The Unblinking Eye

I went to see Thor on Saturday afternoon.

It's a good movie. I thought Thor was a funny and friendly character and I liked that like Tony Stark in Iron Man, he has some notable character flaws to overcome. Though this is a simplified version of the job done by Robert Downey Jr. Indeed, I think Thor's relationship with Natalie Portman's character was in a similar vein. They had chemistry, but matters were a little more vanilla in Thor than they were in Iron Man.

Where director Kenneth Branagh really showed his Shakespearean background was in the relationship of the Aasgardian Royal family. Thor, Odin, and Loki made for the most interesting part of the movie. Loki was probably the most tragic and intriguing villain of these superhero movies, (Except perhaps for Magneto from X-Men) and the royal machinations of these alien god-people made this superhero movie distinct from the other superhero movies. Thor's fish out-of-water style exile to Earth may make it seem like a familiar story on the surface, but even that was handled differently. This wasn't like the Masters of the Universe or Beastmaster 2 where a superhero spends his time wasting ours by being amazed by internal combustion or a Big Mac.

I didn't really think that the whole Norse gods as 'aliens' in space would fly but I guess it worked out alright. It just goes to show that you can use any crazy background you want for movie just so long as there's simplicity and internal logic.



The movie was funny, and had good action, and I really liked the plot. But anything on the ice planet was kinda blurry looking, (a consequence of 3-d filming I guess even though I didn't see it in 3-d) and for some reason it seemed a little less memorable. Maybe I've just seen so many superhero movies at this point, it doesn't even matter if the movies are different.


Earlier in the week, I seemed to have a twitch under my right eye. I read online that this can result from stress or lack of sleep rather than anything serious, (I suspect I know what brought it on) so I made arrangements to get some rest by buying a ticket to a baseball game, though my twitch had gone away by the weekend.