Paradise Lost: Regarding Thor

In a team full of weird science, Thor was always a bit of the odd man out on the Avengers. Sure, the 2011 film that introduces the character tries to explain it off with the old Arthur C. Clarke axiom that science so advanced/different from our own would look like magic but there's straight up a chainmail wearing bearded man hitting frost giants in the face with a war hammer. Let's see your science explain that one.
This was the movie that gave us Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston and they've both become household names ever since. Back in 2011, I was about to start up grad school and not the fresh-faced college from 2008 when the MCU first launched. I had enjoyed everything I had seen so far but still was wary especially as not-great X-Men movies were churning out at a regular pace in the interim. Seeing Thor was almost an obligation, I was truthfully more excited for the MCU's debut of Captain America a couple months later. I had read some Thor comics growing up but not a whole hell of a lot, the only solo Avenger I was interested in before college was Captain America, the most archetypal DC Comics superhero in the Marvel Universe; always more of a DC kid. Something about a buff dude with an electric hammer that lived in a gold pipe organ in space connected to the rest of the universe with Rainbow Road just didn't speak to me.
Final lap.
So I went in one rainy May evening on the movie's opening night with low expectations and was blown away by how easily Hemsworth and Hiddleston inhabit their roles, the Shakespearean gravitas Kenneth Branagh (Everything Branagh does is Shakespearean, even Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit which is interesting but that movie fucking sucks). The action was fine, it's probably the weakest action in the entire MCU to date, but it doesn't necessarily take you out of the movie. And it was this and Black Swan that made me appreciate Natalie Portman again after three Star Wars prequels did their damndest to make her acting seem vanilla. Her chemistry with Hemsworth is effortless and combined with his easy-going winking charm makes the movie fun to watch. But when Branagh needs to make things serious, that scene where Odinson is cast out of Heaven by his father is easily the best scene from a thespian standpoint.
It's one of those fights where everyone takes it too far and says things they regret.
Thor ran the biggest risk of any of the solo Marvel movies coming out of the gate because of how fucking outlandish it all is; Norse gods in space? That's a hard sell. It largely worked though, before Ragnarok, I don't think it would be far off to say the weakest MCU flicks centered on the Asgardian Avenger. But even all these years later, Thor still works; Iron Man 2 saw two men opposing each other because of their respective father's legacies. Thor is about two men that share the same father that oppose each other competing for his. That's the emotional core that makes us care about the characters in between the fish-out-water jokes and obligatory punches. And super jacked shirtless Hemsworth I'm sure went over well with audiences too.

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