Thor: Love and Thunder

Out of the original Avengers group within the MCU, no character has had a simultaneously rocky yet long-lasting journey than that of Thor. The Asgardian God of Thunder hadn’t always had the best track record in comics previous to his introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and even that came with its fair share of bumps with the first Thor film (released in 2011) and especially his follow-up film, Thor: The Dark World (released in 2013) not really grabbing audiences with its grand but hollow atmosphere, style over substance presentation and mostly stoic characters placed in ill-fitting situations. Thor’s role in the universe was given a fresh spark when New Zealand director, Taika Waititi, gave the world, Thor: Ragnarök, which seemed to finally win over audiences with its more light-hearted tone, colourful and creative environments, and characters that felt more relatable and entertaining. While it definitely still had its haters, Thor finally felt like he reached a point where audiences and critics were fond of him and when it was announced that Waititi would return to direct Thor’s fourth film, Thor: Love and Thunder, people were ready to rejoice once again. Too bad that luck didn’t favour them in this outcome. Still recovering from his trauma after the events of Endgame, Thor (played again by Chris Hemsworth) is called away from his new team, the Guardians (don’t get your hopes up with them being in this movie) as he discovers that someone is slaying gods across the universe. The butcher in question is Gorr (played by Christian Bale), a mortal who lost faith in his god after he allowed his daughter to die and has obtained a blade capable of slaying gods and has now set his sights on New Asgard. Upon arriving, he is reunited with King Valkyrie (played again by Tessa Thompson) and unexpectedly reunites with his old girlfriend, Jane Foster (played again by Natalie Portman) who now wields Mjolnir, becoming The Mighty Thor. Now forming a team of godly beings, Thor travels to confront and defeat Gorr, while also rekindling his old love for Jane, who is hiding a painful secret she wishes to ignore. Unlike Ragnarök, general audiences weren’t as pleased with Love and Thunder and how much of joke Thor as a character and as a franchise had become.

The premise for this story takes inspiration from two incredibly popular comic storylines; Jason Aaron’s Mighty Thor comic book, which dived into Jane Foster’s time as the God of Thunder, and the Thor: God of Thunder run, which introduction the world to Gorr: The God Butcher and his vendetta against the gods. Both stories are gripping material that are grand in scale, powerful in its themes and content and showcased a side of Thor that most people were impressed and enthralled by more so than other stories within his run, so there’s plenty of material to make a great movie out of. After his success with Ragnarök, Taika Waititi said that he wanted to do something completely different from his previous outing while still maintaining the style, humour, and tone of these films, which tragically came with a huge downside. This film is beyond shallow; despite featuring a narrative that is ripe with juicy drama, tortured and real characters and a brutal honesty to its tone that made people care more about the circumstances because it felt big and important, this film throws all of that away in exchange for countless gags, dumb writing with a pretty poor screenplay written by Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and a tone that refuses to let moments sit and mean something . The movie actually starts off on a strong note that feels like it’s going down the path of the comics in a respectable manner (in regard to its tone at least), but once the plot gets going, it becomes painfully clear the focus is on how funny and wild things can be as opposed to what works best for character, narrative progression, or tonal consistency. Apparently, the production for the film was incredibly fun to work on, but also incredibly obvious that it was nothing but a large joke, even Waititi expressed himself in an interview how the mindset was like “10-year-olds told us what should be in a movie, and we said yes to every single thing.”, which pretty much sums a lot of the problems up. It’s not that the movie ignores certain dark and deep elements in the film, especially in regard to both Gorr and Jane, but it’s either completely glossed over the second it’s addressed or its immediately followed up by a dumb-bell punchline, like its afraid to talk about serious things. While something like Ragnarök got away with its tone and goofy atmosphere due to its minimal stakes and little connection to its source material, this one’s much harsher and epic source material needed to be taken more seriously in order to properly work as a movie.

