Thor - A Film Review

I was lucky enough to locate the movie 'Thor' in the shop yesterday for a very respectable price. Considering it's one of the few Marvel films that I haven't seen and that it was over twice the price everywhere else, I took the liberty of acquiring it.
   Following the adventures of the alleged Norse God of Thunder, 'Thor' sees much action take place with side features of mild romance and dusty desert stuff that could only ever happen in a dusty desert place. So let's take a look at the plot.

Thor, God of Thunder, is hotheaded and arrogant. Soon to be king, he takes matters into his own hands once too many times and almost starts a war with the Frost Giants. Banished from Asgard, he winds up on Earth, his powers stripped from him. With the help of a team of freelance astrophysicists investigating Einstein-Rosen bridges (wormholes to you laymen), he must regain his honour and his hammer in order to travel back home and stop a traitor from starting a war...

I enjoyed this film. With action sequences permeated with adequate giant robots and big blue monsters, if you don't watch them with too much cynicism, can be very entertaining. Otherwise, they degenerate into men swinging Viking weapons while big blue men chase them with blades of ice sticking out of their arms. However, they are vastly entertaining and quite surprising at points. (Here, I point to the scene in which the robot reverses itself in every way.)
   The characters are rather good. With a casting including Anthony Hopkins and Natalie Portman, it's got some good actors among the cast to play such people as Odin. However, it is not always the actors that make the film rather than the characters they play. The people of Asgard who are actually turned into characters were formed rather nicely, although the glittering armour into which they all seemed to have been born was maybe a little too gold-plated and platinum-stained, if you catch my meaning. What can I say? Costumes matter to me. Certain helmets struck me as hopelessly impractical though (just look at Loki), and a good deal of Asgardians (is that the term?) never even got properly introduced. I can't give an example due to this very fact. The characters who actually mattered were given appropriate intros, and were developed rather nicely. Even so, I was more than slightly puzzled as to why the director hadn't managed to put in the little effort it would have taken to give these others more depth.
    As far as visual effects extended, those implemented in the movie were spectacular in many respects, being both hopelessly unrealistic but generally awesome. Considering that the whole world of the Frost Giants was CGI, it was obviously unreal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. It's sometimes a good thing to know that the rampaging furnace-o-matic laying waste to the small village in the middle of nowhere isn't real.
    The interesting thing about this film for me particularly is that it isn't just set on Earth. In fact, far more than I expected, it is set upon Asgard and the planet of the Frost Giants. More than that, it could be placed in the SF category of movies. The amount of unusual almost steampunk-ish tech surprised me pleasantly. The bifrost particularly amazed me. Who thinks all these things up?

So I now reach the end of my review.
   I give this film a seven out of ten (7/10). The action is great and without more than one or two instances of gore, while the plot isn't all that advanced in many respects and so amplifies everything else. The costumes and the characters are well developed, and the unusual technology is certainly a highlight. Therefore, I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in a) action movies, b) Norse myth and legend (even without the 'Norse' part in mind) or Marvel superhero films.
   Thank you for your time; now go and watch the thing.