Kenneth Branagh and the Art of the Adaptation: or, Stories Will Be Told of This Day!

Ken goes action with 2011's Thor and 2014's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Odds are, if you've ever heard a film critic call something "Shakespearean," they have a limited understanding of what actually makes something Shakespearean. It's often sorta incorrectly applied to anything that involves kings, queens, castles, battles, or political intrigue. That is true about a select portion of William Shakespeare's writings, but just as much of it is made up of dick jokes - and you don't see anyone using the label for National Lampoon's Van Wilder.

If you consider only those basic elements, Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, is the closest thing that Marvel Comics has to the work of the Bard. In the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez, and Gavin Edwards, they write, "People liked to describe Thor's language in the comic book as 'Shakespearean,' by which they meant that, verily, Stan Lee hath sprinkleth Thor's dialogue with enough archaic flourishes to make him feelth like a man from another century." I think that even their evaluation is generous, as Lee seemed to remember to actually do that about half as often as they gave him credit for.

Hollywood is nothing if not unoriginal and when the folks at Marvel Studios went looking for a director to match their projects in development, they didn't stray too far from a basic formula. For the Captain America movie, for example, they turned to Joe Johnston, who had already directed a period-set, Nazi-fighting, all-American classic comic caper in the underrated 1991 picture The Rocketeer. When looking for someone they felt could handle the heightened drama typically reserved for mythology, they talked to fantasy and superhero director Guillermo del Toro and journeyman D.J. Caruso (I can't explain, or defend, that one), before settling on a director for Thor who seems obvious in retrospect: Kenneth Branagh.

Branagh, needing a new career turn after the fading success of his Shakespeare adaptations, similarly found the project in his wheelhouse, saying, "If the actors take those stakes seriously, it is passionate and very intense. That observation of ordinary human - although they're gods - frailties in people in positions of power is an obsession of great storytellers, including Shakespeare and including the Marvel universe." I'm not exactly sure if he felt the need to justify his hiring to us or himself, but Marvel was convinced - he was, after all, the most high-profile and highly decorated director they had attracted to that point.

Before Marvel movies were calculated by computers, directors, especially someone like Branagh, had a good amount of autonomy if not exactly creative control. He hired Natalie Portman to play the scientist Jane Foster, Thor's love interest, before he even hired Chris Hemsworth to play Thor. Hemsworth, only known for playing Kirk's father in the opening sequence of the 2009 Star Trek reboot, was the riskiest hero casting to that point and physically unlike Thor with his "short brown hair, clean-shaven face, and Starfleet-slick American accent," according to MCU. But Ken liked him, saying, "When he came in for a screen test...he did it with such relish, such fun, such a sense of danger."

They passed on British actor Tom Hiddleston, who had previously worked with Branagh on the show Wallander (Ken starred in four seasons of the BBC show based on Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander detective novels, which I considered covering in this column but decided against because his main job for the show is on-camera), instead opting him to cast him as the film's antagonist, Thor's adopted brother Loki, which turned out to be a major decision in the course of the MCU - Loki is the baddie in their first billion-dollar team-up The Avengers and the star of their most-watched Disney+ show, the eponymous Loki.

And the film itself is pretty darn strong despite being a little tonally confused. The top review on Letterboxd is YouTuber Patrick Willems saying, "I forgot how hard this shifts from royal fantasy drama to wacky small-town comedy," and you can imagine which half Branagh is much better at dealing with. However, that's to be expected. That's why they hired him! Having noted Shakespearean Anthony Hopkins play Thor's father Odin also helped with the gravitas.

In 2011, comic book movies had a reputation of being more miss than hit (in a different way than that same statement is true now), so Thor, being pretty good, was a fan favorite. Marvel Studios was now full-steam ahead on The Avengers and their next decade of reign. Ken, not wanting to be tied down to the MCU machine, did not return for the sequel, Thor: The Dark World, which learned all of the wrong lessons and went way too, um, dark. The series would get a reset in 2017 when Taika Waititi took over for Thor: Ragnarok, which he made fully silly and weird and wonderful.

Ken, meanwhile, would return to action with his next project...