I am pleased to say that I was wrong. And Thor is, in fact, awesome. In all ways. Although especially in the way that Chris Hemsworth is jaw-droppingly attractive and takes his shirt off for extended periods. Also his biceps appear to be gearing up to eat Tokyo. And there’s mud wrestling.

The film uses a lot of beautiful scenery, which I'm sure you will appreciate.

Now, when I tell you the plot you’ll tell me that I have gone mad for liking it, and that I was blinded by the sight of such a perfect male specimen. In my defence, this is an actor cast to play Thor, so he needs to be at least a bit buff.

Bear with me.

The Aesir here are basically alien-space royalty and live on this beautiful world with crystal palaces and epic science/magic. The rainbow bridge (guarded by Heimdall, played by the brilliant-in-everything Idris Elba) allows them to blast their way to other planets. Using the argument that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, they are worshipped as gods by the primitive Vikings.

Thus when a chap falls to earth (landing in a small town somewhere in the sandy square states) and proclaims himself Thor, everyone thinks he’s a bit mad. Especially when the rampaging starts. However, some handy scientists need him for some handy science, and then there’s this hammer that no-one can lift…

This all had the potential to be cringingly awful and cheesy, but fortunately it was handled in a rarely-seen triumphal triumvirate of sensitive and nuanced acting, balanced direction (Kenneth Branagh at the helm, and he’s a man who can deal with a lot of ham) and a script that focused on that shyest of all beasts in the comic book action genre: character development.

Mark Millar's Moody Thunder God

That’s right. Character development. Get in.

Anthony Hopkins, who plays Odin, is seen here in an interview calling Thor “a superhero film with a bit of Shakespeare in”, which is a good summary. The almost unbelieveable plot is rescued from itself by the way in which it allows characters to grow.

I was very happy that the writers had chosen to riff heavily from Mark Millar‘s Ultimate Thor rewrites, in which Thor is styled as a hero struggling with self-doubt and the agony of everyone thinking that he’s actually suffering from delusions that make him think he’s a god.

In the film, Thor gets kicked out of Valhalla by Odin for being an annoying, spoilt teenager who picks fights and starts wars. He needs to make good and get some responsibility.

We follow Thor on his journey from arrogant, angry young man to being, well, a grown up. His essential good-naturedness and charm, as well as obvious desire to do good, make this neither pat nor schmaltzy, but wholly believable, and at times exceptionally moving.

In the meantime, his brother Loki is also trying to find himself. Rather than the standard trope of being evil because he’s a villain (although he is of course played by an English actor), the whole thing is carried off with depth, subtlety and aplomb by Tom Hiddleston.

Like Thor, Loki grows into himself, and it is only at the end that he makes the transition from a young warrior of potential into someone capable of evil. You know, the thing that George Lucas tried to do with the backstory for that guy in the black armour, but ended up just embarrassing everyone?

I bet Natalie Portman (playing handy scientist Jane Foster) was glad to get that storyline right this time.

Speaking of Natalie Portman, let’s have a look at the female characters. They are admittedly thin on the ground, but those that are there are pretty good. Portman and Kat Dennings (playing Darcy) give good scientist and political scientist respectively, with the Jane Foster character updated from nurse to physicist.  Both women avoid the dull stereotype of being either predictably “spirited” or annoyingly wet.

Sif kicks ass. Fact.

The kickass Jaime Alexander plays Sif (Thor’s wife in the mythology, but we’ll leave that for the sequel, I suppose), heads up Team Junior Aesir in their fight to rescue Thor from Earth, and gets as much, if not more, fighting screen time as the rest of them.

She’s also wearing a costume that looks appropriate to fighting in, which is a personal bugbear of mine. No-one can fight crime in a bustier. No-one. Pay attention, people allegedly, eventually, making Wonder Woman. I said no-one.

There’s also some ice giants in it, but realistically the action element plays second fiddle to the storyline, and although there were a lot of fighting sequences my overall impressions of the film were about people and personalities rather than a barrage of things crashing into other things.

Which is no bad thing. I love action films, but I love them even more if there’s more to them than just action (are you listening, Michael Bay?)

And the action wasn’t exactly light on the ground – there were some very pleasing fights on all realms of reality from soldiers to robots to lots of ice giants getting hit in the face. A personal favourite caused me to turn and hi-five the person next to me (fortunately, Miranda, and not a stranger) because Thor had just smashed his hammer into the face of an enormous ice-beast and SAVED THE DAY in epic hero style.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You like comic book adaptations or action films
• It has an amazing cast acting their socks off
• You want to see how EPIC Norse Gods can be whether they are good or evil
• You want to sing this song over and over in your head when you’ve left the cinema
• Just go and see it already!

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You are allergic to bling, muscles, fighting, deep voices or CGI ice giants.
• You realise that they didn’t put Fenris Wolf in, OR cast Brian Blessed as Odin, and that makes you a bit sad.

Oh matron. Natalie Portman in the poster for Black Swan.

Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s latest filmic offering, hinges upon the idea of a cunning duality running through Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (1877). We know this because within about fifteen minutes of the film’s opening, the creepy French dance teacher Thomas (Vincent Cassel) has given a rather thinly disguised explanation of what the whole film is about, clumsily telling a room full of professional dancers what the plot of this ‘done-to-death’ ballet is.

