It’s official: in a couple of years’ time there’s going to be a fourth Thor movie in the MCU, and it’s going to be titled Thor: Love and Thunder, and it’s going to feature Natalie Portman as the Mighty Thor and be directed by Taika Waititi. I can’t wait.
There’s a contingent of YouTubers who see it as their bounden duty to pour vitriol on anything with the faintest whiff of “political correctness,” which in practice includes all female-led fantasy, science fiction, and superhero movies. Some disavow any misogyny and I guess quietly hope we won’t go look up what they’ve said about Captain Marvel and Mad Max: Fury Road and Rey in Star Wars and the latest Ghostbusters and the Thirteenth Doctor on Doctor Who. Others are louder and less coherent – “liberals are ruining my childhood, literally no-one asked for this, let’s burn Marvel to the ground!” style of thing.
I mean, one of the complaints is true: Portman isn’t anywhere near as big and muscular as the Mighty Thor. But if that’s your main problem, I have something devastating to tell you about Mark Ruffalo.
If you’re even less familiar with Marvel comics than I am and not clear how Natalie Portman can play Thor, what with him being male, here’s the basics. In the comics, unlike either the Norse myths before them or the movies after them, anyone who can lift Thor’s hammer Mjolnir gains not only his powers but his identity. The usual Thor is a guy called Donald Blake, but there have been several others, including an alien called Beta Ray Bill and a frog and, in a comics run in 2014–2015 titled The Mighty Thor, Blake’s on-again off-again love-interest Jane Foster, i.e. Natalie Portman’s character from the first two Thor movies.
The let’s burn political correctness to the ground! brigade of course hated The Mighty Thor and campaigned for it to be cut short, and some of them claim credit for it ending – which it did with the completion of its story arc, making that claim roughly as plausible as most of the other things these people say. They also say, for instance, that no-one liked Captain Marvel either, a movie which made over a billion dollars at the box-office; and that everyone hated the bit in Avengers: Endgame where all the female heroes band together, a scene which I’ve elsewhere seen criticized only for being too little too late.
So why am I looking forward so eagerly to Thor: Love and Thunder? Most people who write enthusiastically about the MCU seem to have started as comics fans. I suppose I might have been one if things had gone slightly differently, but in fact I never got into any comic as a kid; I was a Tolkien geek instead. And it’s not far to go from Tolkien to Norse mythology. So with most MCU characters the movies are my first sight of them – but not with Thor and his associates.
I did become aware, obviously, that Thor had been reinterpreted as a cartoon character, and I was enough of a purist (you’ll be shocked to hear) that I found this mostly annoying. It didn’t help that the cartoon character was blond, clean-shaven, and a bit of an airhead, where the god is supposed to be ginger-bearded and short-tempered. Worse, not all comics writers have any clue about Shakespearean English, and you’d get sentence constructions like “he didst goeth,” which to me is chalkboard-nails, microphone-feedback, corner-of-tabletop-in-the-elbow-nerve infuriating.
(Not that Thor should technically have been speaking Shakespearean English at all, of course, but even I can forgive comics writers for not filling their dialogue bubbles with Old Norse.)
