This is the age of multitasking. We tweet, text and surf the Web, all at the same time. Who actually pays attention to an entire movie without interruption anymore? These days, all you need to know about a movie is its best five minutes. Here are the best 7,200 frames of Thor.
A man with long blond hair and the body of an underwear model is found in a small American town. His customs are strange. He speaks of magic and other worlds. Our technology, even the normal business of day-to-day living, all seem foreign to him. Perhaps even primitive. In time, it's revealed that he faces an enemy intent on ruling the cosmos, an evil manipulator with a penchant for cloaks and outlandish headgear. To do battle with him, he must wield a medieval, mystical weapon of unlimited power that, once held, increases his own strength thousands of times over. Victorious, he returns to his realm leaving Earth safe at last.
Kansas City film aficionados, what movie am I describing?
Ah, too easy, isn't it? It's Masters of the Universe, the live-action He-Man movie produced by Cannon films in 1987.
Except Kenneth Branagh and Marvel Comics knew that Masters of the Universe sucked, so they decided to remake it as Thor. And the five minutes this is most apparent is when all of Thor's buddies come to find him. See, Thor's been stripped of his powers and sent to Earth to live amongst the mortals until he learns a little humility. This is engineered by his evil brother Loki, who wants to rule their alien Norse God race and battle another alien race of Jack Frosts who want to freeze all of humanity, so they can, um ... so they can be cold? And evil?
So Thor goes around fighting and beating people up and being about as good-natured as a guy who unwittingly starts a genocidal war can be. And while he's hanging out with his new Earth scientist pals, his other alien Norse god race friends decide to come find him, because they know Loki's been bullshitting everybody. They walk down the street of this small town in glistening armor with their battle axes over their shoulders and laughing and being very jovial, and the whole thing is not unlike the Vikings in the Capital One commercials except no one asks, "What's in your wallet?" And there are a lot of double takes, and it's at this exact moment that you realize this movie would be Masters of the Universe if that movie had had a budget of more than $83 or had been financed by anyone other that a consortium of Polish dentists exploiting a tax loophole. And they find Thor, and Thor's very happy to see them, and they all hug, and Natalie Portman might cry because she believes in magic again and knows that her life's research into the physics of rainbow bridges hasn't been for nothing. Then a giant metal robot starts exploding everything with vomit fire, and the alien Norse gods get their medieval weapons out and smile because they absolutely live for this shit. Especially a hot brunette Xena-type who grins like she just knows she's going to be laughing over this monster's ruined corpse and drinking blood out of its rotted-tin skull, and you can't help but feel warm inside.
Those are the best five minutes of that movie.
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Fair point. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth post of the day I can get a little loopy. Especially on a Monday. Have you seen this thing yet, by the way? If I was going to attempt to do a straight-up review, the condensed version would be that the actor who plays Thor - who I've never heard of before - carries a lot of the crazier shit that might not work as well if he wasn't so charismatic and the same goes for the guy playing Loki who pretty much steals the show. The 3D conversion doesn't add anything and isn't done terribly well, so save the cash and see it in 2D. What else? Oh, I have no idea why Natalie Portman took this gig since she doesn't have much to do and really anyone generic actress could take the part. No idea how Kenneth Braunaugh got tapped to direct this but he does great job keeping it tight even with the Avengers references he has to shoe-horn in. B+ sound reasonable? And, again, did you see this, and if so what was your take?
Well fuck, that's what I was kind of pointing out. You liked it but you brainstormed some clever way to mock it for the sake of mocking it. You could do this to virtually any fucking movie, especially any comic book movie. You never reviewed it, instead you presented a few paragraphs of a stand-up routine. I'm not trying to beat you down because I like your shit, but hone it in a little.
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