Except he doesn’t. The plot of Swan Lake is a composite of various Russian folk tales and a German short story called ‘The Stolen Veil’. It features Prince Siegfried who is reluctant to marry, despite the wishes of his queen-mother. But one night he meets the swan-queen Odette and is completely won round: alas, tragedy ensues when Rotbart, the evil magician, sends his daughter Odile (the ‘black swan’) off to impersonate Odette at the Prince’s birthday party, which she does so well that he mistakes her for his True Love. Yada yada yada. It’s a fairly clear example of the ‘fairy bride’ tradition (where a man meets a magical woman whom he marries and inevitably loses), and typical of Romanticism and other Romantic ballets in its interest in man’s relationship with the supernatural and the ideal: Odette is fundamentally unattainable, an imagined perfection, not a representation of sexual love.

But not if you’re Aronofsky, who can’t resist a little Psychology 101: the Black Swan (whose appearance on stage in the original ballet amounts to a measly few dances) becomes Odette’s ‘EVIL TWIN’, a good old fashioned Id to Odette’s Ego. Just to clarify, that’s Black Swan = BAD, White Swan = GOOD (repeat ad nauseum). Siegfried, whose own sexual stand-offishness and maternal relationship is a lynchpin in the ballet, is all but gone in the film, where he functions simply as a sort of pole for the prima ballerina to dance around. She, on the other hand, now has all his issues and then some: the White Swan is FRAGILE and VIRGINAL (yet has somehow managed to woo her reluctant prince into marriage in the course of a single night), and, in perverted-Ugly-Ducking style, no one wants to fuck her (boo hoo). Meanwhile, the Black Swan is a bit oh-matron, a Sexy Seductress. Were she living in 21st century Manhattan, Aronofsky decides, she would be taking drugs, listening to her iPod, sexin’ down the clubs, and carrying a black singlet around ‘in case she ends up somewhere unexpected’. Gosh darn it, isn’t she exactly like this rather pouting ingenue who can’t dance very well, but has lots of passion?

Thus this Romantic tale – which actually has much to offer Black Swan‘s premise through its use of supernatural and metaphorical elements, illusion, ideals and identity – becomes a tired old angel/whore dichotomy, and an indirect sort of homage to the ur-backstage bitches backstabbing drama, All About Eve (1950). I can’t help feeling here, though, that Aronofsky may have arrived at the party a bit late: as Spanish cinema fans will remember, back in 1999 Pedro Almadovar made a brilliant film based on just this cinema classic, and also managed to fix the 1950s gender politics in the process, making the whole thing a loving tribute to women’s endurance, rather than a film about how women always screw each other over.

'Not you, grey swan!' Photo par Hodge.

But even if you read Black Swan as a straight portrait of mental disorder rather than a supernatural horror story (a lazy choice to give an audience, and a bit clever-by-numbers, don’t you think?) the whole thing still hinges around a sexual awakening that portrays lesbianism as a freakish Other, sex itself as A Bit Naughty and the definition of a successful woman as ‘a seductive one’. And from this angle, too, Black Swan is derivative of a much finer (and less misogynistic) film, Michael Haneke’s La Pianiste (2001), which, er, features as its main character a self-mutilating, sexually repressed champion piano player who lives with her obsessive privacy-intolerant mother who wants to live through her daughter.

This post has not been attempting a sword-swinging defence of the sacred Swan Lake story: as Matthew Bourne has shown, it is a skeleton on which vastly different interpretations can hang beautifully. And, yeah, I get metaphor and that. But what really bothered me was this feeling throughout the film that despite the constantly pummeled ‘BLACK SWAN WHITE SWAN’ contrast, manipulation of Tchaikovsky’s music on a scale not seen since Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (itself based on another Tchaikovsky ballet) and the whole ‘ballet theme’ thing, Aronofsky really has no interest in any of those things except as they make him look Clever and link up (in a feminine sort of way) with his Grand Theme of vocations that require you to abuse your body (a la The Wrestler). A case in point is Nina’s much-touted ‘minor eating disorder’, which is presumably introduced as part of the whole ‘dancers are thin and they lust after physical perfection’ thing, and something I have a couple of key problems with. These are: firstly, its yawn-inducing predictability, exploiting the one thing everyone knows about ballet; and secondly the fact that, even though eating disorders are supposedly ballet’s Defining Feature, Black Swan makes no attempt to examine their specific relationship to a career that demands major energy output 24/7.

Plus, of course, the whole ‘Ah yes. She’s a dancer who wants to do well in her career. So let’s give her an eating disorder to really symbolise that drive for perfection. But eating disorders – they’re not all that SEXY are they? The BLACK SWAN must be SEXY… So let’s shove a bit of eating disorder in there, just so we know this is a film about a woman with a perfectionist streak, then forget all about it and focus on the sexy wanking and the sexy lesbian sex.’

Such heavy-handedness sits strangely at odds with the elegance of the dance-world – which, of course, does involve great physical hardship, a short career and an inevitable amount of luvvie backstabbing. That said, I’m not going to attempt to deny I had fun: it’s a rip-roaring yarn, and a splendid performance from Portman. But perhaps if Aronofsky had taken less time to think about how clever he considers himself, and more time to consider the intricacies of the ballet he takes as his framework, Black Swan would be less derivative, less cocky and – as a film – infinitely superior.

Hodge’s List of Related(ish) Films That Don’t Leave Her Toffee Nosed

• La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher)
• Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother)
• …and if you want something specifically balletic, Hable Con Ella (Talk To Her)
• If you can get over the sexual politics, All About Eve (1950) is a fantabulous film (YEAH, BETTE)
• And for backstage meta kind of stuff, a lot of the 1950s musicals are still some of the most fun and unpretentious mainstream films you can watch: my particular favourites would have to be Singin’ In The Rain (1952), Show Boat (1951) and Kiss Me Kate (1953).
• And for all this black swan ‘dark side’ type stuff, there’s always Belle De Jour (1967). Its views on women could be read as fairly atrocious, but aren’t necessarily – one day, we’ll discuss it over pork scratchings.