Thor: Love and Thunder: Mindless Fun With Potential To Be More
Thor: Love and Thunder is the fourth solo Thor film that I feel most people didn’t think we were getting. With the lackluster reaction to the first two films (though I really don’t understand the hate for the first), Marvel Studios took it upon itself to change the formula for Thor and make the character and his story more appealing to audiences, both comic book fans and casual moviegoers. To do this, Kevin Feige brought in Taika Waititi, one of the biggest goofballs in Hollywood today, having made movies such as Jojo Rabbit (an excellent film) and Hunt For the Wilderpeople. He has a wild imagination, a typically great sense of humor, and an eye for awesome visuals.
That being said, it’s unfortunate that he wasn’t able to fully capture what made Thor: Ragnarok so different and special. I don’t want to cut the man down though. Marvel Studios wanted him to basically do what he did last time again, feeling as though that would be enough to keep people happy. While the box office numbers certainly displays consumer confidence, the reactions have been more or less mixed, implying that the magic just wasn’t as strong this time. I agree with that, but I’ll start with the positives.
Set after the events of Avengers: Endgame, Thor is traveling around the galaxy with the Guardians of the Galaxy, liberating worlds and saving entire alien races (with some mixed results), but he feels like there’s something missing in his life that’s robbing him of the purpose he yearns for. In essence, Thor feels like he hasn’t quite ‘found himself’ yet. While saving ‘New Asgard’ from the movie’s main villain Gorr the God Butcher (played expertly by Christian Bale), Thor encounters his ex-girlfriend Jane Foster, who is wielding his once-destroyed hammer Mjoinir and wearing an outfit that looks strikingly similiar to his own. While chasing Gorr across the galaxy to save a group of children he kidnapped from Asgard, Thor has to face his shaky past with Jane and come to terms with his insecurities.
Chris Hemsworth is great as usual as Thor, bringing charm, charisma, and some genuine human emotion to the role. This Thor movie is probably his least stoic one yet, making the character of Thor into someone that we’re supposed to identify with and potentially relate to more, which has its ups and downs. Christian Bale plays Gorr with amazing, chilling range. He’s so good in fact, that it feels like he’s acting in a different movie, exposing how much the movie lost by giving him so little screentime. Natalie Portman returns to the role of Jane and actually turns in a performance that convinces me that she was happy to be there unlike previous entries. I loved the fact that the marketing nearly convinced you that this was another ‘passing of the torch’ story, but the movie instead went in a direction I didn’t expect, and I commend Marvel Studios and Taika Waititi for taking a slight risk with this one. Some of the storytelling decisions, though not perfect, made the film more unpredictable than one might’ve assumed it would be at first glance. Visually, the movie is beautiful to look at, with a dazzling sequence that’s in a black-and-white pallete aside from whenever the light would glint off of something. Like I said, Taika has a good sense of humor, and there’s a number of jokes in this movie that he lands well.
If only Taika knew when to hit the brakes in certain areas. The story was decent, but everything was here to make a ‘great’ story if Taika and the studio had been willing to lean more into the serious drama side instead of constantly focusing on comedy. Some of the jokes simply don’t land, and those bad jokes annoyingly affects the scenes that have a bit more dramatic gravitas to them. While an amusing character in Ragnarok, Korg here is practically a useless character. An overused joke machine with a quality level that dips more than it soars. It was pretty obvious in previous MCU entries that death is never permanent and has no real consequences, but this movie takes it a step further in a way that it becomes ludicrous.
Most concerningly, this movie further adds to the issue that Phase 4 of the MCU doesn’t have a clear direction as to where it wants to go. We’ve had a couple of enjoyable entries like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Shang-Chi, and this, but if the studio really doesn’t have a specific endgoal for these stories like the Infinity War storyline was, I feel that more effort should be put in each of these movies to make them the best stories standing on their own they can be. The movies pre-Infinity War that felt a little emptier were mostly forgiven for what they led up to. Some of these movies lately have been ultimately empty but has no future payoff as of yet to justify their existence.
And if MCU movies just merely exist now, how long will it be before people finally decide they don’t want more of the same?
Still, I had a lot of fun with this movie, and my wife liked it a lot more than she expected. Once again, I commend this movie for being a good time, with a few unexpected twists and turns. There were several points where I predicted the outcome but was wrong in the end, and…I like that. I hope more of this kind of formula is pursued in future movies.
7.5/10