Sam Strange Remembers: THOR
As the architect of the Marvel movie universe, it falls onto my head to make movies of comic book characters I don't always understand. Luckily, I understood the shit out of Thor. I'm what you might call an auTHORity. He's a big blonde lunkhead with delusions of Shakespearean grandeur. I'm even best friends with his real life Earth avatar:
The first thing everyone needs to know about Thor is that his best friend is a hammer. It's a mythic hammer so it has a name: Mahjongnir. Buff and bearded as Thor is, he actually derives most of his powers from this hammer, so if you'd like to see it as a metaphor for his penis, that would just thrill me.
Mohjongnir is pretty awesome. If Thor throws it but holds on, he can fly. If he spins it really fast, he can make a tornado. If he spins it really fast over water, he can make a hurricane. If he spins it really fast into the ground, he can make an earthquake. If he spins it really fast next to an airplane, he can produce a gremlin that scares John Lithgow.
But that's not all! Thor can hit pretty much anything with Mahjongnir. Sure he can hit faces, but Majhonghir can also hit lazer blasts and fire, and can even bat away really stupid ideas Thor gets while drinking. Plus, if Thor throws Mahjongnir, it will always return like an insecure boomerang. Even Thor's outfit is made out of Majhongnir. Without his hammer, he has to wear normal clothes and his beard is noticeably more orange.
Honestly, the only thing Mahjongnir can't do is hit a nail. It's just so big and powerful that it squashes hands like a pancake. Still, if Thor were ever somehow use Mahjongnir to build a house, it'd probably end up looking like the Starship Enterprise.
Thor lives in a magical kingdom known as Isengard where everything is made of floating metal, and all the people act like it's the Middle Ages. Isengard is run by an old and weary king, Odin (played by the top left corner of Anthony Hopkins' face). Poor Odin wants to hand his Wicked Scepter off and go to King Sleep after many centuries of Odin Rule, but his two sons are both disappointments.
The obvious choice for succession is Thor. But Thor is kind of a jock asshole. When he's not flying off the handle to go kill something with his awesome hammer, he's doing keg stands and impregnating Royal Cheerleaders. Thor's body is powerful and in keeping with Odin's Aryan ideals, but his mind floats on a sea of beer and pussy and pictures of himself with his collar popped.
But Odin's other choice, Loki, is even worse. For one, Loki has dark hair and pathetic little weasel eyeballs. Odin realizes how a lifetime of coming in second to Thor has twisted Loki's heart into a cesspool of insecure hatred. Also, Loki is a master of the sort of deceitful tricks people tend to find irritating regardless of their usefulness. He can make multiples of himself, for instance. He can also... actually he can only make multiples of himself. He's really good at chess, though.
But more than that, Loki is a Frost Giant. Frost Giants are big icicle people the Isengards fought back when Thor and Loki were babies. When the war ended, Odin stole one of the ice babies to raise as his own so Thor would have someone to beat up and give wedgies to. Loki was never meant to be anything more than a playmate until Thor was old enough to pick up Mahjongnir.
So clearly, Thor is Odin's only real choice. But not this Thor. The job will require a more mature Thor. Odin's answer is to lock Thor and Loki into a room where they must play chess until Thor becomes smart enough to win.
Of course, Thor sees this as a punishment instead of an opportunity to grow, so he defies his father's orders and makes Loki help him escape the chess room. When Odin finds out, he gets really angry. Before he knows it, Thor is stripped of Mohjongnir and exiled to Earth.
On Earth, Thor begins his humbling process in earnest. In his first twenty four hours, Thor gets hit by a car, electrocuted, ass-poked with a needle full of NyQuil, and hit by a car again. They also don't have his favorite eyeliner, and none of the dogs are big enough to ride.
But he learns to enjoy people more. He becomes friends with a super hot scientist named Jane, her aging Swedish mentor, also named Jane, and a perky quirky intern named Blossom. The three teach Thor about coffee and pancakes and pop tarts and bacon. This is all very new and exciting for Thor because on Isengard all the have to eat is lamb on a split, and all they have to drink is boiling lamb's blood. He's also quite fond of having sex with all three of them.
After hanging out for a while, Thor hears that his hammer landed not too far away, so he goes to pick it up. Government agents from a group called SHEILD have sectioned off the hammer so Thor has to break in and fight his way to Mahjongnir. This proves difficult because he's just a guy now, and he's never had to fight anyone alone. Luckily, Thor's heart still contains the power of INDOMITABLE SPIRIT, and his sheer ignorance keeps him from losing.
One SHEILD guy takes a crane high above the action and stands poised to take Thor down with a bow and arrow. His name is Hawkeye. He doesn't actually do anything with this bow and arrow. I just wanted to throw a fan service bone to all those M*A*S*H fans still alive out there.
SHEILD gets all uptight, but there's no worry. Thor can't pick up his own hammer because he's not humbled enough yet. This makes Thor cry. Finally he loses all hope and lets SHEILD arrest him for being strong, though they kind of don't want to anymore now that's he's bawling so much.
While waiting to hear his charges, Loki visits Thor to tell him that Odin died and Lady McOdin blames Thor, so there's really no hope of Thor ever coming home. Thor cries again, and Loki has to make a straight-faced double of himself just so Thor won't see him laughing his ass off.
Since Thor has nothing to live for anymore, he decides to marry Jane and get fat off Earth food. Just then, however, his warrior buddies from Isengard come to rescue him from SHEILD's clutches. All told, there's Xena, Jacky Chan, Robin Hood and Hagrid, all of them loyal to Thor and his hammer. It turns out they can't bring Thor back to Isengard. But they do reveal that his father is fine and his mother misses him very much. Twenty minutes later, Thor finally realizes that their news means Loki lied to him. Perhaps his brother, sometimes referred to as "The God of Mischief," may be up to something.
Loki sees this all the way from Isengard and sends a fire-breathing robot to kill everyone. Robin Hood and Jacky Chan throw Hagrid at the robot's face, but the robot incinerates him. Xena stabs the robot in the face, but it turns its whole body around so its stabbed face becomes the back of its head instead. As Xena tries to figure out what that last sentence even meant, the robot burns her face off. After that, he steps on Robin Hood's face and Jackie Chan's face runs away. (Sentence sponsored by Facebook.)
Alone, and with no hope of battling the robot without Mahjongnir, Thor simply gives up and stares the robot down, hoping for a quick death. Far away, Mahjongnir misunderstands this quasi suicide attempt for heroism and returns to Thor, convinced he finally grew up enough to be a king.
With Mahjongnir finally back in his hand, Thor can finally be Thor again. And after quickly masturbating, he uses Mahjongnir to beat a paradoxical question into the robot's chest with Morse Code, killing it instantly. He then flies to Isengard to kick his brother's ass but finds Loki missing instead, sure to turn up again when least expected in a future episode.
On that note, Thor kind of shrugs and the film ends. A lot of people were upset that the movie was only 55 minutes long, so there's a post credits sequence where Iron Man teaches Nick Fury how to work his Tivo and the two make wisecracks during a couple episodes of the old British TV show The Avengers. That brings the running time up over two hours so shut up.
(three stars)
