thor

I was very pleasantly surprised by Thor.

I can't say I was ever a fan of him in comic book form.  Norse mythology is quite interesting, but the particular interpretation used in the comic books never particularly interested me.

I also wasn't a particular fan of his costume and the use of a sort of formal, upper class English with a bit of middle-ages English thrown in for good measure always struck me as a bit weird.  He's a Norse god, not a Shakespearean character.

I also always found it a bit daft that he ever had any problems at all - I mean, he's a God, right?  Okay a lot of the adventures revolved around Loki and he's from a polytheistic faith so perhaps isn't all-powerful (though I think his dad, Odin, was supposed to be) but still - dude's a God, and there's that thing in fiction where if anything is possible, nothing is interesting.

There's also the thing where all faiths seem to exist and be correct in the Marvel Universe, which again, always struck me as a bit weird.

Anyway, the film generally worked quite well.  If I was to criticise one element of it, that would be that Asgard seemed a bit weird.  I mean, it was quite comic-booky, but perhaps a bit too much?  It just felt very artificial, even factoring the point that it's fictional, if you see what I mean.

The plot was pretty much what I basically understood the origin of Thor to be - being headstrong and ending up getting kicked out of Asgard and then redeeming himself.  One thing I did find interesting was Loki - they did quite a good job of portraying him as one of the good guys up to a point where he turned.

Knowing the character in the comics where he's always the trickster and causing mischief, it was quite difficult to set that aside, but it was done convincingly here.

What also worked very well were the humanising / humbling of Thor himself.  You genuinely felt he had a character ark, which could have been quite difficult to achieve, given he starts of as a heroically good God, but it was a bit more subtle than that (if, ultimately, obvious in story terms).

The film also had lots of funny stuff in it and looked great.  In particular the costumes were well done to preserve the basic design points, but didn't look daft.  I think it was a particularly wise choice to ditch Thor's helmet for the majority of the film, for example.

So yeah, one of the better Marvel adaptations, I think.  We'll just have to see if the second one suffers for not having Kenneth Branagh at the helm.