I Wanna Be Your Sledgehammer (A Thor review)

Two more days until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, meaning there are two more Marvel Cinematic Universe films to look at. We've already looked at Iron Man and its sequel, plus The Incredible Hulk, so let's press on with the fourth film in the inventory.

Poster by Olly Moss.

Marvel faced an interesting challenge with the last two films before Avengers; how can we get Thor and Captain America on the silver screen without them looking silly? Of all the superheroes to adapt to film, they had to sell a guy in LARPer gear who spoke in Shakespearian prose and swung around a magic hammer, and a soldier in propagandistic American garb with little wings on the side of his head, to audiences across the world without getting laughed out the door. Thor was also high fantasy, a genre that has never really done well critically or commercially. For every Conan or Lord of the Rings that managed to strike a chord with audiences, you had an Eragon, a Dungeons and Dragons, and several dozen Krulls or Hawk the Slayers that bombed HARD.

At the time of its release, however, Marvel once again had good fortune. Prior to Thor's release, HBO had begun airing its epic medieval fantasy saga Game of Thrones, which pushed the original book's political intrigue and scheming amoral characters to the surface, and was picking up enough praise that fantasy looked like it would have a second chance of popularity. Thor itself sweetens the pill somewhat by putting a more sci-fi bent on it - the Norse gods are in fact an alien culture whose frequent visits to Earth resulted in worship from the locals - and setting a good deal of the film in contemporary America, but it still traffics in fantasy tropes, and it still grossed nearly $450m at the international box office. What with Game of Thrones  currently storming the ratings, maybe medieval fantasy's getting a second wind in pop culture.

Thor managed to rise to the challenge well enough, but does it still hold up on a second viewing? If ye be worthy, we're reviewing the Viking god of thunder's cinematic début after the jump.