The God Who Had to Earn It
Thor gets hit by a van in New Mexico. Then, within about twenty minutes of screen time, he gets hit by a second van. Neither one leaves a mark—he’s a god, technically, even stripped of his powers—and Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 film has a neat line in exactly this kind of visual comedy. It turns out to be its most reliable tool.
Chris Hemsworth plays the Asgardian heir as a golden retriever: loyal, enthusiastic, catastrophically underthinking every situation. He picks a fight with the Frost Giants of Jotunheim on a bad impulse—Asgard’s red-eyed ancient enemies, precisely as threatening as the script requires—and his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins, fully committed to a golden eyepatch) banishes him to Earth for his trouble. The hammer goes separately. In New Mexico, an astrophysicist named Jane (Natalie Portman, doing what she can with a character written as "scientist who blushes") is about to run him over with a van.
The fish-out-of-water comedy lands—Hemsworth ordering coffee by smashing the mug on the floor and demanding another is a genuinely funny beat—and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is the film’s real discovery: a performance of wounded stillness in a movie that otherwise runs on momentum, giving the brothers’ dynamic more emotional weight than the plot earns. When the film slows down enough to let Hiddleston work, you can see the outline of a more interesting movie hiding inside the spectacle.
What Thor isn’t is genuinely curious about its mythological source. The Norse original involves gods who know they’re marching toward oblivion and keep going anyway; Branagh’s version involves a blond man learning humility in time for the sequel. That’s the machine working as designed—Marvel had a cinematic universe to construct, and origin stories are infrastructure, not art. The film knows exactly what it is and delivers competently on its own modest terms. You leave satisfied in the way you leave a meal that was fine: full, not particularly nourished, already forgetting the specifics before you reach the car park.