[Spoilers] Thor: Love and Thunder [Analysis & Easter Eggs]
Heavy spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder, which opened on Friday 8 July! A rundown of the film including Gorr, Jane, Eternity and Love, plus the key points, the analysis, the Easter eggs and where all of this goes next.
This post runs briefly through the things that caught my eye on a first viewing and the Easter eggs, and then gets into the analysis.
Spoilers ahead
For the episode-by-episode reviews of the shows that aired earlier, click the images below!
Contents
A recent hobby
Started shooting all sorts of things for fun lately. The camera is an α7 IV — shoot in RAW, edit in Lightroom, that kind of thing.
Easter eggs, trivia and analysis
The story of Thor and Jane
A genuinely serious film, this one… Thor finally makes peace with the hole that opened up in his heart after he and Jane split, and it was good to watch him get there. Jane dies at the end, but the two of them get to tell each other how they really feel first, and that mattered enormously… This one hit me hard… The goodbye at the very end, where he says he loves her, was beautiful… Even the hospital scene, where he explains properly why he can’t take her with him — Thor really has grown… And it’s only because he has grown that he can put into words what Gorr actually wants and save the universe. A deep film when you look at it that way.
And then that ending! Gorr’s daughter is called Love, so she and her adoptive father Thor make a pair — Love and Thunder. That title drop floored me!!!
Jane looks set to begin a whole new life in Valhalla too, which is very exciting!
Jane Foster and what comes next
Jane being struck down by terminal cancer and becoming the Mighty Thor is straight out of the comics. Great groundwork. The sorrow she carries plays beautifully too. Genuinely good casting. The first film managed to find perfect fits for Thor, Jane, Loki, Odin, Heimdall — characters who went on to shape the whole MCU. Remarkable when you think about it. This one uses footage from the first film as well, and yeah, it still lands… Also, not even Wakandan or alien technology can cure cancer…
I assumed Eternity would put her right at the end, and instead she dies… A very real kind of story… A bitter ending, but Thor is doing well with Love, and Jane is off starting a new life in Valhalla (a resurrection, maybe?), so there is so much to look forward to.
Heimdall, Odin and Loki should all be in Valhalla, so that could get very entertaining lol
The attack with the shards of the shattered hammer — electrifying!!
Thor Odinson
Thor was in an awful place mentally right before Endgame, and he put on a lot of weight with it. Something must have shifted for him in Endgame, because now he’s out travelling with the Guardians and has even got himself back in shape! Good for him!
He spends this film facing up to what the hole in his heart really is, and he and Jane finally tell each other the truth. Huge growth.
He has basically declared war on Zeus and the rest of them, so Thor 5 looks like it’ll be the gods, led by Hercules, against the heroes of Earth!
Thor handing out his power to the children got me fired up too! Does the Thunderbolt end up as Valkyrie’s weapon? And the Guardians finding him a nuisance was very funny lol Is Thor going to appear in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3? Drax and the others seem to be retiring, which is a sad thought… And that Loki tattoo on his back… I cried. Thor has lost far too much, hasn’t he…
Love
Gorr’s daughter is called Love, and I couldn’t find any comics background on her… Going by the purple beams from her eyes and the way Korg tells it, when Eternity brought her back she seems to have been granted the power of a god as well! She could well be a hero two generations from now, which is exciting! And Thor’s dad side is bound to come out from here on!
She’s played by India Rose Hemsworth, the real-life daughter of Chris, who plays Thor!
Gorr the God Butcher, the Necrosword and the symbiotes
First, Gorr’s background in the comics! Here it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAu2XEYMkOc
A god-killing madman swallowed by pitch darkness. He was once one of the intelligent beings living on a nameless planet covered in wasteland as far as the eye could see, an entirely ordinary man with a family. Life in that harsh environment cost him his family, and his distrust of the gods who never answered his prayers grew and grew. In the end he abandoned his faith, was persecuted by his own people for it, despaired of his life and was left alone with nothing to do but wait for death… and then, by chance, he found Knull, who had fallen out of the sky and lay unconscious, and took All-Black from his hand. With that power his hatred of the gods exploded, and he set out on a journey to use the sword’s immense strength to kill every god in the universe.
https://w.atwiki.jp/aniwotawiki/pages/43717.html
The comics version and the MCU version line up very closely. Here too he despairs on learning that prayer to the gods was meaningless and that the gods he worshipped were trash, and turns god butcher.
You can follow this villain’s motive, but going after children and killing gods indiscriminately is a bit much lol Still, he fails to finish off Sif and Valkyrie (though he probably went easy on Valkyrie so she would open the Bifrost), so he has a clumsy side to him.
Thor talks him round, and Gorr accepts that what he actually wants isn’t the gods wiped out but to see his daughter one more time. Such a good scene, really. And then he realises his own death is close and entrusts her to Thor… A reminder that what matters most is the people you love getting to live happily.
