Thor Love and Thunder: ‘Interstellar’, ‘Event Horizon’ references explained

‘Thor: Love and Thunder‘ is peppered with references, be it a nod to Harry Potter or a subtle Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson joke. One such scene occurs when Jane Foster, played by Natalie Portman, speaks to a person next to her while getting chemotherapy. 

Foster is battling stage four cancer in the movie but seems wholly engrossed in explaining a scientific concept to the person seated beside her, who’s reading her book. 

In order to do so, she refers to two films ‘Event Horizon’ and ‘Interstellar’, adding that the second movie explains everything clearly. 

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‘Event Horizon’ is a 1997 science-fiction horror movie where a spacecraft with an experimental drive goes missing. The component can warp space and time, creating a wormhole. Similarly, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi epic requires travelling through a wormhole near Saturn to explore distant galaxies for habitable planets. 

A wormhole is a theoretical point linking disparate points in space-time, but in the Marvel movies, this is very much a reality and used by the Asgardians to travel to different parts of the universe. What they call Bifrost is the Einsten-Rosen bridge that Foster mentions in the first ‘Thor’ movie. 

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She tries to explain the same concept to the person next to her, making a hole in a folded page of her own book, to show how the concept works. 

A small but memorable exchange, it shows how there’s more to Jane Foster’s character than just being the Mighty Thor. She’s a brilliant scientist and her work has the potential to change the future of human civilization. Foster’s determination to keep working in the face of her worsening health situation shows the character’s commitment to doing good. 

Foster, of course, ultimately forgoes chemo and decides to wield Mjolnir, which revitalizes her for the moment, but ultimately drains her mortal form of energy, leaving Foster’s body unable to fight the cancer and she dies at the end of the film.