I’ve now watched a good portion of Cars and I still can’t get past the concept. I can accept talking fish, rats, ants and toys but for some reason talking cars stretch credibility too much. Maybe because the talking animals and toys still exist in a human world, whereas the cars exist in a bizarro world where they stand in place of humans. It begs obvious questions like ‘Where do baby cars come from?”

And I don’t want to know the answer.

I freely admit that when I go out to see a movie, it’s because I want to see it on a freaking huge screen to better appreciate the spectacle of sound and light being presented. This means when I’m seeing a movie during the summer it ain’t gonna be an arthouse film. This year I’ve started with two superhero movies, both from the Marvel universe.

Thor

I know little about Thor the comic (comic book, that is, not stand-up comic, though that itself is an interesting concept). I know he’s some sort of viking dude with a hammer and that’s about it. The movie fleshes out his origin story, presenting Thor as a reckless warmonger lusting for blood with little thought to the consequence. A heavily made-up Anthony Hopkins plays his father who banishes him to Earth for being such a reckless boob (Thor lives on a snazzy viking planet and they have some kind of wormhole thingie that can shoot them hither and yonder across the galaxy. Nerds everywhere are cringing at my inability to give any of this stuff its proper names). Thor’s arrival is heralded by him getting hit by a van. This turns out to be a literal running gag. Over the course of the movie Thor goes through a character arc of sorts, which kind of surprised me, given I was mostly expecting lots of fighting and special effects (and there is plenty of both), turning into a wiser, more mellow kind of dude who is fit to be king, unlike his rat brother Loki, who plots to exterminate their enemies, Thor, dad and pretty much anyone who gets in his way.

Good triumph over evil in the end, of course, and Loki gets away with a Vader-esque escape, so he’s primed to be a main bad guy in The Avengers movie — and that’s what Thor feels like, a prequel of sorts to The Avengers, introducing Thor. But it works for what it is. Kenneth Branagh (!) keeps the action moving and gives the characters enough time to catch their collective breath and flesh out scenes that would otherwise feel like perfunctory bits between explosions. The off-kilter camera angles often used to establish shots on Earth might recall the same trick being used on the campy Batman series from the 1960s but here it works as an effective way to illustrate the fish-out-of-water nature of Thor’s presence on the planet.

Chris Hemsworth appears to have had a great time playing the title character and is thoroughly enjoyable as he alternates between bumbling about powerless on Earth and swaggering and swinging the hammer with gusto about on his home planet of Asgard. For some reason I didn’t even recognize Natalie Portman until well into the movie. Her plucky scientist Jane Foster is fairly rote and she does little to distinguish the role but she’s not bad, either and this will certainly look better on her resume than Your Highness. Tom Hiddlestone does a nice job with Loki, at turns menacing and slightly campy.

The effects are dazzling and well-rendered and the action is plentiful and satisfying. Comic book movies don’t have a very high bar to reach to be considered decent. After all, Electra and Daredevil both got greenlit and they’ve made two Fantastic Four movies, so by my account, Thor comes off quite well. A solid romp, I rate it 3.5 mystical hammers out of 5.

X-Men: First Class

After the fairly dismal X-Men 3: Everyone Dies and an okay-but-not great Wolverine movie, the powers-that-be at Marvel apparently decided it was time to reboot the franchise by going the prequel route and so we find X-Men: First Class set in 1962 and laying out the origins of the merry band of mutants led by Professor Xavier. The film plays up the early 60s angle right down to making the Cuban missile crisis the centerpiece of the story but never veers into Austin Powers territory in terms of costumes or design. In fact, there are a few fashion anachronisms, mostly with some hairstyles looking a bit too modern.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are both well-cast as the younger Xavier and Magneto, respectively. While the film shows Magneto’s transformation into a ‘bad guy’, Xavier is given a completely different take as a sex-loving, beer-swilling kinda guy (who still has a highly developed moral code that causes him to ultimately part ways with Magneto).

I don’t have any serious coimplaints about the movie. It moves along well and although the supporting cast don’t get a lot of time to explore their characters, they all handle themselves well. It did seem Angel was given no real motivation to join with evil mutant Sebastian Shaw and I suspect the many-credited writers may have had something in there at some point that got cut. And speaking of Shaw, I’m unsure what to make of Kevin Bacon as the chief bad guy. I actually didn’t recognize him in the 1944 scenes where he appears as a Nazi doctor. Once he became Evil Kevin Bacon in 1962 I was less convinced because, you know…Kevin Bacon. They should have given him a big villainous mustache or something.

I’m usually not big on reboots, remakes or prequels but X-Men: First Class actually pulls off the origin story with intelligence, flair and, well, class. If the film does well, expect to see X-Men: Second Class get the go-ahead. Okay, maybe not with that title. X-Men: Top of Class? X-Men: Still Classy? They had four people credited on the screenplay, they can throw a couple of writers at coming up with a decent name for a sequel.