Why Thor (2011) is the best movie in the MCU series

With the onslaught of Thor: Love and Thunder arriving in theaters on July 8, it seems only fair to look back on Thor’s earnest beginnings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe when he first came onto the silver screen in the 2011 movie, Thor.

The film sees the hero in his own neighborhood of Asgard about to be crowned king of the realm until a slew of frost giants attempt to steal the tesseract. It’s later revealed that Loki sent the giants to sabotage Thor’s coronation, and when the hero picks a war with the giants, their father banishes Thor to Earth, only to be picked up by Jane Foster and her colleagues.

Many Thor fans will argue that, as of now, Thor: Ragnarok is the best in the Marvel series. However, they are sadly mistaken and here’s why.

Thor features humble beginnings

Of course, the MCU, altogether, began with some starts to characters that may not have been their best, but Thor’s origins truly show the making of an exceptional hero. He is expelled to Earth and is forced to start all over in an unfamiliar place. It’s the classic case of a stranger in a strange land scenario.

To be completely honest, this film is the essence and the foundation of Thor and the other films would not exist without this one here. It is the catalyst for all of Thor’s deeds and misadventures. This film lays the basis for the hero and has him in good company with a remarkable cast at his disposal.

Thor proves that less is more

In a world full of comic-book movies that relish in CGI, expanded fights, and an enormous budget piled on top of it, one could easily get lost in the fray of the superhero craze and miss out on the plot, story and the brilliance of the traditional film language for entertainment. Ragnarok and probably, the soon to be released, Love and Thunder, may suffer from this problem of adding beautiful CGI and colorful imagery to distract its audience from the beauty of grounded storytelling.

The flash of sequences are fine and there is certainly nothing wrong with that in a superhero movie, but the latter Thor films seem to fill those sequences to the brim and have waterlogged the market with spectacle over substance and meaning. Hopefully, the next movie will make up for previous mistakes.

Thor features great brother dynamic

Something that has stuck out from the first movie is its ability to take the brothers Loki and Thor and have them begin their relationship in a more sensible and level-headed fashion only to have the power-hungry Loki turn it into an adversarial and heated dynamic. Loki seeks the throne despite finding out that he has been adopted by Odin after a war with the frost giants and raises Loki as his own.

Distraught, Loki takes the throne at a moment of Odin’s weakness and attempts to finish his brother off using the Destroyer. This all ends when the two clash and Loki falls back into the outer limits of Asgard.

The movie was able to convey the best and worst of the brothers by showing their highs and lows in the short time that the film is on.