A die-hard fan of Marvel's Thor comics reflects on the movie adaptation
Marvel's The Mighty Thor, written by Walter Simonson
So it seems my people have conquered yours, and now we must learn to live together. You are naturally sceptical: you think that by “live together” I mean “live as masters and slaves”. I must tell you that my people have their own fears. We fear the dilution of our blood as we mingle with you, the erosion of our old ways under your influence, the creeping failure that calls itself success. Geeks, we mutter to our pillows in the small hours, were never meant to rule the world.
Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to get my head around the existence of a Thor movie. By “movie” I mean, of course, “massively well promoted special effects blockbuster”, and by “Thor” I mean the very specific version of the Norse god known as Marvel’s “The Mighty Thor“. This latter distinction is going to take some unpacking. I can’t quite believe the silver screen is ready for the onslaught of my beloved, ridiculous Thor comics.
Okay. 1962. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, in the early stages of inventing the Marvel superhero pantheon, come up with the notion of raiding a real pantheon for material. Their anthology comic Journey Into Mystery introduces a new character: “The Mighty Thor! The most exciting superhero of all time!!” Thor is beardless, with long golden proto-hippy hair, a winged Viking helmet, and a hammer. He wears superhero tights and a red cape. He can fly. (He does this by throwing the hammer and neglecting to let go). He hangs out with other superheroes. He has a secret identity and an arch-enemy and a girl friend who needs rescuing a lot. He’s also the Norse god of thunder. He proves popular enough that Journey Into Mystery eventually changes its name to The Mighty Thor.
Like a lot of things about the Sixties, you had to be there, I expect. Those early Thor comics do nothing for me. I got hooked in the Eighties, when Walt Simonson took over writing and drawing. This was the decade when Frank Miller, of 300 and Dark Knight fame, famously described the history of comics as “Fifty years of crap. And people talk as if we had a heritage behind us”. But Simonson’s Thor demonstrates what you can grow on a rotted-down 50-year mulch of pulp heroism. You could tell that he knew and loved the Norse myths, and also loved the texture of a long-running comics title. All those mad interwoven storylines, the triumphs over reliably self-renewing evil, the rescuings of Reality Itself from Powers Undreamed Of. The exclamation marks. So. Thor is a superhero! In tights! Who says “Thou miscreants!” a lot! – because he’s also the god of thunder, and Norse gods speak bad Elizabethan English. Why not? Let’s have some fun.
Simonson made his Thor a bit more mythological, and at the same time delved down into all those superheroic back-issues for the Good Crazy Stuff. He gave us frost giants and the Midgard serpent, a curse from Hela the goddess of death, a knock-down universe-threatening battle with the fire demon Surtur of Muspelheim; and he gave us a time travelling Judge Dredd lookalike, an alien superhero called Beta Ray Bill, and the terrible Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man, a long-running Thor villain with the power to take on the properties of anything he touched. Including Thor’s hammer, gasp! My favourite episode was the fight to free the peace-loving frogs of
The Frog of Thunder
Central Park from the threat of Ratso the, um, rat. Thor had been turned into a frog by his evil brother Loki, but was that going to stop him doing good? (Great end of issue promotional tag-line: “Next issue, Thor croaks!”) He saved the frogs, winning the love of the beautiful frog queen in the process (“Lady Queen, you do me a great honour, but my place is not here”) and was about to be killed in revenge by Ratso, when he remembered the enchantment Odin the All-Father had placed on his hammer. Anyone who was worthy could pick it up and be granted the powers of Thor. With the rats closing in, he exerted all his puny frog-strength, levered the hammer a fraction of an inch off the ground… and was transformed into a giant, hammer-wielding Frog of Thunder. Off he soared into the empyrean to foil his brother’s nefarious plans. Loki might still have won the day, but he couldn’t stop laughing long enough to put up much of a fight. Neither could I.
Superheroes are basically absurd, which is why I get slightly nervous whenever I have to front up and admit that I love them. You see it in things like Christian Bale’s Batman voice in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Batman just doesn’t work when real-world plausibility rules are let through the door; even something as basic as the fact that he and Bruce Wayne both know how to talk becomes an instant problem. “I know! Batman can speak in a grumpy gruff monotone! It’ll be unrecognisable and it’ll sound really dramatic!”
No, it’ll sound really demented; but if you’re going to make a serious Batman movie, what are your choices? This is why the idea of a Thor movie directed by Kenneth Branagh got me excited. The character is the very essence of hard-boiled superheroic ludicrosity, a noun I believe I may just have invented, because standard nouns are not crazy enough to do the job. There’s no way to put him on screen that isn’t going to look mad. The idea of giving him to a director mostly known for his Shakespeare films is bats-in-the-belfry insane. Perfect.
Except. That thing about geeks not being meant to rule the world. Can something so deeply genre-specific as the Marvel version of Thor really survive the box-ticking, appeal-to-all-demographics-please logic of a tentpole movie? On the one hand, the studio wants a hit, and picking Branagh to direct does suggest they’re following the “This is too dumb to work unless we go outside the box” line of thinking that gave them the original Iron Man. On the other hand – Iron Man 2.
