Thor (Rifftrax)

Film Year:  2011
Genre:  Superhero, Fantasy, Action, Adventure
Director:  Kenneth Branagh
Starring:  Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgard, Rene Russo, Idris Elba, Kat Dennings, Clark Gregg, Jaimie Alexander, Ray Stevenson, Josh Dallas, Tadanobu Asano, Colm Feore
Rifftrax Year:  2011
Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

The Movie

*I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS MOVIE UNRIFFED*

I'm a Marvel fan, though Thor was mostly out of my wheelhouse growing up.  The Norse God superhero just didn't appeal to me, so I tended to avoid him.  When it came to his own movie, I saw it out of allegiance as a superhero fan first and foremost, and I needed to support this little experiment of a "shared cinematic universe" that the company was creating, because I wanted to see it fulfilled.  I hoped to like the movie, but what I didn't expect was to absolutely adore the movie.

The film is the story of Thor, the prince of the realm eternal Asgard, who on the eve of being crowned king finds the ceremony interrupted by a group of Frost Giants infiltrating Asgard.  In a rage, Thor, his brother Loki, and a group of his warrior friends travel to the Frost Giants home of Jotunheim and threatens them, opening the two realms to war.  In a rage, Thor's father Odin banishes Thor to Earth, and cursing his weapon Mjolnir, a magical hammer, to only be wielded by "one who is worthy."  In order to return to Asgard, Thor must learn compassion and humility through his interaction with humans.

If there is a fault to the movie, it's that the moral lesson Thor needs to learn is a pretty big one to learn over the course of a few days, and when he learns it it's actually through the manipulation of the film's villain than the result of any experience he's had on Earth, which is mostly just an excuse for him to get romantic with Natalie Portman's character.  But the story is a fun little workaround of the classic Thor comics, in which Thor is trapped on Earth, forced to do good deeds through a symbiotic human companion named Donald Blake that turns into the God of Thunder when butts need to be kicked.  The movie dumps that character and just has Thor be Thor, because he can't really have a story arc if he only bursts out for action scenes.  The plotting is still problematic, but I feel it charms in spite of it.

If there's one thing that always enchants me about the films of Kenneth Branagh, it's that they're always beautiful to look at.  This goes from the larger productions he's currently taking part in down to his work with Shakespeare.  Thor is no different, as the production design of the film is lavish and spellbinding.  The way they brought Asgard to life still blows me away to this day, and there is a loving magic that this film had in its portrayed it with that is missing from any film featuring Thor afterward (especially the much praised Thor:  Ragnarok, which I didn't really care for, to be honest).

But most people have come for a superhero movie, though it's fairly action lite.  The big CG blowout scenes sandwich the film in the first act and the third, as Thor has quirky fish-out-of-water conversations with his human companions and his brother Loki broods and schemes up in Asgard in the middle of the film.  I never really minded, because I felt the character-work in this film was more fun and charming than the far less interesting Iron Man 2, which was the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie that was released prior.

I think movie plays up Thor's strengths as a character, including how silly his character is in general.  It's a fun movie to watch and it's one of my favorite superhero films.  I think I lie in a minority on that, since it was deemed the Thor franchise needed "course correction" by the third film, though I never complained about it.  I think the course it charted in this first movie was pretty spellbinding.

The Trax

I didn't watch the few Marvel Cinematic Universe riffs when they came out, and watching them through this blog will be my first subjection to them.  At the time these had came out I had become somewhat disillusioned with Rifftrax and dropped out for a while (save for when they dropped a Twilight riff), because they had distanced themselves from the "movies we could never get on MST" image and started steering toward popular movies that a lot of people owned, therefor we could sell more copies.  I didn't mind them dipping toes into this territory early on, if the movie was self-serious enough to support a humorous commentary like Lord of the Rings or The Matrix, but seeing so many cheeky crowdpleasers being released one after another was just exhausting and not that interesting to me.  I longed for the days of an Island of Dr. Moreau or a Battlefield Earth riff that really tapped the potential of the format they were playing with.  Instead they were aiming at a "popular movies are bad and fuck 'em" crowd, and I wasn't gelling with it.

Then they just bought cheap crappy movies and mostly forgot about this MP3 stuff, saying "We're just Mystery Science Theater again, only without the puppets."  Yay?  But rest in peace to what made Rifftrax exciting when it first started.

But I digress.  The point I was trying to make was that I passed on these riffs when they first came out and never looked back.  Now they're coming up on rotation on my blog and I have to suck up my pissy negative vibes and give them a watch.  It'll be interesting to watch these all these years later, because when these movies came out the MCU wasn't what it is today, where people turned out in droves to bring Avengers:  Endgame to Avatar level box office success.  Nah, the only real success of this franchise was the Iron Man films at the time, and Thor was a "success" at barely topping $400 million worldwide, which is chicken feed compared to almost everything that came after it.  This riff exists in a vacuum in which The Avengers hadn't come out yet, Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, the MCU wasn't yet one of the most popular franchises of all time, and this was just another silly movie based on a comic book to most.

"Kenneth Branagh gave us a Kenneth Branagh impersonator!"

To say I wasn't looking forward to this riff is a bit of an understatement, but just as much as the film surprised me in theaters, the riff actually quite surprised me as well.  What I forgot to take into account when I first heard they riffed this movie is just how stoic the scenes on Asgard, and coupled with the extravagant nature of the comic book/mythological hybrid world it inhabits, there is a lot to comment on and properly make fun of.  The first half hour of Thor is pretty hilarious, because it gives them precisely what a thriving riff desires.

"Wow!  It can transform into...something that is turned around!"

The riff starts to grow a little stale once it reaches Earth, because the film is mostly comedy by then.  They do have some cute interplay based on successive scenes of Thor getting knocked out by one means or another, but it becomes clear that they don't really have much to comment on except the fact that they're looking at a bunch of character quirks for long periods of time.  The riff never grows dull, but it teeters on the "meh" line a few times.  Luckily slight trips to Asgard are spread intermittently throughout the film to keep them a little energized, even though nothing lives up to the opening scenes.

"What a shock!  His solution involves hitting something with a hammer!"

Thor almost convinces me at times that I may be a bit too dismissive of the riffs of latest blockbuster movies at times, though its lows do remind me why I didn't really care for them.  But Thor is fueled by an entertaining movie that inspires strong comedy in the best of moments, so I'm glad I watched it.  Does it make me more excited to visit some of these flavor-of-the-month blockbuster riffs?  Not really, because I don't have much of a desire to watch it again.  I'm sure there are more surprises out there, but I'm in no hurry to discover them.

Final note:  Like most Marvel movies, Thor has a scene after the credits, and Mike, Kevin, and Bill stick around to riff it, despite ducking out during the end credits.  Disembodio has a song to kill our ears in the meantime.

Good