Thor and Natalie Portman's downfall

Rating: 3/10 (31 July 2011)

Perhaps the best way to start this review is with an observation about a very talented actor's career. Natalie Portman demonstrated with her spellbinding performance as Nina in "Black Swan" that she can act really well, but then she went on to act in three terrible films, "No Strings Attached," "Your Highness" and now "Thor." In "Thor," Portman is simply miscast. She is not a warm actor meant to play in romantic films(that is more Amy Adams' vocation), but instead a cold and efficient actor who is more suited to roles where she is expected to play a villain or someone socially awkward (if not anti-social) or a gifted prodigy with inner demons. Yet director Kenneth Branaugh and the producers put her in this film where she is expected to play a romantic lead -- something that she never did very well throughout her two-decades long career. As a result, every romantic scene with Portman looks forced from the flirtation to the laughing to the kissing scene. She does all these scenes with professional efficiency, but that unfortunately is the problem. There is nothing professional or efficient about love. Love is this irrational, emotionally charged and fantastic thing. If anyone experiences love the same way Natalie Portman's Jane Foster character did, then perhaps they should reevaluate their relationship and find someone else.
But that is not the only problem with "Thor." This movie fails at the screenplay stage. There are so many wall-to-wall special effects and blasting soundtracks (Hollywood frequently confuses loudness with good music) that there's no room for a plot or for character development. Moreover what little story line there is was taken out of dozens of movies which exhausted these plot gimmicks. Chris Hemsworth plays the "Thor" character in the same spirit as Dustin Claire played Gannicus in the second season of Spartacus, except that Claire's character evolved beyond the caricature of the muscular cool guy at the gym who is loved by all women. Hemsworth's Thor, by contrast, has not even lived up to the caricature, because the plot allows for no character development. Or take how Jane Foster (Portman) and Darcy (Kat Dennings) react to the appearance of the muscular Thor. Those scenes of women enamoured with Thor's manliness are essentially a page taken out of a less than memorable scene in Cecil B. Demille's "The Ten Commandments," when muscular Moses (Charleton Heston) crosses the desert and happens upon a small farm with an elderly farmer and his daughters. The daughters are thrilled because they see a muscular, heroic man. In other words, "Thor" is really the product of wall to wall special effects and recycled story lines. The immediate impression I got was that the producers decided to go with the first draft of the screenplay rather than telling their writers to go back to the drawing board and come up with something better. The result is mind numbing entertainment.
As a final comment, the villains in this picture are not compelling. The frosty giants do not do anything except turn other people into frost or get knocked down in record numbers. This, of course, is boring because we have known for more than ten years that computers can create fake armies battling each other. Moreover this film does not have the guts, the imagination and the intelligence to show how brutal and dehumanizing violence and war really are (even though there are two battles on screen). Instead the violence appears to come out of several mindless video games. Something mildly interesting was done with the villain Loki, who may not have seemed as bad as the other villains, but even then Loki's character was so limited and oversimplified that he just wasn't interesting. I was stunned to see IMDb.com awarding this terrible film 7.4/10. It goes to show how easy it is convince the viewing public that they're not watching junk. I think 3/10 is more suitable.