I Thought I Thor a Nordic God.

I went to see Thor last night and, well, you know that Simpsons episode where Mr Burns remembers being a young boy, smashing his dodgem repeatedly into the legs of that Irish handyman, then spends days laughing at the memory?  Well that’s me, still pissing myself.  The opening half hour or so sees Anthony Hopkins deliver line after line of hilarious, preposterous dialogue, matched only in his absurd delivery by Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth.  On top of that, we are introduced to Thor’s three stooges, one of whom sports a ginger beard of ZZ Top proportions, and may as well have been played by Gimli.  Sorely disappointing was when he opened his mouth and didn’t have a Scottish accent.  Honestly, with the first act barely done, the film has already thrown up every conceivable cliché in the book, and sent me and my lady into fits of giggles.

It was fucking brilliant.

Preferable film times meant that we reluctantly went to see the 3D version, which really would not have been my first choice.  But I must say this is one film where that muddy, discolouring effect the 3D filters cause is outweighed by the spectacle that is created.  The long, epic sweeping shots of Asgard (Thor’s realm) are truly astounding, and threaten to bring on a little motion sickness.

So yes, I really, really enjoyed Thor, but man, what a geeky evening at the cinema it was.  Aside from us, the only people in the auditorium were a group of (and I don’t mean this in a derogatory manner) dorks.  Lovely, polite, silent-during-the-film dorks.  So as if watching Thor, in 3D, with these dudes wasn’t geeky enough, the trailers consisted of the following: Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class, Transformers 3 and the new Pirates of The Caribbean.  The first of only two peeps heard from the nerdy fellas behind us came when the auditorium was plunged into silence following the Green Lantern trailer, and the end of a sentence rang out: “...yellow.  That’s his weakness.”  The slightly agitated tone suggested an unheard but heated disagreement over some superhero or another.  The second peep was the group laughing en masse when a Xena reference was made in the film.  Tellingly, one of the few lines in Thor that didn’t tickle me.

So yeah, altogether a rather geeky evening out.  Also, one thing I did want to mention was how dubious I was a couple of months back when it was announced that Kenneth Branagh was to direct Thor, not being a fan of his haughty breed of film making.  But seriously, the decision to bring him in was a stroke of absolute genius.  Overblown, pompous and pretentious, his style has found it’s perfect bedfellow.  Let’s hope that, with the promising-looking Captain America on the horizon, Marvel is back on track after a somewhat rocky couple of years.