Director/Photography – Noah Luke, Screenplay – Steve Doucette, Producer – David Michael Latt, Music – Christopher Cano & Mikel Shane Prather, Visual Effects Supervisor – Sasha Burrow, Production Design – Paul Bianchi. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Myrom Kingery (Thor), Vaune Suitt (Grace Choi), Daniel O’Reilly (Loki), Vernon G. Wells (Odin), Tyler Christopher (Dr Nicholas Sagais), Neli Sabour (Adrian Quinn), Ashford J. Thomas (Greg), Christopher Robert Smith (Patrick Nelson)
Plot
In Asgard, Loki breaks out of confinement and kills his father Odin, taking his staff and heading to Earth. Grace Choi heads an archaeological research team when Loki appears, blasting open the entrance to a cave and freeing the giant wolf Fenrir. Thor then appears, announcing that he has come to defend the Earth. He and Grace’s team set out to stop Loki before he finds the two parts of the amulet he needs to unleash Ragnarok, the end of the world.
Since the early 2000s, the low-budget US production company The Asylum has been known for their output of Mockbusters – films that come out with titles intended to mimic those of big-budget releases in the hope that people will mistake them or not look too closely. In between these, they essentially created the Gonzo Killer Shark film, as popularised by their bad movie hit Sharknado (2013), and have made an assortment of monster and disaster movies.
Thor: God of Thunder was an Asylum mockbuster released to coincide with Marvel’s fourth Thor film Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). As with the release strategy for most of The Asylum’s mockbusters, Love and Thunder went into general release worldwide on July 6, 2022 and God of Thunder appeared two days later. The film here is not related or should be confused with Thor: God of Thunder (2011), a videogame from Sega that was released to coincide with the first MCU Thor film Thor (2011) and featured the voices of Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston. Earlier, The Asylum had produced another Thor mockbuster with Almighty Thor (2011) to coincide with the first film, although that does not appear to be connected to this Thor film. Nor have there been any attempts by The Asylum to create copycats of the other two Marvel Thor films.
Expectedly, Thor: God of Thunder is a Thor copy on a cheap budget. With Almighty Thor, The Asylum made nominal words about it being based on the Norse Myths but Thor: God of Thunder definitely takes all its beats from the MCU – from the conception of characters like Thor, Loki and Odin to the depiction of Asgard as a separate realm and of Mjolnir only being able to be picked up by someone who is worthy.
Myrom Kingery as Thor
On the plus side, the film is not entirely awful and is at least watchable. The biggest jolt coming after watching MCU’s Thor is expecting to see a Chris Hemsworth equivalent in the title role and instead getting Myrom Kingery, who looks as though someone cast a wrestler or a beefy, balding, middle-aged biker in the part. That said, Kingery plays with a soft-spoken quality that works fairly well for what the part requires. The visual effects for the giant-sized Fenrir are variable but the effects of the downtown of a city flooding do look quite convincing.
Noah Luke had previously worked for The Asylum as a cinematographer. He made his directorial debut with Jungle Run (2021) and went on to direct Attack on Titan (2022), Battle for Pandora (2022), Moon Crash (2022) and Doomsday Meteor (2023) for them.
