Thor (Page 1 of 2)

Is the fact he can eat a lot somehow important to the plot? Or am I missing something?

EDIT: I should point out, that I've heard nothing but good things about Thor

EDIT EDIT:

"When I saw the trailer, the part when I really cracked up is when Anthony Hopkins scolds his son for bringing on war," she said. "But Odin in mythology starts wars, creates strife."

Kaplan explained that in Norse mythology, the gods are usually battling the giants. "During these constant battles with giants, Odin creates strife," she said. "But he's not a hand-to-hand combat guy like Thor. Odin's contribution is frequently gathering knowledge and prophecy and magic stuff. His associations are with warfare, strife, poetry and the type of magic that men are not supposed to do."

From: http://www.newsarama.com/film/thorsday- … 10505.html

EDIT EDIT EDIT:As far as the accents, would you rather they spoke in old norse?

Worth a read.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2011-05-06 08:00:35)

I want them to sound like Victor Borge.

Who am I kidding? I want EVERYONE to sound like Victor Borge.

I'll freely admit ignorance with regard to Norse myths and the Marvel version of Thor (and it may be that the movie is totally consistent with the comics), but Neil Gaiman in 'Sandman' had Odin fearing final battle as everyone was going to die and while fighting is good living forever is better Naturally he also had Thor hitting on women by saying that if they rubbed his hammer it would get bigger, so I'm not sure it was a fully accurate take on the characters regardless.

^ I concur, in fact now I feel like I kind of need to see it, just to get in on the conversation.

EDIT to post thoughts.

Finally saw it with my buddy Sean on Saturday night so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents. 

To start, I want to clarify my position on something that, sadly, is tainting the conversation of Marvel's recent slate, and making criticism of these films a bit muddled: The Avengers.  Yes, I am an avid Comic reader.  No, I'm not going batshit over the very thought of The Avengers happening.  If I do buy into the pre release hype over a comic movie, its only over what I know is possible with the character and/or world that is being adapted.  Lots of comic movies get made and most dont do much for me.  But some characters are deep wells to mine from.  For instance, I was equally excited as the idea of an Iron Man movie as I was a Punisher movie.  Both characters are rich, have a deep backstory to delve into, and are potential acting and directing showcases.  Well, one movie hit it on all cylinders from casting to story to creating a world, and one certainly failed in all three of those.  But in either case, those movies were created because someone LOVED those characters and thought they could support their own film.  While you could certainly say that Thor has a rich backstory, is an interesting character, and lives in a cool little world, the fact of the matter is this movie exists for one reason: to put him in the Avengers.  Not only that, but the script and film have to be structured around these immovable little breadcrumbs that are meant to dovetail into Captain America and later, The Avengers (cosmic cube, odin's armory, and Hawkeye all appear in Thor to set up plot points of Cp and Avengers).  This is bad for a few reasons.  One, it makes telling the story a little harder, but it also affects the criticism of it.  Any deficiency in the film will be hanged, rightly or wrongly, on the fact that this movie is being tied to another.  I see a lot of folk make very well articulated points of contention with the film, but a lot of it concludes in "...because they're trying to sell me on another movie."  I think Thor has plenty of problems, in that I agree.  But very little of it has to do with The Avengers, and I'll explain why.  I also want to say that Thor never has been at the top of my pull list of monthly comics.  He's a character that is largely writer dependent, as the wrong writer can make him woefully boring.  It's similar to Superman, that when you have a character that fucking strong, it becomes harder to challenge him.  Unlike Supes, Thor has no real weakness.  So I wasn't counting down this movie like I was Iron Man or am now with Green Lantern (god help me).   

Unlike Teague and Dorkman, I knew exactly who each of the Asgardian characters were, and what their motivations were.  In brief:

ODIN:  Wants peace.  Not afraid to smack a civilization down BUT NOT ERADICATE IT (this is important) in order to keep it.  This is illustrated in the opening story by Odin going to war with the Frost Giants but letting the king live.  He hates war, but is good at it, and most importantly all his actions are directed towards securing peace. His very act of adopting Loki is motivated by by this.  The movie hinges on Odin's desire for no war, and I buy it.

THOR:  Idolizes his father, but for the wrong reasons (as a child he wants to hear.  He's loyal, hot tempered, and definitely good at fighting, which he enjoys too much.  Anthony Hopkins has a look that works very well for me.  Its when Thor enters for his coronation.  Odin sees his son showing off and realizes, "Shit he's not ready..." and is almost relieved when they get interrupted.  When the Frost Giants first sneak in, Thor is ready to throwdown because to him, the idea of warfare is kingly, and that will make him more like his father, who he adores.  The banishment makes sense because Thor almost plunged Asgard back into war, and when scolded by his father, Thor says something awful, motivated by anger and frustration that he never got to demonstrate his own power and ability to make king like decisions.  Again, his definition of leadership is a false one, one that he "learns," (sorta, we'll get to that later) over the course of the film.

