I’m not sure you know this? But Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was kind of a big deal. Much later, Zack Snyder and/or Joss Whedon’s Justice League chased it in the opening sequence, but before that, Thor basically gave us a whole fan fiction of what if the story pivoted around Aragorn instead of Frodo.
At this point the MCU was very much a thing, with the first of two 2011 releases detailing the origins of two crucial additions to the forthcoming introduction of the Avengers. (The humongous mistake Snyder and every other attempted shared universe franchise made was believing they had to follow some version of the same template; everyone makes fun of “Martha” but it’s the laborious title Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the idea that you had to sit through all of this film just to conclude, “Oh! They’re just gonna be friends anyway”and the core members of a team we just spent two hours proving, other than Wonder Woman we don’t think are as important as them; remember: the MCU began with Iron Man, who until that moment had never been considered as important as Spider-Man or, say, Captain America.)
(That was a long parenthetical aside.)
(Anyway.)
I wasn’t a big fan of Thor when it was released. It felt like a chore, an obligation, something no one thought was worth all that much on its own (and yet ended up, until Brave New World and Brand New Day, sparking the most durable inter series franchise). I thought, as many did, that Tom Hiddleston’s Loki stole the movie, but rewatching yesterday, he seems almost insignificant, in this appearance, much more setup than reward, and not handled particularly deftly, as with any other element in the movie…
They got Keneth Branagh and Anthony Hopkins for this one, hoping they could elevate the material with them alone, but the story is still thin and it still hinges mostly on the goofy moments the later Thor films rely on, because they want to keep him grounded, even though by far the best visuals of the movie are provided in the mud fight, the only time Chris Hemsworth looks larger than life.
But as I suggested at the start of this, they were really aiming for a buddy warrior vibe, surrounding Thor with a fellowship that is clearly subordinate to him, so that he’s clearly the guy we should take most seriously, on a quest that takes a number of twists and turns, one of which is Natalie Portman reclaiming her role as her generation’s geek queen (which once again spectacularly backfires on her in the end, at least as popular reception goes). Whereas Jackson mistakenly makes his once and future king impossibly heroic right from the start, Branagh at least knows there’s got to be an arc to the character, a true humbling, which is also the film’s real failing, not starting in the middle (which is what the recent Masters of the Universe attempts in its tribute to Thor, inadvertently revealing the whole idea to be the secret princess trope), though pretending it does. It makes no difference if we know the backstory before or after Portman and company stumble across Thor, especially since we don’t even see the guy until the flashback begins…
Anyway, this for me remains the weakest of the early films, knowing what it wants but being thoroughly incapable of achieving it.
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