Up the Rainbow Bridge
Happy Easter! To celebrate this most holy of Christian festivals, I went to see a movie about a pagan god: The Mighty Thor. Of course, they've made him an alien and Birfrost a wormhole, but all the mythological characters and structures are otherwise largely intact, including Sif and the Warriors Three, Volstagg, Hogun, and Fandral. I've never been much of a fan of the Thunder God, but with the Hulk and Iron Man already out there and Captain America coming up next, it's obvious we'll be getting an Avengers movie before long, so it's important to keep up.

Kenneth Branagh did a good job, and Anthony Hopkins makes a good Odin. This Australian kid they found to play Thor was beyond perfect, and engaging in just the way the movie is overall. This is light entertainment, as it should be. There's a lot more humor than we've seen out of Marvel Studios in general, and just enough of the various other dramatic elements to keep things moving right along. The spectacle of it all is not in any way underdone, but I have to question the 3D.

I'm not unhappy with it, entirely, but there wasn't much reason to bother, really. Standard 2D would have been enough. Funnily enough, movies have always been effective at deceiving the eye into a 3D experience, without the glasses. In this case, the illusion of depth was, I think, counteractive to this illusion. The different planes in which the action took place seemed flat layerings of one image upon on another, with none of the rounding binolocular vision affords in reality and our brain has supplied in movies over the years. Some of the faster action sequences seriously suffered in this respect. I'm hopeful they'll start leaving it alone if they can't make it any better than this just yet.