LogFAQs > #902718100

I like first Thor movie, there's a lot of good stuff. Asgard and everything is cool, Odin is great, Loki is great, the frost giant stuff is cool. Thor is cool too which obviously is important for a movie called Thor that introduces Thor.

But... there's something missing with Thor. It's the development he undergoes. He begins the movie thirsty for revenge against the Frost Giants. He wants to go to war and make them pay and is gleeful in his wanton slaughter of them in the initial excursion to Jotunheim. By the end of the movie, he's become more humble and understanding of other races, and tells Loki "you can't kill an entire race!". Loki retorts with, "weren't you gonna do it with your bare hands at the start of the movie??" which is completely true. So ostensibly, Thor has gone through a change of character in this movie.

But when did this happen? There's a great throughline where Odin banishes him because he feels Thor isn't worthy of being his son or Asgardian royalty with his careless behaviour, so he strips of him of his power and sends him to earth, and places the famous seal upon Mjolnir "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor." This leads to a *fantastic* moment when Thor breaks into the SHIELD tent base and grasps the hammer and discovers he's not worthy. That moment of realization that he's truly not worthy is excellent, and a great step in his path towards the end of the movie. Then it pays off at the end when he gets the hammer back.

But what did he do? He got drunk with Selvig? Hung out with horny Natalie Portman a little? Did this make him care about the other races more than he did before? I feel like there's just something missing here. He sacrifices himself to the Destroyer in the end, which is the moment that makes him worthy of the hammer again, but would he not have done that at the start of the movie?

I think realizing he wasn't worthy of the hammer really is a good step in him reevaluating his place and what kinds of things are worth fighting for, but it just doesn't feel like enough.

The human characters are meant to bridge that gap in his interactions with them, but maybe they were just too weak. Most people don't like Kat Dennings in Thor but I actually do.... and *still* I find the human component of this movie pretty weak.

I guess I'm just rambling at this point, but I'd say this is my biggest regret in the MCU - I feel like a bit more of a purposeful journey of Thor becoming worthy of the hammer would have made this a really great movie.

As it is, I still think it's a good movie. In the lower end of the MCU, but certainly not bad or even the level of mediocrity Iron Man 2 is. It's not like they just missed the mark completely and made a movie that misunderstood the character or something.
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The batman villians all seem to be one big joke that batman refuses to laugh at - SantaRPG