Fun, but a bit silly

Rating: 7/10 (20 May 2011)

I had my doubts when it seemed Marvel studios was going to follow up its successful and critically acclaimed Iron Man with the rest of the cast of the Avengers all getting their own movie culminating ultimately in the Avengers movie which will, of course, totally fail to live up to the buildup. Don't get me wrong, I want it to be a great movie, but I'm afraid I've been deluded and jaded by things like the 1979 Captain America, the two abysmal Fantastic Four movies, and a depressingly long list of incredibly bad movies done solely for the purposes of grabbing the rights to Marvel characters.
So, yes, I'm not expecting Shakespeare here, and it's a good thing, too.
Thor's not bad. Grading Marvel on a scale it easily falls closer to the 'good' spectrum, i.e. Iron Man, and a lot farther form the 'bad' spectrum, say, Spider Man 3. Here's the thing, Marvel has finally gotten the idea that 1. You can make money on a good movie just as well as you can on a bad, and 2. Making a good movie can actually make you MORE money. Just look at the difference between X-Men and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. You'd think they existed in completely different universes by how vast the gulf of stupid is between the competently told X-Men and... the other one. And box office returns reflect this.
I'm ranting. Fine. To the point: Thor is a competently told story of the Thunder God falling to Earth only to rise again through self-sacrifice and a shoehorned in romance with a clearly pregnant and hiding it Natalie Portman. It's fun. But more importantly, it is visually stunning. I don't even just mean in 3D, I mean entirely. The digital effects are (mostly) perfectly believable. The visuals of Asgard are breathtaking.
The fight scenes are... well, they're okay. Honestly, I'd rather have had a more clearly visible fight choreography, but I understand that when you're story is about Thor, God of Thunder, it's going to be very CG heavy.
SHIELD shows up an awful lot in this one, as the main driving force of the plot on Earth, though I'm still a little fuzzy on how exactly SHIELD has any idea that a weapon of the Gods has fallen to Earth suddenly, much less how they can get there so quickly to retrieve it.
The somewhat mangled love story is... well, it's a mangled love story because Hollywood doesn't understand how to make a movie that appeals to both sexes without cramming in a pointless romance. Can't we just see Thor hurling lightning at monsters? Does it have to be ruined by Natalie 'I'm not preggo, I just like to wear a big jacket in the desert' Portman staring at the hunky English Norseman with moony eyes? Okay, I unfairly picked on Nat there. Mea Culpa.
And speaking of inexplicably English Norsemen, what the living balls was Cary Elwes doing in this movie? Besides sporting a fake goatee and dancing around with a rapier? And the Asian Norseman? And the black Norseman? Not that I have a problem with diversity, and they all played their parts well. Maybe I just don't know the Thor mythos that well.
I nitpick, but ultimately, Thor is a fairly fun ride. It's a summer CG action movie that could have been better but in the end isn't really that bad at all. I recommend seeing it because we all know the new Pirates movie is going to be balls.