Maybe I’m just getting old.

We just saw Thor last night. After seeing the trailer the previous weekend, I had no interest whatsoever in seeing it. Then my partner said it got 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. I begrudgingly agreed to go.

By the time we got out of the theater, the RT score had dropped to 78%. And that didn’t even include my panning of it!

Here’s my unorganized thoughts on this trainwreck of a movie:

• You have to be a brainless meathead to appreciate the one-dimensionality of the plot. Seriously, no nuance, nothing that makes you think, nothing clever whatsoever. A three-year-old would roll his eyes at the storyline.
• Hollywood has GOT to stop emphasizing this Mormon idea that the fairer you are, the more morally good you are. You can just know who the good guys are by the color of their hair and skin nowadays (I think the Karate Kid was the last movie to run against this paradigm, and that was about 30 years ago). Orphan was the last movie that reminded me of this (the dark girl with the foreign accent tries to kill the blond, blue-eyed American girl…really?!)
• The cast is 99% white, with one token black guy and one token Asian guy. OK, maybe because it’s about Norse mythology, and no one is more lily-white than the Scandinavians. Except that one Asian god. And they make both the black and Asian guys’ eyes lighter.
• I’m not sure why a Norse god of the Middle Ages speaks modern British English with the occasional Victorian turn of phrase. Maybe the actors can’t pull a Scandinavian accent off? And why do Norse gods use English as their native tongue?
• A clever FX budget-saving technique: throw in a lot of “camera movement” and noise during the fight scenes, so people won’t realize the animation is cut-rate. I noticed this in Iron Man 2, too. Wasn’t that a Marvel film, also? Hmm….
• Just because a character on the screen laughs at his lame joke doesn’t mean we’re obligated to laugh at it, especially when it’s not even remotely funny. I know this is a matter of social conditioning, but still. And just because it’s delivered with a British accent doesn’t mean it’s wit.
• It’s not unusual for Hollywood to pick a female lead because she’s pretty, even if she lacks any charisma or acting talent. Maybe we should be celebrating the objectification of male leads with Chris Hemsworth’s casting as Thor as a milestone. Great body, not much else. Oh, crap, I forgot about Matthew McConaughey.
• Was the pressure of having delivered an Oscar-winning performance in Black Swan just too overwhelming for Natalie Portman, that she had to act in something brainless next? Or did she have a mansion in the Caribbean that she wanted to buy?
• You might wonder if Kenneth Branagh’s directing skills are what ultimately made Emma Thompson divorce him. I did. Thor is as overrated as Dead Again was.

If you think my lambasting of Thor means I hate everything out in the theaters right now, you couldn’t be more wrong. I really enjoyed Source Code, and The Adjustment Bureau wasn’t half-bad, either. But Thor is going to make me trust my instincts about all other Marvel movies I see trailers for. (And the Captain America one I saw looked absolutely ridiculous)