Christian Bale, famous as Batman, gives a wonderfully unhinged performance…
Next, the Necrosword he carries. It turns out to be an item with deep ties to the symbiotes, the same species as Venom. Its proper name is All-Black the Necrosword!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ-VOMY5V10
The details get complicated so I’ll leave them out, but with the Necrosword showing up I thought Knull, the lord of the symbiotes, might appear and the symbiotes might finally be coming to the MCU!? In the end there was nothing symbiote-related in it at all…
The post-credits scene: Hercules
The post-credits scene ends with Zeus’s son Hercules talking about going off to invade Earth! His comics background is below. Incidentally, the comics seem to use the English reading, Hercules, rather than the Greek Herakles.
The Greek god Herakles himself. “Hercules” is the English reading of the name. As in the myths his strength is unmatched, and he ranks among the very strongest in the Marvel universe. He is broadly bold and open-hearted. He can look like a simple soul who wears every feeling on his sleeve, but there is nothing two-faced about him. So he gets along with Deadpool without any ulterior motive, and he and Thor are close friends (in the sense of one hero to another). He loves the expression of life, and combat above all.
https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/441.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiMLlBFy6HQ
It seems he isn’t an out-and-out villain! And since he ends up on good terms with both Deadpool and Thor, odds are he becomes Thor’s partner in the next film one way or another!
The end-credits scene: Valhalla
Jane Foster dies, and the place she wakes up in is Valhalla! What kind of world is it, exactly? One thought that stuck: what if there is no afterlife at all, and it’s a computer world running a copy of Jane’s memories? That would be terrifying.
Eternity
Eternity is the embodiment of time, and every living thing in this universe is said to be a part of him. In this film he grants the wish of the first person to reach him. He never speaks a word himself, and whether he even has a will is left unclear. He’s closer to a law of the universe than a character at this point. Beings on his level include the Living Tribunal and Death! The Living Tribunal in particular had a statue in this film (or maybe I imagined it), and there was one in Doctor Strange too!
The Living Tribunal statue
In the scene where America Chavez and Doctor Strange travel across the multiverse, there’s a statue of the Living Tribunal! As set out below, the Living Tribunal is a three-faced being who serves as the arbiter of the universe.
History
The Living Tribunal has been granted omnipotent power by the omnipotent being the One-Above-All in order to protect and maintain the harmony of the prime reality (Earth-616), branching universes (What If and the like), pocket universes (Earth X and the like), the whole multiverse, and the past, the future, reality and parallel worlds.
The Living Tribunal appears on Earth as required, watching the actions of other cosmic beings, judging whether they will affect the universe as a whole, and handing down a verdict.
Appearance
For convenience the Living Tribunal manifests in a humanlike form with three faces. Only one of the faces can be seen in full, the second is partly visible, and the last is completely hidden by cloth. The three faces represent equity, necessity and vengeance.
Powers and abilities
The Living Tribunal holds infinite cosmic power, is omniscient and omnipotent, and, second only to the One-Above-All, wields absolute authority over the Marvel universe. Should he choose to, he has the power to wipe out the entire multiverse in an instant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Tribunal
The Celestials
There were Celestials in the realm of the gods!! Not that they look like a species who would join the rest of them in a drunken free-for-all lol
Erik Selvig, Darcy Lewis and Sif return
Erik Selvig, Darcy Lewis and Sif are all back! Selvig and Darcy are apparently still in touch with Jane, which was so good to see…
Sif survives instead of falling in battle, and settles down in New Asgard — so glad. Her and Valkyrie getting together feels entirely possible. And the gag about her not being allowed into Valhalla because she isn’t dying as a warrior in battle was very funny.
The goats, Stormbreaker and the hammer
The sheer craziness of the goats was so funny lol That scream lol Completely addictive lol And in the comics they pull Thor’s chariot too!
Stormbreaker becomes a proper character in this one — who knew it was that jealous lol
The hammer’s devotion was lovely too… It kept the instruction Thor gave it, to protect Jane. I cried.
The Asgardian acting troupe
The Asgardian acting troupe turns up again lol And the players are Matt Damon, Liam Hemsworth (the real-life younger brother of the man who plays Thor), Sam Neill (famous for the Jurassic films) and Melissa McCarthy (winner of any number of awards) — nothing but seriously heavyweight actors, which makes the whole thing gloriously surreal!
Valkyrie
Valkyrie carries the same wound as Thor — the hole left in her heart by losing the person she loved… She doesn’t manage to break out of it in this film, but Sif is in town now, so the next one has to get her there…!!!
Zeus
Zeus is played by Russell Crowe of all people! I took him for a small man privately terrified of Gorr, and then he survives being run straight through the chest! It’d be great if Hera came to the rescue when the invasion of Earth arrives in a later film! I rather like the way the realm of the gods is depicted.
The giant beast is Falligar the Behemoth
The corpse on the icy planet where Sif was is a god called Falligar the Behemoth! The comics show him in exactly the same composition.
