Well, now I've seen it

Rating: 5/10 (22 May 2011)

Saw it in 3D, in fact.
It's all about a comic book superhero who's also a Norse god with Norse god friends and relatives. They live Norse god lives in a quadrant of outer space called Asgard and not everybody is who he thinks he is and people can fall asleep at the drop of a helmet and their enemies live in a deep freeze and if you displease Dad you can get banished to Earth without a hammer. The parts of the movie that take place in Asgard are excruciatingly, watch-checkingly boring, and the parts that take place on Earth are bearable at least, and occasionally amusing.
Maybe it's just me; I'm not a comic book aficionado -- haven't been since adolescence about a half-century ago -- so I suppose much of this movie's charm must inevitably be lost on me. But I'm not a total snob about these things -- I did enjoy IRON MAN (cleverly referenced in this film) and I liked the entire middle of BATMAN BEGINS. I just think there was less to like here. Much less.
And I can't quit without mentioning that once again I'm convinced 3D is a worthless gimmick that not only adds nothing of value to the experience of viewing movies like this (and AVATAR and UP and 15 minutes of HARRY POTTER and even IMAX in outer space), but it detracts from my viewing pleasure. Why do so many people seem not to care that watching a movie through sunglasses filters out the color? All scenes in THOR were mostly brown and uniformly dark and ugly. I tried watching without the glasses for a while, and as long as the focus of the scene was on the middle distance, everything looked almost good -- almost acceptable, in fact. But anything close or far was blurry, so eventually I gave up and got with the ugly dark brown program. Three-D is a stupid idea, worthless and stupid and it needs to have a wooden stake driven through its wretched heart so it can slither back to the grave where we buried it in the '50s.