My Head Is Thor

Review: Thor:

I know, I’m late to the party again. But now that I’ve seen it, I’m glad I waited for the DVD to see this movie.

I’ll say off the bat that I am a big Norse mythology buff, and coming into the movie, I already had low expectations based on the fact that I knew it would never live up to the greatness of its source material.

Oddly enough, though, the mistakes with the mythology — such as the way they seemed to confuse Jotunheim with Niffleheim — didn’t bother me all that much. In fact, I rather liked the sci-fi explanations they gave to the Norse myths. Most of the gods’ portrayals felt right to me, if a little rough around the edges at times, and re-imagining the Rainbow Bridge as a wormhole was quite clever.

In  fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the first twenty minutes or so of the movie that were set purely in Asgard and Jotunheim.

And then the rest of the movie happened.

What follows is a spree of cliche “fish out of water” silliness that I’ve only seen in every sci-fi or fantasy crossover story ever. Even this I could have lived with, as Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor, is quite charismatic and does an adequate if not stellar job in his role — not that it was a challenging part in any way.

But the movie just keeps spiraling downward. Going in, I at least expected a fun action movie, if not a smart one, but it didn’t even deliver there. The action sequences in this film were few, short, uninspired, and generally uninteresting. Chris Hemsworth, while likable, was not enough to carry the movie as a character piece, so it needed the action to hold the viewer’s attention, but it didn’t work as an action movie, either.

I also have to take issue with Thor’s love interest, a scientist played by Natalie Portman.

Now, I like Natalie Portman. I’ve seen her in other things, and I think she’s a very talented actress. Which leads me to wonder what the Hel* happened.

*(Mythology nerds will see what I did there.)

As should be obvious by now, I was not overly impressed with Thor as a movie, and Natalie Portman’s character was easily the most irritating part of it for me. She spends the entirety of the movie doing nothing but gush over Thor like a thirteen year-old girl at a Justin Bieber concert. I just wanted to punch her.

Perhaps the most important of my objections to this movie, though, is the fact that it simply didn’t make any sense. I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, so I won’t get into specifics, but there are plot holes in the ending that I could drive a bus through.

I will say one good thing about Thor, though. I thought that Tom Hiddleston was very good as Loki. In fact, he was too good.

Despite all his sleaziness, selfishness, and pettiness, I ultimately found Loki to be the most likable character in this movie. In fact, due to some of those plot holes I mentioned above, I spent the film’s climactic fight scene hoping Loki would win. Considering Loki was supposed to be the villain, I really don’t think that’s “working as intended,” as we gamers would say.

Overall rating: 4.7/10 Thor has some very good parts, but they are few and far between.

(PS: I did not come up with the title of the review. I wish I had, but I didn’t.)

New article:

WhatMMO has posted another of my articles, Most Famous WoW Players. You can probably guess who made it to number one, but if you need a hint, he has chicken, and he will be your pal for life.

Writing: I’m Weird [Edit]: Sanctuary Cancelled

Sanctuary cancelled:

Just after posting this, I learned that Sanctuary, which I had been covering on this blog for some time and was the only speculative fiction show on TV I still watched, has been cancelled.

This news isn’t terribly surprising, but it’s still quite disappointing. The already barren TV landscape just got a bit more bleak.

I may have more thoughts on this at a later date, but for now, on with our regularly scheduled blog.

I’m weird:

I’m a regular reader of fantasy author David Farland’s “Daily Kick in the Pants” writing newsletter. In a recent installment, he suggested that all writers likely suffer from some form of schizophrenia. Thinking about it, he may have a point.

Take my life, for example. One of my closest friends is a woman named Leha.

Leha is a small woman with brown hair and eyes. She’s friendly and charming, which serves her well in her job as an antique-dealer. She’s commitment-phobic and only interested in what’s new and exciting, so she has bad luck with relationships, but she doesn’t let that bother her. She has great common sense, which she ignores with a religious devotion. She was born in Three Gates, Eastenhold, and she does not exist.

Leha is entirely a figment of my imagination. I created her and her world about four years ago now — I forget exactly.

And yet despite the fact that she does not exist, Leha is easily one of the most influential people in my life. I’ve written two novels and several pieces of short fiction about her — I’m just finishing her latest tale now. Even when I’m not writing about her, she often invades my thoughts.

My obsession with her has at times grown so intense that I thought of her whenever I saw a short woman with brown hair, and among my close friends and family, “Leha short” is now an accepted and understood measurement of height.

When I discovered how powerful the character customization in Aion was, one of the first things I did was replicate Leha exactly as I imagined her.

Writing about Leha has helped me work out many of my own issues. Because I’m a sick bastard, I respond by putting her through every kind of hell I can come up with. But that makes for a better story. She’s an avid reader, so I think she’d appreciate that.

The point is that Leha really does feel like an old friend, despite the fact that she’s nothing but words on a page.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an author, it’s weird. Really, disturbingly, frighteningly weird.

New article:

Another of my articles has gone up at WhatMMO: Best MMO Settings. I’ve always felt a good setting is crucial to any RPG, and to MMOs in particular. If you’re going to spend a lot of time in a virtual world, it had better be interesting.