ThorSave

A van rattles down a New Mexico highway in the middle of a lightning storm. Jane Foster — astrophysicist, post-doc, sleepless — is at the wheel chasing what her sensors say is an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky aurora bridge anomaly hovering above the desert. Beside her, her mentor Dr. Erik Selvig, half-asleep in the passenger seat, and behind them, intern Darcy Lewis, half-hugging a giant Tupperware of Cheez-Its. The storm is impossibly violent — clouds folding into themselves, ground lightning, a column of writhing blue energy descending from the sky onto the desert floor. Jane drives directly into it. The van's hood plows over a tall blond man in armor who's just been deposited at the bottom of the column. "I think that was legally your fault." "Get the first-aid kit." The man stands up dazed. "OH MY GOD!" Jane yells. The column closes above them. The film begins.

Cut backwards to 965 AD. Frost Giants — eight-foot blue creatures of Niflheim ice with red eyes and hand-to-hand combat instincts older than human history — invade the Norwegian coastal town of Tønsberg in search of the Casket of Ancient Winters, an Asgardian relic that gives them their power. Asgardian warriors, led by a one-eyed king named Odin in golden plate armor, ride down from a rainbow Bifrost bridge and engage them on the frozen beach. Odin himself takes the Casket from the Frost Giant king Laufey, banishes the Giants back to Jotunheim, and leaves them to die in their own permafrost wasteland with no power source. The Casket goes home to Asgard. Voice-over narration from Odin tells his two sons the story of that war while small children — Thor and Loki, ages eight and seven, in matching Asgardian princewear — listen at his feet. Both boys swear they'll be the warrior who carries Mjolnir into the next war. Odin smiles down at them. "Only one of you can ascend to the throne. But both of you were born to be kings."

Present-day Asgard. Thor's coronation day. The throne room is packed with citizens, the Warriors Three (Volstagg the fat raconteur, Fandral the dashing rake, Hogun the silent Easterner) and Sif (warrior maiden, dark hair, born for a sword) in dress armor in the front row. Odin is older now, hair gone gray, his single remaining eye still hard. Thor walks down the aisle. He's twenty-eight, blond hair past his shoulders, a hammer the size of a car battery at his hip, drunk on his own future. Mid-ceremony, alarms fire. Frost Giants have breached Asgard's most secure vault — the one holding the Casket — through some unknown teleportation gateway. They're caught and killed by the Destroyer construct standing guard, but the breach is the issue. Three Frost Giants got into the vault. Someone let them in.

Thor wants war. Odin wants diplomacy. "This is now a fragile peace your grandfather forged with the Casket and a treaty written in your great-grandfather's blood. You will respect it." Thor storms out of the throne room. In his chambers, with his brother Loki — younger, leaner, dark-haired, the family black sheep — Thor decides to take the Bifrost to Jotunheim and confront Laufey directly. Loki, who normally talks Thor out of his stupid ideas, this time talks Thor into it. "I'm not saying you should do it. But if you did, no one would stop you." They round up Sif and the Warriors Three. Heimdall, the all-seeing watchman of the Bifrost, lets them through against Odin's standing order, because Heimdall has private reasons of his own.

Jotunheim is hell-frozen, all jagged ice spires and roving Frost Giant patrols. Thor and his five companions march into Laufey's throne room and Thor immediately starts insulting the king of the realm in his own court. Laufey lets them go. They walk back to the Bifrost site. One of Laufey's lieutenants follows them out, hooks Volstagg with a Frost Giant gauntlet, and the fight erupts on the ice plain. The skirmish is ten minutes of clean Branagh staging — Thor swinging Mjolnir into Giants by the dozen, Sif fencing two at once, the Warriors Three each in their lane. The Giants release a beast — a massive Bilgesnipe-style ice serpent — and the team starts losing. Odin appears on horseback at the head of an Asgardian rescue column with the Bifrost reopened behind him. He grabs the Giants off the field. He breaks the treaty. "Heimdall, open the Bifrost!" He drags Thor home in irons.

Throne room scene. Odin strips Thor of his armor, then of his power, then of Mjolnir. "Through your arrogance and stupidity, you've opened these peaceful realms and innocent lives to the horror and devastation of war. You are unworthy of these realms, you're unworthy of your title, you're unworthy of the loved ones you have betrayed." He casts Thor through the Bifrost to a random terrestrial realm. He whispers a worthiness enchantment over Mjolnir — "whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor" — and casts the hammer after his son.

Back to the New Mexico van crash. Jane, Erik, and Darcy bundle the unconscious blond man into the van and drive him to the local hospital in Puente Antiguo, where a confused ER staff tries to sedate him and he punches an orderly through a glass partition trying to figure out where his weapon is. They drop him off in town. He spends the next day wandering the local diner barking orders and smashing a coffee mug onto the floor in approval. "This drink. I like it." "I know!" "ANOTHER!" Darcy films him on her iPhone. He tells them his name is Thor Odinson. They think he's a homeless cosplayer. Until they take him out to the impact crater that landed forty miles outside town overnight — a crater the size of a basketball court, with a small stone hammer at the center, fenced off by SHIELD agents in tactical kit. Thor walks up to the hammer. He grips the handle. He cannot lift it. He cannot move it an inch. He drops to his knees in the dirt and the rain.

