When the Avengers first assembled 10 years ago, many would have pegged Iron Man or Captain America as the heroes with the most longevity. As it turns out, the God of Thunder is the first Marvel character to headline four solo films, with Thor: Love and Thunder set to release this week. It also marks eight movie appearances — not counting cameos or post-credit scenes — for Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, trailing Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark by just one movie. Whether or not Thor is the “strongest Avenger” is a lengthy debate, but he’s undoubtedly one of the most popular. However, the version of the character set to appear in Taika Waititi’s sequel wasn’t always the self-aware, self-deprecating fixture he is today.
Thor’s journey on the silver screen is a strange one, marked by a jarring shift in tone once Waititi came aboard (for Thor: Ragnarok, and for a handful of tongue-in-cheek short films). During his first two solo outings, Thor and Thor: The Dark World, and his first two Avengers team-ups, The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, the comics mainstay helped carve out the MCU’s cosmic corners, to varying degrees of success.
In the first of our two retrospectives on the character, we’ll explore how his cinematic foundations were laid, and why he was ripe for a comedic remix in 2017 — for better or worse.
A Flawed Foundation
Thor’s 2011 introduction came courtesy of a whole host of credited screenwriters (Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne, Mark Protosevich, and Thor comic scribe J. Michael Straczynski) and of Oscar-nominated director Kenneth Branagh. Apart from lobbing off one leg of his tripod, Branagh’s approach was fairly straightforward. He brought with him the regal grandeur of his five Shakespeare adaptations — among them, Hamlet and Henry V — and he told a mythic story set partially on Earth and partially in a gilded palace, about gods and egos, fathers and sons, and ultimately, about sacrifice.
The film’s core premise establishes a running theme throughout Thor’s MCU journey: the question of his worthiness. More specifically, Branagh’s origin story deals with the brash prince of Asgard being cast out by his father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), because of his warmongering tendencies, and it sees him stripped of his destructive powers until he learns to wield them responsibly. The broad strokes make sense on paper, with Thor’s banishment functioning as an opportunity for some much-needed introspection until he becomes a better man (then, and only then, can he lift his trusty hammer, Mjolnir).
The first time Thor tries and fails to retrieve his hammer, Hemsworth captures the utter devastation on the prince’s face, followed by a performance that closely resembles bereavement. While Waititi would eventually lampshade Thor’s relationship with Mjolnir, it forms the emotional backbone of his on-screen debut, allowing for some amount of emotional investment in the character, even if — upon closer inspection — the details fail to add up to something meaningful.
The catalyst for Thor’s exile is his invasion of Jotunheim, the frozen realm of the enormous blue Jotuns, or the Frost Giants, a species with whom Odin and the Asgardians have a long-standing cultural enmity. Unbeknownst to Thor, his scheming brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) had been responsible for a handful of these Giants attacking Asgard, resulting in Thor’s bloodthirsty incursion of their planet. On Earth, he later meets Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and her fellow scientists, and while he often acts brutishly in their presence — “Another!” he yells, while breaking a diner coffee cup — he eventually comes to care for the people of Earth, until he’s ready to sacrifice himself for their safety.
It’s at this point in the story, when Thor “dies” for his new human compatriots, that Mjolnir and its powers return to him, and he returns to Asgard to prevent Loki from destroying Jotunheim, even if it means breaking Asgard’s Rainbow Bridge (his only path back to Earth, and to Jane). It’s a noble sacrifice, but the way it plays out calls his arc, and the movie’s dramatic framing, into question. “I’ve changed!” he bellows at his brother, stating his reason for no longer wanting to kill Frost Giants. But the supposed change he undergoes in the film feels disconnected from this climactic decision. While his initial motives concern a long-standing blood feud against the Jotuns, his development during the story is about learning to live amongst humans, with whom he has no prior rivalry, and who don’t look all that different from him. The latter may not seem like a relevant point since it never comes up explicitly, but it’s key to the movie’s subtext.
Beginning with Iron Man in 2008 — a film set against America’s presence in the Middle East — the Marvel Cinematic Universe has always existed in the shadow of real-world U.S. politics. Thor’s mythology may be Norse, but the movie’s themes are distinctly American, centering, as many Marvel movies do, on questions of militaristic response. After his homeland is attacked, Thor’s fear and his “rah rah” bloodthirst leads him to kill Frost Giants who may have had nothing to do with the attack (and, to take the post-9/11 Iraq parallels further, he is also the ostensible successor to his father’s war, not unlike George W. Bush). However, the character’s central arc doesn’t stem from his warmongering (or his feelings towards the Frost Giants) being challenged in any way, but rather, from his affinity for a different people entirely. He gets along with the citizens of small-town New Mexico with ease (after some goofy misunderstandings), and there’s nothing in the film to indicate that he wouldn’t have still protected them if he were never stripped of his powers.
Ironically, the only real payoff in Thor 1 that feels directly connected to any setup can be found in a deleted scene.
