After the climactic events of the Infinity saga, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff have disappeared, and Clint Barton seems to be returning to superhero retirement after Hawk’s Eye. We’ll learn more about what Bruce Banner has been doing when he joins his cousin in the upcoming Disney + She-Hulk series, but outside of the original Avengers group who first teamed up to prevent Loki and his alien invasion on 2012. only Thor Odinson remains in front and center of the MCU. When Thor: Love and Thunder opens on Friday, the God of Thunder will return.
While much of the old star guard of the MCU franchise has gone ahead (at least for now), Chris Hemsworth returns as Thor for an unprecedented fourth solo film. After his MCU debut with the fantastic Thor: Ragnarok in 2017, director Taika Waititi also returns to the helm and lends his voice to Thor’s rock partner Korg. Tessa Thompson also reprises her role as Valkyrie, and for the first time since Thor: The Dark World in 2013, Natalie Portman returns as Dr. Jane Foster.
Along with the familiar faces from previous Thor films, Love and Thunder will also feature a number of new gods, including Zeus (played by Russell Crowe) and an imminent threat that seeks to end the gods’ almost immortal existence. , Gorr. the God Butcher (Christian Bale). It’s been a few years since we’ve seen the self-proclaimed strongest avenger in action, so before the release of Love and Thunder, here’s a rundown of where we left Thor and Jane, as well as some background on comics. which inspired the film. (Note: there will be no spoilers below for Love and Thunder, or at least nothing beyond what has already been revealed in the movie trailers, but everything that has come before in the MCU and comics of which it has been adapted is fair. game.)
The adventures of Thor
Love and Thunder marks the eighth appearance (!) Of Hemsworth’s film as the God of Thunder (not counting a half-credit scene from Doctor Strange), and many things have happened to the Asgardian throughout this time of screen. He began as an arrogant and petulant prince whose desire for the throne was only overcome by his thirst for war, and he became a worthy hero who realized that he was not fit to be king. He has saved the Earth on several occasions after being exiled there without his divine powers or Mjolnir’s hammer, and cut off the head of the infamous Thanos (after not doing so the first time).
But Thor’s story at MCU can be defined both by all he has lost and by his successes and how he has grown as a character. First, she was his mother in the fight against Malekith the Cursed in the dark world. Then it was his father, who became a space dust in Ragnarok. Then his naughty brother died, as for the third time, in Infinity War. By now, Thor has lost virtually everything he started in Thor in 2011, as most of his closest Asgardian friends, Heimdall and the three warriors, were killed by Hela, the Asgardian goddess of death or Thanos. (Thor even lost his glorious hair for a while starting at Ragnarok, but grew up again during that dark period on Endgame where all he did was drink beer and play video games with Korg.) Asgard has also been destroyed, with all that is there. of its people and culture that now exists in the portion of land on Earth called New Asgard.
Towards Love and Thunder, Thor has handed over the government of New Asgard to King Valkyrie and has decided to return to space with Korg and his new friends, the Guardians of the Galaxy. Thor still wields his enchanted ax, Stormbreaker, after Hela destroys his trusted hammer at Ragnarok, even though he was able to borrow a version of Mjolnir from a timeline prior to Endgame. (It looks like Captain America has brought him back to where he came from, but the details of this situation are still a bit blurry, as is often the case with time travel.) Perhaps, above all, the following Thor’s chapter now finds it. without purpose. After countless years of fighting dark elves, ice giants, and all sorts of living creatures in between, God is ready to accept change. “These hands were once used for battle,” he says at the opening of the first Love and Thunder trailer. “Now they are just humble tools for peace. I have to find out who I am exactly. “
The return of Jane Foster
Although Dr. Foster made a brief appearance on Endgame, in which unused images from The Dark World were recycled along with Portman’s new voice-over work, Love and Thunder is the first time Portman has played Foster in real life in almost one decade. And this time, he comes to play a version of the character that is much more than a damsel in distress or one that is forever waiting for the God of Thunder to return to Earth. “I’ve seen him play the science fiction character in Thor 1 and 2, and it seemed pointless to do it again,” Waititi said of Portman’s astrophysicist in a recent interview with Variety. “This character seems like just a love interest. She’s a woman of the earth who runs deadly and has no echo at all times.