Phil Coulson and his SHIELD team haul Thor in for interrogation, where he calmly refuses to give name, rank, or country of origin. Then — across the room, in a holding cell — a tall, broad, terrified S.H.I.E.L.D.-recruited British agent named Sitwell wonders aloud what to do with him. Loki, in disguise, appears in Thor's cell — Loki has the run of the Asgardian intelligence apparatus now and is operating Thor's earthly captivity remotely. He tells his brother that Odin has died in Odinsleep — true; Odin slipped into his thousand-year recovery coma immediately after banishing Thor — and that the throne now belongs to Loki, and that the treaty with Jotunheim will be honored by Loki on the condition that Thor remain on Earth forever. He's lying. Loki has been queen-of-hearts running the whole crisis from the start. Loki himself orchestrated the Frost Giant break-in at the coronation by letting them through a hidden Asgardian back-door, knowing it would provoke Thor's idiocy and his banishment. Loki has just discovered, in a private moment with the Casket of Ancient Winters, that his skin briefly turns blue at the touch — he is not Odin's biological son. He is Laufey's son, raised by Odin as an infant out of guilty pity after Jotunheim's defeat. He's a Frost Giant. He's been one his entire life. He has snapped.

Back in Puente Antiguo, Sif and the Warriors Three break Asgardian protocol and travel to Earth themselves to retrieve Thor before Loki's coup consolidates. Heimdall lets them through. Loki — running Asgard alone — sends the Destroyer construct after them. The Destroyer arrives in Puente Antiguo at sundown, a fifteen-foot armored sentinel made of unbreakable Asgardian metal with a fire-blast face. It begins leveling the town. The Warriors Three, in human dress, engage it on Main Street. They get destroyed. Sif goes down. The Destroyer turns to Thor — still mortal, still de-powered, walking back from the diner with Jane Foster — and aims its face cannon at the blond depowered prince. Thor walks up to it. He spreads his arms. "Brother. Whatever I have done to wrong you, whatever I have done to lead you to do this, I am sorry." The Destroyer hesitates. Then it back-hands him across the boulevard.

Thor lies dying on the asphalt. Jane runs to him. He kisses her hand. He tells her she is wonderful and that he is sorry he could not save her. He's lying about the dying — he's about to die for someone else, willingly, having put a civilian (Sif, the Warriors Three, the whole town) ahead of himself for the first time in his life. In the desert ten miles away, Mjolnir, which has been lying in its crater unmoved by every passing soldier and bystander and SHIELD operative, glows. The runes engraved on its side light up. It tears itself free from the ground. It spirals up into the sky, gathering storm clouds, and arcs through the air at Mach 4 across the desert. It lands in Thor's outstretched palm and the rune-light explodes outward in a thunderclap that knocks every observer flat. Thor stands up. The Bifrost armor reassembles itself around him in mid-rise — silver and red, full plate, Mjolnir glowing in his fist. He has just become a god. "You know, for a crazy homeless person, he's pretty cut," Darcy says.

Thor and Mjolnir versus the Destroyer is a forty-second one-sided fight. He summons a tornado. He flies over the Destroyer with the hammer. He lands the hammer through the Destroyer's faceplate from above. The construct collapses into smoking pieces. Thor walks back to Jane and tells her he has to leave. He tells her he'll come back. He calls Heimdall — "Heimdall! Open the Bifrost!" — and the column of light comes back down for him. He brings Sif and the Warriors Three home with him.

Asgard. Bifrost observatory. Thor arrives, demands to know what Loki has done, runs to confront him. He finds Loki standing over the unconscious Odinsleep chamber, having just murdered Laufey — Loki's biological father — in front of the comatose Odin to secure his own credentials with the throne. "I never wanted the throne. I only ever wanted to be your equal." Loki has activated the Bifrost on a feedback loop pointed directly at Jotunheim, designed to channel the Bifrost's energy and destroy the Frost Giant homeworld entirely. "I'm going to prove to Father that I am the worthier son. I am going to destroy the Frost Giants." Thor refuses to let him. They fight, brother against brother, hammer against scepter, across the throne room and out onto the Bifrost itself. Mjolnir versus Loki's Casket-stolen ice-magic. The fight is genuinely brutal — Hiddleston and Hemsworth both did most of it on practical sets.

Thor realizes the only way to stop Jotunheim's destruction is to destroy the Bifrost itself, severing Asgard's only connection to the Nine Realms — including to Earth, including to Jane. He swings Mjolnir into the Bifrost generator and breaks the rainbow bridge cleanly in half. The Bifrost's beam blows out into the void. Thor and Loki tumble off the broken edge. Odin — awake now, his Odinsleep ended by the impact — appears at the end of the broken bridge and catches Thor's left arm in his right hand and Loki's right hand in his other. The three of them hang in the void. Loki, hanging from his father's hand, looks up. "I could have done it, father. For you. For all of us." Odin, voice rumbling, says "no, Loki." Loki lets go. He falls into the void. Odin pulls Thor up onto the bridge alone.

Back in Asgard's throne room. Thor and Odin reconcile. Thor admits he has much to learn. Odin acknowledges he made mistakes raising both his sons. Thor, looking out the throne room window, asks about Jane. Heimdall — on the broken edge of the Bifrost, looking out over the void — tells Thor that Jane is searching for him still. He can see her. Cut to Jane in Puente Antiguo, by herself in a desert lab, building a homemade dimensional-aperture rig with Erik and Darcy. She doesn't know Thor is watching her through Heimdall's eyes. She just knows she has to keep working. The film ends on her face under the desert stars.

Post-credits. A SHIELD black site somewhere in the American Northwest. Nick Fury, in a long black coat, walks Erik Selvig into a vault and sets a small briefcase on the table. He opens the case. Inside, glowing blue, is a small Asgardian-built artifact — the Tesseract — that Howard Stark recovered from the Arctic in 1945. Fury wants Selvig's help studying it. Erik walks up to the case and stares. The camera circles the back of Erik's head — and reveals, in his reflection in the glass cabinet behind the case, Loki. Loki is standing over Erik's shoulder, invisible to Erik, smiling. "Well, I guess that's worth a look." Cut to credits.