LOKI:  Wants to have the love and respect Thor gets.  Wants his father's respect more than anything.  This motivates every one of his actions.  Mike had a problem with Loki suddenly killing the Frost Giant King (his blood father) but that actually worked for me.  Loki is the god of LIES and MISCHIEF for f's sake.  He doesn't want to rule over Yottenheim, shit is cold there.  He HAS an awesome Kingdom.  He wanted to save his father's life in front of his mom (and his Dad.  They establish that Odin is aware during the Odinsleep) and BE the HERO that Thor was supposed to be.  He doesn't want Asgard to burn.  He wants to rule it, and destroy any trace of where he really comes from, which, Dorkman, in and of itself is a very bad thing that a HERO would want to stop regardless of wether or not doing so would destroy the bridge that his blank slate of a girlfriend is on the other side of.  Loki is my favorite character in the entire movie, and even though a villain, in many ways he's the most sympathetic.  Homeboy just wants love and respect from the people who had lied to him his whole life....but he'd commit genocide to get it, and therefore HAS to be stopped. 

Now...I gained none of this from the comics, because I never really read Thor with any sincerity.  Most of Thor's comics are about his adventures on earth, anyway.  I got all this from the same movie that Dorkman and Teague saw.  Where I consider the film fails is not on the Asgardian drama, but on the earth side of things.  Specifically, with the single most important relationship in the movie that is supposed to be the vertex that the titular characters arc hinges on.

Yes, Natalie, I'm looking at you.  Unlike Teague, I will unleash the full might of my hate cannon on her character.  She is underwritten, under motivated, and holds NO chemistry with Thor.  This is a huge problem for the movie, as in order for Thor to become Thor-y again.  He has to learn humility.  How does he learn it?  Some legit bad news about his Dad, and making eggs for Stellan Skaaaarrrassssgaaaaaaaaard, and finally throwing himself in front of the Destroyer.  Sorry folks, not enough.  Movie, I need more steps in between to see Thor gradually learn humility.  If I can't buy Thor learning humility, then I can't buy him getting his powers back for the big win.  Jane as a character is practically a cypher.  The only real Avengers intrusion is in this stuff, and it just comes off random and rambling.  I like Kat Dennings, but her character should've been called QUIP-A-TRON 9000, as all she's good for is mispronouncing Mjolnir.  That and her offensively hot titties. 

Yeah, Thor's whole arc is tied to him growing through a love interest.  Seeing the world through her eyes, realizing that peace is worth protecting, and discovering that a King's job is to serve the people and not rule them would have made this movie awesome.  Jane is supposed to do all these things and none.  Of.  It.  Works.  I liked the movie, mostly, but anytime Thor drew Yggdrassil on a notebook, or made eggs or whatever, I didn't give the tiniest of shits, and I was supposed to.  Jane exhibits no personality traits that would seem to intrigue, let alone attract the God of Thunder.  But the movie decided that she should, so she did....kinda....but she didn't really.

So I don't disagree that the film had problems, but just not quite all the ones Teague and Mike were saying.  Teague asked me on IM why Iron Man worked for him and not Thor.  It worked because as an audience you buy the relationships that motivate the change in the title character.  The actions he takes to become a better person are interesting as a result, and the final fight is that character DEFENDING his new outlook as well as innocents or a girl or whatever.

To wit:  Tony Stark is a genius who makes weapons and sees no problem with that.  Until he is attacked and kidnapped, and watches soldiers and innocent people dying from his creations.  He meets a good man who DEMONSTRATES selflessness by saving his life twice, and challenges him to do better.  Tony then returns home to those who love him (Pepper and Rodhey) determined to be a better man and make a difference.  As he pieces together his armor, his internal self is changing that change is represented physically as he creates a new self (the armor) to combat the old one (Stark weapons in terrorist hands).  In the end, he fights an older shadow of himself (Obie, who wants to exploit Toney's armor) and saves lives in doing so.  When he finally says, "I am Iron Man," its not out of hubris, its him showing the world, "Look, I've changed."

We buy all of this because of the relationships in Toney's life. We buy his relationship to Pepper, who always saw this good in him.  To Yinzen, who teaches Tony the value of life and second chances.  To Obidiah, which deteriorates as Tony matures.  When Tony demonstrates behavior that progresses his arc, its usually scenes with these people the preceede him armoring up and kicking ass.

Compare that to Thor, and while many of those elements ARE there as I listed, the scenes with his human relationships just dither on and fall flat.  If you don't buy those, huge chunks of the movie don't work.

Last edited by Eddie (2011-05-09 20:52:33)

so how would we go about fixing the Earth section of the movie?  I think a good place to start woul be to put Thor in the body of Donald Blake like Odin did in the comic.  That way you can establish Jane as a compassionate nurse who cares for those less fortunate, again, like in the comic.

