Just an ordinary spectacle

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2011)

The biggest problem about comic book adaptations is that sometimes movies are too short for them. That's the problem about Thor. I'm not familiar to the comic book, but it's clear that the story has much more than what 2 hours can offer and it's impossible to digest all at once no matter how long the movie could be. Kenneth Branagh's efforts to transform it into a Shakespearean thing is just an attempt to give to a comic book adaptation a different approach intensifying some mythological beauties and artistic layout within traditional direction techniques so Thor wouldn't be called just another regular action movie full of special effects. But in fact that's what the movie is, an ordinary action movie full of ambition as well as its main character. The movie fails to specify the audience it wants to achieve shooting everywhere and everyone as possible, giving the feeling that sometimes you are watching Henry V with lame dialogs played at a Comic Con event by amateur young actors.
The movie is more beautiful than interesting: the special effects are better than the dialogs and the visuals are better than the plot. Chris Hemsworth did what he was supposed to and Natalie Portman is beautiful and responsible to give the charisma that the movie lacks. Kenneth took a comic book character serious enough giving a huge blockbuster spectacle and limiting the layers he wanted to give instead of just defining it. Thor isn't what it seems to be and that makes it a little frustrating. Kenneth Branagh was responsible for the longest Hamlet adaptation, so of course you can expect hours of useless progress and a movie full of things that regular action movies shouldn't care.
Anyway, the movie isn't bad, but isn't better than other comic book adaptations, but at the same time you can't ignore the fact that it's entertaining most of all because gives one of the best visual effects sequences so far in 2011, the acting is fair and also is Mr. Branagh's first step into action movies.