8 / 10
Official trailer
I really liked Thor. It’s the strangest choice Marvel made in its first phase: hand a comic about a flying Norse god to Kenneth Branagh, the man who had spent twenty years filming Shakespeare, and let him make a story about a king, two sons and an inheritance.
Chris Hemsworth plays Thor, arrogant and spoiling for a war. Tom Hiddleston plays Loki, the brother who was never going to inherit anything. Anthony Hopkins plays Odin, Natalie Portman plays the scientist who finds Thor in the New Mexico desert, and Idris Elba plays the gatekeeper.
Branagh’s gamble is what wins me over. I get a real kick out of watching a Shakespeare man treat thunder gods like a squabbling royal family, and whenever the film stays in Asgard I’m completely on its side. The desert scenes are where my attention drifts. It cost about $150 million and made roughly $449 million. It’s an 8: the Asgard material is excellent, the Earth material is thin, and the two leads are the reason the character lasted.
The Setup
Odin has kept peace with the frost giants of Jotunheim for a thousand years. On the day Thor is to be crowned, a handful of them break into Asgard’s vault, and Thor takes a war party to Jotunheim against his father’s orders. Odin strips him of his power and his hammer and throws him down to Earth, where he lands in the New Mexico desert in front of an astrophysicist and her research team. Mjolnir lands nearby, and nobody can lift it. Meanwhile Loki discovers the truth about his own parentage, takes the throne while Odin sleeps, and starts working on a plan that ends with his brother dead and himself the sole heir.
Branagh’s Asgard
The Asgard scenes are the film. Branagh shoots them like a court drama: an aging king, a favored son, a second son nobody takes seriously, and an inheritance nobody is going to divide fairly. He uses tilted camera angles throughout. They drew complaints at the time and make complete sense once you notice what they’re doing. Asgard is a place where nothing is level and everyone is off balance. The design work is the best of Marvel’s first phase, all gold and Kirby-inspired geometry, and Odin’s vault and the Bifrost sequence look like nothing else in the series.
The Bifrost is the image I’d keep from the whole first phase. It looks like a court painter got his hands on a comic book, and I could stare at Odin’s vault for an hour without getting bored.
Hemsworth and Hiddleston
Hemsworth is a revelation in the first act, because he plays Thor as completely unbearable. He’s loud, he’s entitled, he starts a war over an insult, and the film has to break him before the audience can like him.
Hiddleston’s Loki is the better piece of writing. He isn’t evil, he’s the second son, and every terrible thing he does follows from the moment he learns his father took him as a spoil of war. The film gives him a real grievance and lets him be right about parts of it. That performance carried Marvel for a decade. Loki became the franchise’s most reliable character because this film made him a person before it made him a villain. Hiddleston gives the film its heart. I think the scene where Loki learns he was taken as a spoil of war is the best acting in the picture, and he plays it as a son’s heartbreak before it’s ever a villain’s motive.
For Writers
Branagh makes his hero insufferable for the first act, then takes everything away from him, so the audience meets the real character at his lowest point. A protagonist the reader dislikes at the start has somewhere to go. When you write, let your hero win sympathy across the book instead of starting with it. Write your opening chapter so your protagonist does something that puts the reader off. Then design the loss that changes them, and don’t rush it. A character who improves in one scene hasn’t changed, they’ve been forgiven.
The Frost Giants and the War
Jotunheim is the film’s weakest world, a grey rock with grey giants on it, and the fight there suffers for it. What the sequence does well is show why Odin exiles his son: Thor loses a hundred years of peace in twenty minutes because somebody called him a princess.
Laufey, the frost giant king, is given just enough to make the truce credible. He’s tired, he’s beaten, and he wants his stolen relic back, a more reasonable position than the one Thor takes.
The war is really about the family. Odin made peace by taking an enemy’s child, raising him as a son and never telling him, and every problem in the film comes out of that one decision.
For Writers
Odin’s old act of mercy, raising a stolen enemy child, is the seed of everything that goes wrong two generations later. The strongest plots grow out of a decision made long before the story starts. When you plan a book, write the history that created your conflict, then let the characters live with its consequences instead of inventing new trouble. Ask what your antagonist’s grievance is and when it began. If it began during your book, it probably isn’t deep enough yet.
The Earth Material
The New Mexico scenes are the weak half. Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster is written as a set of reactions, and the romance develops in about two conversations, nowhere near enough for what the story asks it to carry later.
Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgård are entertaining, and the running joke about a homeless-looking man smashing coffee cups works. The agency subplot with the impounded hammer exists mostly to set up the wider franchise.
That’s the drag on the rating. Every time the film cuts from Asgard to a diner in the desert, it steps down a level, and I find myself waiting for it to go back. Portman deserved a character, and the romance asks me to believe in something the script never builds.
The Supporting Asgardians
Idris Elba’s Heimdall gets three scenes and dominates all of them, and that tells you something about the casting. Anthony Hopkins does the whole king-and-father performance without condescending to the material. Rene Russo is wasted as Frigga, and the series never corrected it. Jaimie Alexander’s Sif and the Warriors Three provide the battle scenes with some personality, and they mostly disappear from the franchise after this.
The Destroyer sequence in the third act is the one moment where the two halves of the film meet properly, with a faceless Asgardian machine walking through a small American town.
For Writers
Branagh’s camera tilts through the entire Asgard section, so the audience feels the imbalance in the family before anyone explains it. Technique can carry your theme without a word of exposition. When you write, look for a stylistic choice, sentence rhythm, chapter length, point of view, that can echo what the story is about. Pick your book’s central tension. Ask what formal choice would make the reader feel it even when nothing on the page is naming it. The best effects are the ones a reader can’t point to afterward.
Why It Holds Up
It holds up because the family story underneath is real. Odin lies, both sons pay for it, and the film ends with Loki letting go of the spear instead of being defeated.
It’s also the only Marvel film that treats its own absurdity as an opportunity. A god falls into a desert and gets hit by a van twice, and the film plays that straight and funny at once.
An 8. The Earth half drags, the romance never convinces, and Branagh’s court drama makes this a better film than a comic about a flying hammer had any right to be.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Branagh treated a Norse god as a king’s son with an inheritance problem, and the comic material stopped being an obstacle. Find the ordinary human story inside your strange premise and direct all your attention there. The reader will follow the fantastic part on its own.
Is Thor (2011) worth watching?
Yes. The Asgard scenes are the best-looking work in Marvel’s first phase, Hemsworth gets the arrogance exactly right, and Hiddleston’s Loki is the performance that carried the franchise for the next decade.
It’s an 8 because I’d happily watch another hour of Odin, Loki and Heimdall and would trade most of the New Mexico scenes to get it. The Earth half is thin and the romance is undercooked, and the family drama underneath is still stronger than anything else Marvel made before The Avengers.