Instead, Portman now takes on the role of Mighty Thor herself.
In Phase 4, there have been several cases of new characters or those who had been in smaller roles taking on the mantle of one of the original Avengers, such as newcomers Yelena Belova in Black Widow and Kate Bishop in Hawkeye, or Sam Wilson to Hawkeye. The hawk and the winter soldier. And beyond the entire torch passage, the multiverse has also allowed several versions of a character to appear on the screen at once, such as Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. With the sole exception of Kate’s team with Clint Barton in Hawkeye, what separates the appearance of a new Thor in Love and Thunder from these other Phase 4 projects is that the original hero is not dead (or potentially hiding on the moon). ), and Jane does not come from an alternative universe. In Love and Thunder, Odin’s son is no longer the only one worthy of carrying the hammer.
During Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman’s Thor career in 2014, Jane grabs Mjolnir to become the goddess of thunder after Thor is unable to temporarily do so himself. There’s a bit of a learning curve for Jane in her new line of work, and an even longer adaptation period for some Asgardians to accept her as the new Thor; Odinson, meanwhile, mourns his lost weapon after being beaten at several New Kingdom bars. But Foster embraces the legendary title over time, earning the respect of his divine companions as he learns to use Thor’s famous weapon in new and deadly ways.
Images via Marvel Comics
While Jane gains the power of the Mighty Thor, the sudden gift comes at a great cost. Before he had this ability to transform himself into a god on a whim, he was battling breast cancer. Becoming a Thor purges the disease from your body every time it transforms, but it also neutralizes your chemotherapy treatment. In other words, being Thor saves Jane every time she goes into battle, but is slowly killing her in the process, weakening her body every time she returns to her mortal form.
To prepare for the part of the new goddess of thunder in love and thunder, Portman transformed her body into a superhero through an intense 10-month training program, and the results are undeniable: the Jane was absolutely overwhelmed. “At Black Swan, I was asked to be as small as possible,” Portman told Variety. “Here, they asked me to make it as big as possible. This is an amazing challenge, and so is my mood as a woman.”
As for Jane’s comic book cancer story, fans have wondered if Foster’s version of the MCU will face the same grief since Portman’s return to the franchise in 2019 was announced. Both Portman and Waititi have offered standard supervised answers that include any questions loaded with spoilers before the release of a Marvel movie, though the director of Love and Thunder’s answers have been a little more revealing than those of its co-star. “Part of the reason [Portman] I wanted to play this character is that he has a dilemma in the book, “Waititi explained to Variety, before seeming to measure his next words more carefully.” Let me talk about that? “
The butcher arrives
Ten years after Christian Bale last put on the hood at The Dark Knight Rises, the 48-year-old English actor returns to superhero movies. Since Batman didn’t die at the end of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, well, guess who lived long enough to become the bad guy? In Love and Thunder, Bale joins the MCU to become a great villain of all-time Thor comics: Gorr the God Butcher.
Thor has been in the pages of Marvel Comics since the early 1960s, facing villains like Loki, the Destroyer, Malekith and Hela over and over in later years. All four of these characters appeared in Thor’s first three films, but Gorr is a relatively newcomer. God Butcher’s comic book debut came just a decade ago, during a stellar story created by Aaron and artist Esad Ribic in 2012’s Thor: God of Thunder.
In comics, Gorr was born on a hard, nameless planet, where his people suffered hunger and a relentless sun from the day they were born until the day they died. Despite their ungrateful way of life, they still worshiped the gods and offered them what little they had, even though their prayers were not answered. Gorr’s faith in the divine diminished with each death in his family, until he no longer believed that the gods existed. When he finally found out that …