Thor

With the rel­a­tive dis­ap­point­ment of Iron Man 2 in the rear-view mir­ror and the poten­tial mass team-up clus­ter­fuck that is The Avengers lurk­ing just over the hori­zon, Mar­vel Stu­dios brings anoth­er of their super­heroes to the big screen. This time, though, they face a dif­fer­ent chal­lenge: bring­ing a God into a world ground­ed in real­i­ty that they’ve spent count­less films building.

Thor is the tale of the tit­u­lar Norse deity (Chris Hemsworth), manip­u­lat­ed into defy­ing his father Odin (Antho­ny Hop­kins) by his con­niv­ing broth­er Loki (Tom Hid­dle­ston) and ban­ished to Earth where, with the help of an astro­physi­cist (Natal­ie Port­man) and her men­tor (Stel­lan Skars­gård), he attempts to regain his trusty weapon and redis­cov­er the nature of his gifts and the pow­er he wields.

At the heart of the sto­ry is the Shake­speare­an rela­tion­ship formed between father and broth­ers, one torn asun­der by pow­er, greed and arro­gance, played with unflinch­ing seri­ous­ness by Hid­dle­ston and Hop­kins in par­tic­u­lar, and it’s easy to see why some­one so inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Bard as Ken­neth Branagh would have been drawn to direct.

Equal­ly, the Earth-bound por­tions of the film show a deft touch with humour, and the bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship between Hemsworth as Thor and Natal­ie Port­man is sweet­ly believ­able even if her char­ac­ter is drawn rel­a­tive­ly thin.

Thor suf­fers, though, when jump­ing between the spir­i­tu­al realm and mod­ern-day New Mex­i­co, with the rel­a­tive sparse­ness of the Amer­i­can desert serv­ing to draw atten­tion to the unre­al­i­ty of the CGI land­scape of Asgard and the overblown melo­dra­ma of the por­tion of the sto­ry set there.

There is nev­er any real sense of scale, either: we know some of these impres­sive swoop­ing shots over a city gild­ed in gold are intend­ed to give an impres­sion of immense size and wealth, but instead it only feels fake and absurd, espe­cial­ly when held up against sequences set on our plan­et which actu­al­ly man­age to do a great job of bring­ing this arro­gant oaf of a supreme being into the real world with some degree of believability.

For all its Shake­speare­an under­tones of famil­ial strug­gles, this is a super­hero film with a hearty dash of fan­ta­sy and, on those terms at least, it’s a suc­cess. Branagh’s skills with direct­ing dia­logue don’t quite trans­late to action, and many of the big fights can be some­thing of dim­ly lit mess of fly­ing detri­tus and explo­sions when viewed through 3D glass­es – see the film in 2D if you can, if only to give those beau­ti­ful New Mex­i­co land­scapes the chance to look as bright as they should – but it does what it sets out to do by set­ting the stage for future instal­ments with­out leav­ing an audi­ence feel­ing like they only got to see half a sto­ry. At almost two hours long, that was nev­er going to be an issue.

Despite run­ning for a few min­utes more than it should, Thor just about man­ages to avoid sink­ing under the weight of mythos threat­en­ing to drag it down, with talk of Frost Giants and Bifrost and mag­i­cal cas­kets and ham­mers called Mjol­nir that pos­sess the abil­i­ty to help our hero fly, smite his foes, and return to his hand with the sort of accu­ra­cy even the best boomerangs couldn’t hope to match.

It would be easy to get lost in these mud­dy waters mix­ing Nor­we­gian folk­lore with pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions for the ethe­re­al plane, and the timescale of events tak­ing place on-screen is mad­den­ing to com­pre­hend if you try piec­ing it all togeth­er, but this isn’t the sort of film designed to encour­age those types of thoughts. It’s impos­si­ble to take a film seri­ous­ly when so many char­ac­ters are wear­ing horned hel­mets, and it’s like­ly that the whole sto­ry would fall apart if placed under too much scruti­ny, so don’t take it seri­ous­ly and don’t scrutinise.

Just sit back and try to enjoy this sto­ry of an arro­gant God and his ham­mer, and you prob­a­bly won’t be disappointed.