The trailer for Marvel’s next superhero movie, Thor, starts out promisingly enough: Thor (Chris Hemsworth) may have a golden mane Goldilocks would envy, but he is a manly man! He wears Timberlands and is a scrappy, thuggish fighter who dispenses with secret-service agents like he was trained in “Afghanistan†or “Chechnya.†Alas, it turns out he was actually trained in the celestial kingdom of Asgard, where the trailer sends us for far too long, sharing what we can only assume is just about every beat of the first 30 minutes of the film. After an intense round of name-calling with his father — “You are a vain, greedy, cruel boy†— the Norse God Odin (played by Anthony Hopkins and his floating eye patch), Hemswoth is stripped of his powers and exiled to Earth. There he is discovered by Natalie Portman, initially under the impression he’s a super-cut homeless guy, and himself discovers a magical, Arthurian hammer, which will give him the power of Thor. Shots of Hemsworth actually being Thor, or Thor fighting the film’s major villain, Loki, are few and far between (not few and far between: shots of the long lost Rene Russo as Thor’s mother), likely because they haven’t been filmed and special-effected yet. So despite the trailer’s length, we’ll have to wait for the second trailer to determine if Thor can really pull that huge cape off.