This might be a core issue, for me. The problem is that the Frost Giants are so underdeveloped that I don't really see it as committing genocide. I literally see it as practically equivalent to trying to exterminate all the spiders in ARACHNOPHOBIA. Or even the Orcs in LOTR (doesn't help that they look very similar). The good guys could have killed every last one of the Orcs in Middle Earth, on screen, and based on the way the story was constructed, they still would have been HEROES.

I'm totally cool if Thor wants to learn the value of life no matter what its form, but that sure as hell wasn't a journey he went on in this movie. Maybe the movie could have done a thing where he thought every creature that wasn't Asgardian was contemptible, and maybe had a poor impression of humans from wars fought or whatever, so that in spending time with humanity and learning we're not all like that, he would be able to extrapolate that, holy crap, maybe the Frost Giants aren't all alike either. Then I could buy his concern for them. But the Frost Giants had nothing to do with what he went through, and like you said yourself, his time on Earth was fraught with emptiness and nothing to drive him as a character.

Part of the problem was that there was a lot going on in Asgard but once Thor got to Earth we spent most of our time there. Fair enough, since he's the titular character, but I think the Asgard story was far more interesting and wish that had been the majority, even the entirety, of the movie, and clearly developed all the things that instead we had to read between the lines.

Very interesting discussion. My thoughts are similar to Eddie's, except I've read quite a few Thor comics and am a huge fan of the characters (Conan, Thor and Punisher are the only ongoing comics I get these days). That doesn't make me an authority, I'm just pointing out that I had a lot of expectations going in.

I enjoyed the movie alot, but when it ends there's definitely a sense of 'wait, is that it?' It feels truncated, like we're watching an action-focused cut rather than a complete story. It feels like we go from arrogant Thor to making breakfast Thor too quickly.

What the film needs is for Thor to want to change himself to make Jane want him. As it stands, his arrogant and cocky nature are almost attractive to Jane, so he doesn't have to change to get the girl. Thor never has that 'this woman I like doesn't like me, why?' moment of self-reflection. He never truly realises that he's arrogant. His transformation is only that he becomes self-less. That to me is only half the arc. Thor isn't worthy to be king because of a number of character flaws, but the story doesn't tackle them all.   

What the film also needs is to get rid of the pseudo-LOTR opening and the presentation of the frost giants as one-dimensional orc-like beings intent on wanton destruction. They need to have a valid story of their own. The war with the Asgardians needs to be more about a pre-determined fate than about good vs evil. With the relevation that their King does know about the infiltration mission at the start, any hint of them being a race with their own problems is thrown out the window. As a result, Odin's reluctance for war seems odd, and the audience is left questioning why Thor shouldn't go off and bust heads. They don't see why Thor was wrong. If you can't really agree that a character is flawed, it somewhat undermines the ensuing transformation. And as others have said, Thor's turnaround to not wanting that race destroyed is made puzzling because at no point have we had any hint that the frost giants are redeemable. Thor hasn't had a revelation that they aren't the boogeymen he's grown up wanting to fight. There's a definite disconnect there, as if his experience with humans should have informed him of the worth of other races. Considering there was a line in a trailer where he says something like 'oh no, this is earth isn't it', I suspect that there are some deleted scenes that perhaps could make this whole thing make more dramatic sense.

All the problems I feel come from the story though - the acting, directing, art design and action were all great. Some of the Odin-Thor-Loki stuff especially was great. The whole Loki character and his story was probably its strongest point. It took unexpected turns and for me was geniunely moving and sympathetic.

There's a masterpiece in there somewhere. I really hope that there's a director's cut coming.

Would you prefer it to be The Lion King, mayhaps?

I'm referring to the development of Simba when he has to leave the kingdom and discovers the joys of not-being-there, structure wise.

Yeah, I think we're all in agreement over what didn't work, I think its just a matter of some other things working better for.

Okay, here's the only thing that really jumped out at me (although I agree with all the other problems previously raised). Why the he'll does Thor suddenly care so much about the lives of the Frost Giants? I think Dorkman already brought this up, but it's a point that bears repeating. Here's what he should have done. He should have allowed Loki to destroy the Frost Giants. Imagine the thematic resonance when Thor realizes that the villain of the movie is right, and that the morally right thing to do is to help him. You guys talk all the time on Down in Front about how the villain is better if he/she actually has a decent point. But that doesn't work if the hero originally shared that point, and if the hero's arc involves him changing his views on that issue. If SERENITY had started out with Mal as an Alliance officer, we wouldn't have seen that the Operative was making a good point, because the entire point of the movie would have been dissuading us from that opinion.

And as for why this movie has Earth in the first place, that's just so that they don't have to do all of that "Thor on Earth" crap in The Avengers.