Ironically, the only real payoff that feels directly connected to any setup can be found in a deleted scene, in which Thor returns to the aforementioned diner and replaces the cup he smashed. It’s a small moment in the grand, universal scheme of things, but it’s the only action he takes where the emotional through-line is clear: it results from his remorse and his learning to be better, and he makes amends for his actions in a direct and tangible way. His bombastic rescue of Jotunheim in the movie’s climax — a realm he never visits, interacts with, or learns about in the slightest after his initial invasion — pales in comparison to this touching gesture.
When the film ends, it does so in a poignant place, with Thor having sacrificed his own happiness with Jane in order to protect the Frost Giants, even if little in the film’s drama challenges or complicates this decision along the way. While his character development may play like the flip of a switch, it still retains a vague enough resemblance to a traditional narrative arc to be functional, and to inform our understanding of his background moving forward.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of his next three appearances, in which his presence is largely passive.
A Passive Prince
The question of Thor’s worth (as a leader, and as a hero) continues to loom large over his next three appearances, but it’s rarely the driving force behind them, and so it often feels like repetitive wheel-spinning. The Avengers’ first team-up is less concerned with Thor’s place among the other heroes — except in the broadest, most utilitarian sense of whether he can gel with them conceptually — and more with his godlike powers. His presence undoubtedly yields spectacle, as the most supernaturally gifted of the Avengers, but apart from Loki’s presence drawing him back to Earth (a return that’s easily hand-waved, robbing his prior sacrifice of its intended weight), he’s given but one, solitary moment of effective drama during the movie’s runtime. After the Avengers implode aboard the Helicarrier and he tumbles out of the sky, he pauses for a moment before retrieving his hammer from a field; physically, he’s no doubt able to raise it, but whether or not he can do so emotionally is another matter. This beat may not last long, but his brief pause to consider his “worthiness” plays deftly into the film’s overarching structure, which is all about whether or not these heroes can function together. For a brief moment, Thor doubts his place in this story — as does the audience — which helps make the Avengers’ eventual reunion all the more satisfying.
His appearance in Thor: The Dark World orbits this same idea, of what it means now that Thor can (and does) wield this enormous power. However, the character’s solo sequel suffers in too many respects for this question to remain central. Its plot focuses almost entirely around characters simply waiting around for the nine realms to align. While this results in some fun theatrics (primarily, an inter-dimensional game of Portal in the film’s final act), it leaves both its heroes and villains with little by way of motive or drama pertaining to one another. Of course, Thor suffers unequivocal loss in this film — the death of his mother Frigga (Rene Russo), which complicates his forgiveness of Loki — but for the most part, he’s a passenger to events in which he has little hand, despite Odin verbalizing his spiritual journey on occasion. The villain Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) may seek power and destruction in the abstract, but there’s no point at which his perspective clashes with Thor’s; while our hero ends the film by stating he’d “rather be a good man than a great king,” there’s little in the story to indicate what those two ideas even represent, let alone how they clash.
The Dark World does introduce joking elements which the series would eventually lean on.
The Dark World does, however, introduce joking elements which the series would eventually lean on. Thor’s very presence, as a regal prince drawn from antiquity, clashes with the tone and aesthetics of modern Earth, and while he may not interact with our world enough for this to be a central premise, its fleeting details provide a window into this existing tension. He’s an awkward puzzle piece in a world of Earth-bound Avengers; it’s amusing when he hangs his otherworldly hammer on a coat-rack, or when he rides the London subway to retrieve it. The mere sight of these interactions is funny enough.
This disconnect is expounded upon in Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which the Avengers make a game out of trying (and failing) to lift his hammer. Soon after, the newborn villain Ultron accuses them of being “unworthy” — a parlance the series has now firmly established — because of their destructive actions. Thor, once again, briefly ruminates on this idea when the group escapes to Hawkeye’s farm, and he accidentally breaks a toy belonging to a child; is he a destroyer after all? But while this minor, silent beat contributes to the movie’s overall themes, it precedes the MCU treading water when it comes to Thor, since he flies away and exits the story in the very same scene, leaving the other Avengers to butt heads as they reflect on their dangerous natures, and returning only to help create The Vision. The prince of Asgard has already undergone this very same arc, and while the other Avengers now wrestle with this question, Thor instead pursues exposition about the Infinity Stones (a concept that isn’t as relevant to Age of Ultron as it is to future films). Even though he still contributes to the spectacle, he’s reduced to little more than a concept meant to bridge the MCU’s Earth-bound and cosmic goings on.
The tension between Marvel’s space opera and human drama is built into Thor’s narrative conceit, but it’s one that — prior to his comedic transformation in recent years — the series took little advantage of in anything but a logistical sense. However, the MCU would get its first taste of truly mining this disconnect in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, in which Earth-dweller Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) spends most of his time making pop culture references unfamiliar to his alien friends, introducing a kind of comedy that would go on to define the tone of Marvel’s major crossovers. Fittingly, in the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, Star-Lord and the Guardians now fight alongside Thor himself, and the two franchises feel as if they belong hand in hand — which may not have been possible had the God of Thunder not undergone such a radical and hilarious makeover in his subsequent appearances.
Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of our Thor retrospective!
