Quick thoughts on Thor

2....that is.

Good.
1) It was better than Iron Man 3, which puts it behind the Avengers and Iron Man 1 in the Avengers series, and easily the "best" blockbuster film of this year I'd say. Captain America is probably better than I gave it credit for at the time, but that's about the only other one in the running in this list. The rest are kind of meh.

2) Action was often very clever rather than just pointless devastation (unlike the Superman movie, which was terrible).

3) Some throwbacks to other sci-fi films (Star Wars references mostly).

4) Didn't take itself as seriously as the first Thor movie. This is basically why the Avengers and first Iron Man worked too, plenty of humor, both deliberate and in the meta-form of poking at the absurdities of comic book heroes with ridiculous powers. Thor's entrance into a London flat and subway were both hilarious, also Mjolnir following him around between the realms.

5) Spent more time on alien worlds than Earth. Thor movies should revolve mostly around Thor doing Thor things and Earth is just kind of a place that sometimes matters. It's also more interesting to look at Asgard and the other realms. Taylor seems to have figured out how to draw up and use fantasy sets from doing Game of Thrones, so that helped.

6) Thor has better and more interesting villains (especially Loki) than most other comic book story lines  in the Avengers set, which often has rather lame villains. His dynamic with Loki is really fun by now. Kurse was quite good as a badass.

Bad
1) Natalie Portman doesn't seem to want to actually be in these movies. Fortunately for her, for a good chunk of this one, she's basically asleep anyway. This was probably the biggest detraction from the first two Batman movies too was the labored love interest plots didn't have any chemistry and seemed just thrown in. (Catwoman in the last one worked). The Thor-Jane relationship functions too much on the "tell not show" theory that doesn't work in a movie. Stark-Potts works a little better because it works more on a show-n-tell routine. Even the Spider Man movie last year had a better chemistry formed around this part of its plot.

1a) Hopkins doesn't seem to want to be in these either.

2) Plot overall was kind of incoherent and messy. The writing and humor and clever action sets makes up for it but stopping to think about it, it just gets messy fast. Why exactly are these guys trying to destroy the universe again? Why is Odin an asshole/idiot suddenly rather than the man with a plan (bitter old guy?) Thor doesn't seem to bother figuring it out either so maybe we shouldn't ourselves.

3) I'm not sure what to make of the Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in. I assume that's needed to play the Thanos card eventually but I'd think they could work it in somewhere in a Thor movie.