Unsurprisingly, Chris Likes The Movie About Thor Smashing Things With a Hammer

 

 

This weekend, just like a heck of a lot of people, I saw the Thor movie, and today I’ve got a review of it up at CA!

It goes without saying that there are spoilers, but in case you want a quicker, less revealing review: I liked it a lot. I really liked that they made Thor’s cape stand up on his shoulders like it does in the comics, which was really fun. 3D was worthless and you shouldn’t bother. Very, very nice to see a cameo by Walter Simonson, as that movie really owes as much or more to his work than it does to Stan Lee’s.

For the rest, go read the review!

9 thoughts on “Unsurprisingly, Chris Likes The Movie About Thor Smashing Things With a Hammer

  1. “(The) movie really owes as much or more to (Simonson’s) work than it does to Stan Lee’s” is all the review I needed.

  2. I really like this review. Particularly how you gave the film points for managing the balancing of the two worlds.

    One thing that I found really interesting is Kat Dennings’ character “Darcy.” I loved that Natalie Portman’s “Jane” had somebody to interact with as a peer and I felt that in some ways, Darcy was externalizing Jane’s (and the audience’s) implied inner thoughts, concerns and reservations.

  3. Two quick questions, if I may:

    1) Who did Walt Simonson play? I don’t really know my comic creators well enough to recognise him.

    2) How much better would the film have been had BRIAN BLESSED been cast as Volstagg?

  4. I remember JMS and Stan Lee in the film, but don’t recall seeing Walt. JMS played the guy who first found the hammer and tried to pick it up. Made sense that he was in the film since he is responsible for the current revival of Thor and co-wrote the movie script.

    Audience reaction is always so awesome when Stan Lee shows up in these films. When he was revealed on screen as the driver of the truck trying to yank Mjolnir loose with the chain, the theater I was in cheered loudly. We all owe that guy a lot of happy times.

  5. I was unsure whether I liked the movie or not after seeing it Friday night. So I went back for the matinee on Tuesday and it turns out that yes, I did enjoy it.

  6. I caught Walt, but missed Ralph Macchio and Louise Simonson (which I’m sad about because she’s also one of my favorite writers from my childhood – but I will look for her when I see the movie again).

  7. Great movie, good review, but I disagree on the whole “Loki is evil” thing. I came to this movie knowing not a great deal of the backstory in the comics (I was never a Thor reader), but Loki came across as more tragically semi–misguided than evil. I say “semi-” because a lot of his actions, especially initially, were motivated by his belief that Thor was an arrogant idiot who shouldn’t be king, and, hey, he was right. Later, he confronted Odin and I was fully expecting him to make the hit, but instead Odin collapsed of his own accord and Loki even called for help. Even his desire to destroy Jotundheim seemed to be motivated by a desire to protect Asgard and prove he could be a capable ruler. This is where Branagh’s involvement really pays off, because this version of Loki is a very Shakespearean character.

    There’s one thing about the whole destroying Jotundheim segment that sort of nags at me, though. It looked pretty clear to me that as Jotundheim was being destroyed that bad things were also happening on Earth and Asgard (and, by implication, the rest of the 9 Realms), but they never explicitly said anything about it. And that seemed odd to me because they appeared to set up something to explain it when Thor explained the World Tree to Jane; I fully expected someone (probably Odin) to explain that the interconnectedness of the 9 Realms through the World Tree meant that if one fell they all would. Was it a matter that it would have just been too hard to shoehorn the exposition in, or did they never even think that way and I’m just reading too much into this?