As a character, Thor has come quite a long way from his introduction to his modern portrayal, and that journey has been for the better. His early appearances lacked a certain punch that kept people from getting into him, only relying on Chris Hemsworth’s charm to stay relevant underneath an otherwise stale, stoic and boring role. Once Thor was given more of a light-hearted edge and Hemsworth was allowed to show off his comedic talents, the role became much more relatable and the later Avengers films exploring the grief and trauma he experienced from losing so many of his loved ones helped round him into a man who can speak in an operatic booming tone but also harbor the naivety and goofiness of a child. While these building blocks were good, he’s become incredibly goofy come this latest film, where again the tone and directing prevents any nuance in the portrayal and instead makes him come across as a bunch of jokes and lines that barely feel character based. Gorr is also plagued with a weirdly goofy portrayal that doesn’t match with his design, backstory, and motivation. Bale does a good job in the role, but it’s a very messily handled character with little identity outside of these dumb jokes. A majority of the characters suffer from this mindset where the humour doesn’t come from character, but rather writing that any of them could say so that limits variety in a comedy and makes a lot of them lack an identity. Jane Foster as Thor arguably suffers the strongest and has the hardest hill to climb due to the poor handling of her character in the past, and while she is definitely better in this film, every positive comes with an equal negative. It’s nice to see Portman act invested as the character and she does it much better here, but (without going into spoilers) her end results make her purpose in this movie feel pretty useless, she actually pulls off the looks and feel of The Mighty Thor quite nicely and gets some cool moves with the hammer, but is stuck with terrible dialogue like ‘’what should my catchphrase be’’ or something along those lines, and while it’s nice to see Hemsworth and Portman have a shred of chemistry when it was non-existent in the past, the dialogue between them is 90s rom-com levels of awful. Valkyrie as a character is completely useless in this movie and feels entirely tacked on (any exploration of her bisexuality is also a complete lie) and when the main characters are nothing but jokes, the side characters and background roles are nothing but stupid lines (there are two screaming goats that never shut up). While no one’s acting is awful (outside of a hilariously awkward Russell Crowe cameo), its plagued by awful writing holding them back.

The writing for this movie is the worst thing about it because a majority of these attributes proved they could function in a Thor film from the previous example (the comedic tone, the colourful environments, the almost ‘’Rock-Opera’’ time-period based atmosphere), it isn’t a complete failure of an idea, but what is a failure is how much of this universe and franchise has devolved into meaning so little due to its light-hearted tone. The tone of this new Thor came as complete 180 against the original two film’s dull and lifestyle tone that people didn’t like, but Waititi’s overcompensation in destroying everything that was created in those first two films has resulted in not only the character and the world feeling segmented, but also that half of its own mythos is a joke, therefore so much of this character’s life, passion, and development feels like nothing but a punchline. It’s become a real issue in this latest film where scenes feel so much like an SNL sketch that it ironically lacks that epic quality that Thor should carry but doesn’t because it wants nothing to do with that past version of the character. It’s a very messy handled world and even when a moment could come across as legitimately funny or at best just light-hearted enough, you can’t enjoy it because there’s no relief or break from any other moment in the movie. From a visual standpoint, the movie does have some nice colourful visuals that feel interpretative and very unique (especially during the final act of the film) and despite it looking incredibly fake (with one of the fights looking like a PS1 game), it’s still visual pleasing which is also true for most of the action, which is nice looking in parts with an occasional cool move but nothing worth remembering. Most of the songs used make the movie feel more light-hearted by comparison because of how much it feels like a rom com, but they aren’t too overused, and they don’t take you out of the moment unlike other aspects of the film.

Ironically Thor has gone from a character that was overly serious and needed to smile, to an overly goofy character that needed to take things seriously, in the span of his entire MCU run. That’s honestly one of the funniest things about the movie, how it’s taken a narrative that would’ve worked great with the original tone but went too overboard in its new tone to make it work. Clearly the passion behind this movie is clear from the cast, the director, and the fact that many of the actors (especially Hemsworth) wanted to continue playing these parts because of Taika Waititi’s involvement, shows how much they respect his vision. However, that vision was messy and unfiltered, resulting in a tonally messy film with poor usage of its source material, wasted characters with weak personalities, visuals that look nice but also very fake, action that is flashy but weightless, and writing that 5% of the time is okay and 95% of the time is really ineffective and annoying. Not an awful film (its arguable whether it’s even worse than the first two films), but definitely not one strong enough to bring the rainbow.