Thor - what worked and what didn't

Rating: 6/10 (18 February 2020)

+ Dutch angles.
+ Asgard, although not seen much, is well realised.
+ Good to see the trickster Loki not as a grinning, wailing nogooder but as a quiet, manipulative, lost little brother.
+ Cool, trippy sci-fi iconography not seen again until Guardians of the Galaxy.
+ Real life sets are quite well designed to be memorable and interesting and big and layered with lots of background activity.
+ Pre-sitcom Kat Dennings
+ Thor's hammer festival with everybody trying to lift it is kinda apt and funny.
+ Thor's fish out of water story is actually still quite funny. He's a sort of loveable dumb dumb.
+ Tom Hiddleston starts a tragic character arc as a distressed and around royal adoptee.
+ Thor is funny. Ragnarok made it good, but this set it up pretty well.
+ Natalie Portman is also funny and it's good to see her.
+ Cheeky Hawkeye cameo that I forgot about. Useless but I still grinned.
+ I sort of like that there's not some cave-dwelling, stick-wielding bad guy allegory for Osama Bin Laden and that Thor is basically the bad guy even if that makes the third act a little lame and stakeless.
+ "Son of Coul".

Dutch angles.
Rene Russo doesn't have much to do.
Cheesy Warriors Three crassly shoehorned in.
Action is clunky and messy and not pleasurable.
Time jumps and crisscrossing stories are badly paced and screw with a lot of potentially meaningful moments.
Effects are very dated.
CGI backgrounds are depthless and unconvincing stages and wastelands.
Chris Hemsworth's accent is a little off.
Loki's plan is a little unclear here and there hard to follow.
Odinsleep is an incredibly handy plot device/deus ex machina.

Post-credits sequence review: 4/5. An actual coda scene again. Shows the trickster and the link set up for Selvig to lead in to the start of the Avengers. Makes little actual sense but in retrospect links the movies nicely.
Stan Lee as: Old Man that drives truck trying to pull Thor's hammer out. "did it work?" 1/5: Surprising but a bit generic. Basically a stand-in. Not integrated well or a reason for it to be Lee.