The review
Kenneth Branagh's Thor is where the road to Doomsday takes its first trip off Earth, and the costume, makeup and effects teams showed up for it. Asgard glows, Jotunheim freezes, and every featured realm has its own mood down to the stitching; that work is a big part of why I enjoyed it. Where Waifu and I part ways is one character's arc. We'll get there.
The first fight is the best one in the movie. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) drags his friends to Jotunheim to make the Frost Giants answer for crashing his coronation, and Waifu, who had little patience for this brat version of him, asked the fair question: what are they trying to achieve? They go in swinging, one of them gets hurt, everybody retreats. My answer: it's a cosmic-level tavern brawl, and I enjoyed every second of it.
That said, I do wonder: why are the friends even there? Thor handles everyone single-handed, so Sif (Jaimie Alexander) and the Warriors Three are along to look worried and to come fetch him later. Waifu didn't remember their names. S.H.I.E.L.D. said it best tho: they're Xena, Jackie Chan and Robin Hood. Heimdall (Idris Elba) is a side character too, and he's the one you remember: the voice, the delivery, that costume. I'm an Idris Elba fan, so I can be biased, but in this instance I know I'm right.
Then Thor gets grounded, and this is the part Waifu and I talked about longest. Odin (Anthony Hopkins, always good, even when the script sends him to bed for most of the movie) strips Thor of the hammer and drops him in New Mexico, and the prince who wanted a war learns humility in roughly a day.
I agree it's sudden. On the other hand, if your whole identity is the power and the authority that came with it, and one afternoon it's all gone, you start asking the right questions, like Selvig tells him over a beer. The introspection is fast, but the material was there: Odin raised him with all that wisdom and he never listened, because he was a brat. So it still worked for me. What we both wanted was a reason bigger than a bruised ego. Mine: tell us the Nine Realms need a balance, that wiping out one race breaks the others, and his sudden mercy makes sense. Hers: give him and Jane one real thing to go through together, so she's the reason and not just the scenery. Either would have done it. Part of why the flip looks so sharp is the starting point: on a rewatch, old Thor is so aggressive, ignorant and short-tempered that the humble one might as well be his stunt double.
Earth is where the movie is still fun. Jane (Natalie Portman), Darcy (Kat Dennings) and Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) have real chemistry, the taser gag is funny, and watching Thor behave like a medieval Asgardian in a New Mexico town (smashing a mug for another coffee, asking a pet store for a horse) is what entertained me most back in 2011. It never got old. Coulson (Clark Gregg) is just doing his job and doing it well. Thor renames him "son of Coul", which I'll be using for the next 34 movies. I'd forgotten that Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) gets his first glimpse here, up a crane with a bow. Waifu called it a nice touch; I got giddy and assailed her with elbow pokes for the three minutes he was on screen.
The rainy night at the S.H.I.E.L.D. site, Thor punching his way through agents to a hammer that won't come, is a solid scene. The Destroyer is not. The metal golem was lustrous but lackluster to me in 2011 and nothing has changed. It did give us one argument. Waifu: Thor drops a tornado on it and the houses next door stay standing, so what about the humans? Me: that's the superpower. In every power fantasy ever, the guy who can't control his power does the most collateral damage; a tornado that only takes out the target is mastery. She called it a bit of a stretch. I call it the first time in the movie Thor aims before he swings.
Loki is the winner of the movie, and the character Waifu and I had the most good things to say about. Tom Hiddleston plays a conflicted, confused boy with a schemer's brain: a god of mischief who wants approval so badly that almost everything he does is a reaction, and he delivers that neediness very, very well. A villain who plots ahead and still doesn't know who he is, emotionally all over the place: that arc works, at least for the two of us. Waifu's version is shorter: his acting is superb, better than anyone else on screen, and he makes the character a 10 out of 10. Kudos to him.
How he gets there is the best story in the movie, so here's the fold. It starts as a prank. All he wants is to spoil Thor's big day, so he lets the enemy into the vault without much thought for the guards protecting it. Deep down I don't think he wants anyone hurt, per se; he just doesn't see the chain of events coming, so he rolls with it and turns every new mess to his own advantage. Then he finds out he's a Frost Giant himself, Laufey's son, taken in by Odin as a baby. Killing his birth father I can live with. Trying to wipe out all of Jotunheim to prove a point is the extreme part, and it still makes sense: the home that threw him away gets a tantrum from a kid holding the keys to a bigger one. You think you can cast me aside? Well, scum you too.
Full disclosure: Waifu and I are fans of Loki, his own series included, so maybe we're biased. Get over it.
Chris Hemsworth sells it, and you can see his range. Waifu puts it fairly: it's an early role, he gets better with every movie after this one, and standing next to Hiddleston, the gap shows. Still, he's good enough for the story. Her other note was about the body. I might've gotten lucky that night after the shirtless scene. Thanks, Chris.
Fair. It's similar for me: in my head this was an 8, and now it's a 7. I enjoyed it the second time anyway, because the shiny things were the point for me: the realms, the armor, the gold, the mood of Asgard and Jotunheim. And both of us might keep this on the rewatch list, just for Loki.
Thor: the realms dressed to the nines, the brother dressed to kill.