The good news is that Thor is much, much better than it could have been: not on a par with Iron Man, but far more fun than its sequel. The bad news is that the inspired craziness I was hoping for from Branagh isn’t really there. He doesn’t even get to bring a Shakespearean’s ear to the actors’ “thou miscreant!” bits; the language has been sensibly modernised. He does a workman-like job of putting the film together, makes a few obvious blunders but nothing crippling, move along folks, nothing to see.
Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth
No, far too strong: this is not the film I was hanging out for, but its virtues easily outweigh its defects. Chris Hemsworth makes a dandy Thor; he’s not just a set of biceps. Natalie Portman is great as Jane Foster, the no-really-she’s-a-scientist love interest; Tom Hiddleston is wonderfully sly as Loki; Anthony Hopkins, whose performances always seem to rise to the level of the film he finds himself in and not one micron higher, delivers a perfectly passable Odin. Even Clark Gregg, whose effortful comic flounderings did so much damage to Iron Man 2, is fine here, playing it more or less straight as the secret agent who finds Thor’s lost hammer and Must Learn More. There are some fairly pointless bit players wandering loose in roles that will make sense only to people who know the comics, but the only real disappointment on the acting front is The Wire‘s charismatic Idris Elba, who has to play Heimdall with orange glowing eyes and a digitally reverberant voice. He sounds like a severely annoyed computer.
Heimdall appears only in the Asgard scenes, which make up perhaps a third of the film, and his relegation from character to special effect is symptomatic of the way the mythological backstory is handled. It’s less mythology here than Erik Von Daniken-level science fiction, with Thor the heir of an immortal high tech dynasty on a higher plane of reality. Who, after all, would take actual divinities seriously in this day and age? Plausibility being such a key issue for a superhero movie. So we get Asgard as a high tech palace in the sky; it looks like an unusually well resourced shopping mall. Cue some standard-issue scene-setting. Thor picks a fight he shouldn’t pick, starts a war, enrages Dad, and gets exiled to Earth, minus his hammer and minus his powers. Yay Thor. The film instantly comes to life.
Hemsworth, sporting a ruling class English accent in the middle of the New Mexican flatlands, does the stranger in a strange land thing with a winning mix of broad comedy and heroic fire. The script feeds him only middling-funny lines, yet he makes them get up and dance. Sample: striding into a small town pet shop, he makes a ringing pronouncement. “I need a horse!” He’s so certain one will be instantly forthcoming that the shopkeeper’s bewilderment becomes hilarious. “We don’t have horses. Only dogs, cats, birds …” “Then bring me one of those big enough to ride!” This exchange should not have had me rolling in the aisles, but in the delivery it becomes a real Frog of Thunder moment.
This is not the whole story of why I ended up riding happily along with this film, which on any cold-eyed assessment would be a box office poodle, not a war horse, but it’s the most important factor. Hemsworth, as soon as he’s let loose on Earth, doesn’t let your eyes go cold, and his chemistry with Portman is real, albeit more pleasant/winsome than set-the-world-on-fire. The other thing to write home about is the 3D. You’re possibly sick to death of those two characters, which have been thrashed to death in the wake of Avatar, but listen up: nearly all the live-action 3D films we were offered last year were 3D digital conversions, which are to the real thing as instant coffee is to espresso.
Thor
This is the first real live-action 3D I’ve seen since Avatar except for Tron: Legacy, which is to say it’s the first worth talking about. [Update: No, it turns out it's another conversion. Which is 1) embarrassing, because I didn't notice, and 2) interesting, because I didn't notice. I'm rating this the best conversion to date. Curious to know what others think on this point.] Branagh does not have a very good handle on the technology – he breaks his fight scenes up into lots of little fast-moving fragments, a la Michael Bay, which gives the depth illusion no time to establish itself. But even so, he manages some moments of quite unexpected beauty. Three people sharing a quiet moment, seated on the edge of a roof, viewed from below, nothing but sky behind them: not the image you’d anticipate being haunted by in the wake of a special effects action bonanza. Here and in a number of other low-key long shots, the movie does enough to convince me we’ve only seen hints of 3D’s real potential so far.
It still wrong-foots me, and I realise this is my failure to adjust to something that’s been a reality for at least a decade now, to find myself discussing major films based on comics and fantasy novels. You’d think I’d be in heaven. The position is roughly analogous to a music snob whose favourite indie band has become a mainstream sensation: underneath the “what are you people doing liking my music” possessiveness, there lurks the legitimate concern that something unique has been blanded out for the sake of a few extra hundred million dollars. (If it were for the sake of a few hundred thousand extra dollars, would we mind more, or less? Best not to ask.) I should remind myself of Miller’s 50 years of crap. You could make a very bad film indeed and claim you’d done justice to a good percentage of Marvel’s source material. Thor, while it’s not a movie I can go crazy over, is an honest blockbuster. Its mind is on showing you a good time, not on stringing you along in hopes you’ll pay to see the sequel, and it delivers.
THOR, directed by Kenneth Branagh, playing now.