evil threats. Guess what? The conversations of these immortals never rise past the level of present day high school English. The sentences are short and clipped. The vocabulary is limited. The phrases are unimaginative and totally underwhelming. If the gods could speak, I would be hugely disappointed if they sounded like this. I’m making a huge point about this mostly because the movie was directed by Kenneth Branagh, a man best known for his Oscar nominated movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. If anyone is capable of punching up a script to include more exalted dialogue it would be this guy. The fact that this wasn’t done suggests that the makers thought the audience wouldn’t accept it. Because I guess larger-than-life steroid-toking Norse gods that hang out in gargantuan palaces and wear over-elaborate warrior costumes is one thing, but if they had intelligent conversations, well that would just be snobbish.
The plot works really well in the form of a one-paragraph pitch. Earth is a battleground between two realms of gods. One contains the frost giants and the other contains the Norse gods of Asgard. Somehow a couple of frost giants trespass into Asgard. Thor wants to escalate the mere trespass into a war. This is something Odin forbids Thor to do. Thor goes into the frost giant realm anyway and starts a big fight with his hammer. Odin, angered by such arrogance, banishes Thor to Earth. He also banishes Thor’s hammer to Earth but not before putting a curse on it. Only those worthy of the hammer will be able to pick it up and receive its power. That includes Thor at this point, who is now stranded on earth without any of his powers. The first people Thor meets on Earth is a astrophysicist played by Natalie Portman, her mentor played by Stellan Skarsgard, and a college intern played by Kat Dennings. Meanwhile in Asgard, Thor’s half brother Loki connives to usurp the throne.
This could make a really good movie I bet. Let me explain what the movie should have done. Here we have Natalie Portman playing what is said to be a brilliant scientist with social problems. It wouldn’t hurt if she acted like the description. The way she is in the movie is abnormally normal. Then there is the Stellan Skarsgard whose character basically consists of unbelieving skepticism of the existence of Norse gods in the face of increasingly obvious evidence. Almost every conversation he has with Natalie goes something like this:
Stellan: This is silly Natalie, there is no such thing as Norse gods.
Natalie: But what about the elaborate computer generated effects we saw and the man that fell from the sky that looks like Thor and even calls himself Thor.
Stellan: Oh Natalie, you silly person.
That’s paraphrased somewhat but you get the gist. There should have been only one of these exchanges. After awhile Stellan starts sounding really dumb. Finally there is Kat Dennings who is this movie’s attempt at comic relief. If the movie followed my advice in allowing Thor to speak in exalted prose and allowing Natalie to be a total nerd, then this character would have a lot more material to make jokes from. But as it is, she is just another normal person in a town of normal people. She tries, bless her heart, but there is very little to work with. It is hard to make sly wisecracks about people who act just like you.
I am now going to suggest something that will essentially rewrite the story. How about instead of being banished for his arrogance, Thor was instead banished for being a big dumb idiot. Imagine that his foray into the Ice World was not merely macho zeal, but incredibly stupid. That instead of him going in and easily beating the frost giants (as what happens here), he instead goes in against much larger odds and has to have his ass saved by his dad. Then Odin banishes for his stupidity, sends down his hammer and curses it with hex that Thor can only lift it if he proves that he can use his brains in battle as well as his biceps. Now that he is on Earth without any powers, he will have to do just that.
This would accomplish a couple of things. One, it would make the bad guys much more formidable. Right now, the Frost Giants are kind of pushovers. Two, it would help the movie avoid melodrama and slow motion; the absence of which would have made the movie move faster and be much funnier. Three, it would make the Natalie Portman character much more useful. Here, she helps Thor overcome his arrogance by teaching him table manners. How about instead she taught him the basics of working your brain to accomplish things. Natalie Portman would then be perfectly cast. Did you know that in real life she is brilliant? She's a Harvard graduate and a bona fide scientist. Add to that the fact that she is small and weak. Portman and Thor technically complement each other very well, if only the characters could be developed in a way that allowed them to do so. Thor could help the socially inept scientist in return. For example he could improve her social standing by being a hunk that talks to her in public or perhaps he could help her move a large piece of furniture.
The way it is in the movie, Thor’s problem with arrogance can only be cured with being a more polite person. That’s great I guess but it hardly helps a summer blockbuster. You may be surprised by how many slow scenes of touchy-feely soul searching there is in this movie. Just take the climatic battle sequence. To win, the mighty Norse god Thor pulls a “Jesus.” He “turns the other cheek.” Now I do hesitate to suggest that a character shouldn’t act like Jesus, but I think something must be said about staying true to the source material. Would the Norse god of Thunder really be into self-sacrifice? Come on.
One more thing, I really have to complain about Branagh’s decision to film so much of the movie in weird tilted camera angles. The point I would think of using those angles would be to confuse perception and unsettle the audience. Sometimes that is called for in a movie like “12 Monkeys.” But in this movie? I don’t think so. This movie should be presented in a straightforward manner with confidence. This is a blockbuster about an immortal after all.
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