Week 4: Thor

Meh. I was underwhelmed when I saw this in theaters, and I was underwhelmed a second time when I saw it just now. It's just not terribly interesting. Thor has (to me) always been a C-tier Marvel hero despite his power. He's handsome but quite lacking in personality, and everyone surrounding him here is fairly dull too, with brief sparks of life shown only by Loki and Selvig and Odin. Just a few weeks ago, we talked about how giving Stark all of the personality saved Iron Man and the MCU, and this film forgot that lesson.

There are a few decent lines (I forgot about "Son of Coul" and chuckled). The design of Asgard is spectacular, and in its own forbidding way, so is Jotenheim's, plus there's that gorgeous animation behind the end credits. And there are some great emotive close-ups of faces, particularly of Hemsworth, that feel like director Kenneth Branagh trying to force his way into the minds of these characters. But the action scenes are so poorly lit and staged as to be unclear what's happening, and CGI maelstroms swallow much of the detail. And underneath the vast fortune spent on production design and special effects, there's just not a story worth caring about.

I do want to call out one specific line that I found distasteful: Laufey taunts Thor by saying, "run back home, little princess." Why must it be gendered? Is "little boy" not sufficiently mocking? I don't know if it's a growing cultural awareness of sexist microaggressions or just my own growing crankiness as I get older, but I have so little tolerance for that kind of crap any more.

3/10