The stand-alone Thor movies thus far have been pretty consistent with showcasing library, book, and/or research scenes! In this movie, Thor: The Dark World (2013), Thor reunites with Jane Foster and battles Malekith and the army of Dark Elves. Thor: The Dark World is part of MCU’s Phase Two. Upon rewatching, this sequel to Thor — directed this go-round by Alan Taylor and often cited as among the worst MCU movies — was actually better than I remembered it being. It has two main things going for it:
- Chris Hemsworth’s eyebrows are not bleached blonde like they were in the first Thor movie, and
- There’s a library scene in it.
Here’s a trailer to set the Dark World mood:
Ok, now let’s explore the library scene!
At 1 hour and 26 minutes into the movie, Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) arrive at the Greenwich site of convergence for plot reasons. They walk hurriedly through an academic library in London, and you can see a wooden, rolling book cart in the foreground.
The captions reveal that Jane’s shoes squeak… which is why they get shushed by a student in the library!
Meanwhile, Thor and the main baddie Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) are fighting it out in the college courtyard, and at 1 hour and 30 minutes, the perspective switches back to students in the library checking out the fight from the library’s windows.
Click on any image in the gallery below to view in a larger window.
Jane: What are you all doing? You need to get out of here, now!
Student [holding a phone in his hand]: You’re joking, right? That’s Thor out there! He’s waving his hammer around and everything!
Fun fact: The actor who has this bit line is Royce Pierreson, who plays Istredd in Netflix’s The Witcher TV series!
The next thing we see, Thor’s hammer sends shock waves that blow out the windows in the library. Jane warned y’all.
Click on any image in the gallery below to view in a larger window.
The library scene lasts less than a minute total, but it is a very cinematically striking scene that helps demonstrate the real-world effects and damage due to Thor’s fighting.
The location of the beautiful library is the Old Royal Naval College Library in London. Here are a couple of different views of the library’s exterior and courtyard during this fight scene.
Use the slider below to view and compare both screenshots.
No librarians were easily discernible in this scene — again, it looked like a student shushed Jane and Erik earlier in the scene, not a librarian — so Thor: The Dark World falls into the Class V category.
Note: A shorter version of this post was included in the “A round-up of library, archives, and reel librarian scenes in MCU’s Phase Two” post, published July 2022.
Sources used
- “Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase Two.” Wikipedia, 15 June 2022. Accessed 17 June 2022. CC BY SA 3.0 license.
- Snoek-Brown, Jennifer. “A Round-Up of Library, Archives, and Reel Librarian Scenes in MCU’s Phase Two.” Reel Librarians, 13 July 2022.
- Thor: The Dark World. Dir. Alan Taylor. Perf. Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgård, Kat Dennings, Christopher Eccleston. Marvel Studios / Disney, 2013.
REEL LIBRARIANS 