by Heath Lynch, Contributing Writer
Whether intentionally or not, 2022 has been shaping up to be a pivotal year for the MCU. It’s been several years since Endgame, and we’ve had more than a handful of movies without any clear direction as to where we are going. With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness we had a chance to examine the multiverse in the wake of Spider-Man: No Way Home. With Thor: Love and Thunder we have the followup to the exceptional Thor: Ragnarok and Taika Waititi’s rise to mainstream stardom. Yet Multiverse of Madness failed to deliver on its promise. Sadly, Love and Thunder is worse, like a ship without its rudder, just as misguided as the franchise at large. Unfortunately, it’s official — the MCU is on the struggle-bus. Like Mjölnir itself, this franchise is certainly showing its cracks. I genuinely don’t know where we go from here. Worse, post-Love and Thunder, I’m not sure how much we should care.
That’s a big yikes.
Thor: Love and Thunder follows the titular Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as he seeks to find purpose in life after the events of Avengers: Endgame. We find him quickly abandoning the Guardians of the Galaxy, whom we last saw him paired up with, when word travels that gods are being slain. This is because Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) has sworn to destroy all gods after he was forsaken by his own personal god of worship. This of course includes Thor the God of Thunder. But when returning to New Asgard, Thor Odinson encounters not just Gorr, but The Mighty Thor as well… his old girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). What lies in front of them is a series of space adventures and battles to determine the fate of all the gods in the universe.
I would love to say that this movie is flawed in just a few scenes, but is otherwise enjoyable. However, that’s just not the case. Love and Thunder is flawed on a structural level down to its very core. That’s because this movie doesn’t remotely know what it wants to be. The dichotomy of thematic elements, as well as tone and atmosphere, throughout this movie will give you whiplash. There’s an attempt at a profound storyline centered around the character of Gorr about loss and grief. However, it’s so incredibly rushed — with no backstory or emotional tether for the audience — that it just feels forced. It doesn’t hold nearly the weight that it thinks that it does. So all the drama falls flat and devolves into eye roll-inducing melodrama. Yet, running parallel to everything Bale and his storyline are trying to achieve, the rest of the film, and everyone in it, might as well be in a parody. The attempt, and I stress the word attempt, at humor here is non-stop and relentless. This film is not happy unless everything is a joke. That makes it really hard to get invested in a story when the movie can’t even take itself seriously.
The humor is a big part of the weakness of this feature. That’s because, well, it’s not funny. Waititi is known for bringing his quirky Kiwi humor to Hollywood. Whether it is in the criminally underseen What We Do in the Shadows, or the populist Thor: Ragnarok. In fact, Waititi, and his brand of laughs, is almost single handedly responsible for the success of Ragnarok. It completely re-imagined the character of Thor and the universe he lives in. But instead of trying to continue the trend it was decided that everything needed to be amped up all the way to 11.
More specifically, it’s as if someone else saw Ragnarok and decided to try to copy it without understanding what makes it work, instead of the same creative team carrying on with what made Ragnarok great. Here, we are bashed over the head with jokes about screaming goats, even though we are a decade past the height of that meme. You’re supposed to guffaw over the idea that Thor’s weapons are now sentient, with feelings, and how silly it is that they can be jealous of other weapons. And I hope you love Guns N’ Roses, because their music is all over this film, and the movie definitely wants you to giggle at it. You will not. In fact, in a packed auditorium, at the early preview showing with nothing but MCU super fans, this movie garnered mostly crickets. Almost every joke flew by without even a chuckle from the audience. There were maybe a handful of times, at best, when the theater actually unanimously laughed at a joke. Myself? I only laughed twice the entire movie. Because when everything is supposed to be funny, nothing is funny.
The other big way in which this movie lets its audience down is in its structure, pacing, and editing. These three elements combine to showcase exactly how mangled Love and Thunder truly is. Were you excited to see the Asguardians of the Galaxy as teased at the end of Endgame? Sucks for you. That’s over virtually as soon as it begins, with zero character development tied to the experience, and an illogical reason to split up the group and abruptly end the story just to get Thor flying solo. Do you wonder how our heroes escaped imprisonment in the Shadow Realm? Because I do. They were all tied up and stuck to a wall and then the very next scene, the very next cut, they were free… for no reason. Do you wonder why this film screeches to a halt in momentum during the middle of the third act when it randomly decides to go back to Earth for not even five minutes just to go battle again? That was definitely weird. Especially when it was just to separate Jane from Thor only to have an unsurprising, 100% anticipated return of Jane anyway. And, how about that trip to Omnipotent City? You know, the one that had absolutely no purpose other than to tease future MCU stories? The scene that shows exactly how trivial all of this is because apparently gods can die all the time, super easily? For the people who like to complain about the Canto Bight casino storyline being useless, man, do I have a new one for you.
Every time this movie starts to do something interesting with its character development, it changes course and doesn’t resolve the arc. Almost every time there’s a big action sequence, the movie finds a way to hit a brick wall halfway through, derailing the tension. Often when our characters are in peril, or even when there’s just a simple sequence, it feels like there are transitional scenes that were left on the cutting room floor that were needed to explain how we got from here to there. There are countless examples of this film not knowing what it’s doing, and not knowing where to go. It’s all amplified given that the movie is edited together so poorly. I mean, what do you expect when this movie has not one, not two, or even three, but four different editors. Oof.
So if the tone is off, and the jokes don’t work, and even the narrative story has pacing and editing problems, does anything really work in this flick? Well, sure. Kind of. The theme work at play with Gorr was a beautiful counterpoint to that of Jane. Both characters are wrestling with the same question. What do you do with yourself when the sand is draining out of the hourglass? We all have a limited time in this world. Life is short. Do we try to have a grand adventure and go out with a bang? Do we condemn those who have scorned us? Do we reconnect with those we care about and feel the warmth in the power of love? Do we fester in hatred and exact selfish revenge at perceived injustices? This theme is poorly woven throughout the film, but it’s there. Damnit I wish there was more of it.Especially in regards to Bale, as he’s doing such fine work, and he’s doing everything he can to save this movie.
The character of Gorr is easily the most compelling aspect of this movie, and I wanted to see so much more of him than what we got. His emotional journey was engaging. Though I will say that even his character feels inconsistent at times with its demeanor and even its accent. At once he’s solemn and dour, while also evoking the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He’s depressed and angry as much as he’s maniacally gleeful. It’s odd. But given all the other inconsistencies throughout this film, I’m more inclined to lay that fault at the feet of Waititi as director than Bale. He’s clearly performing in the manner in which he was directed, and he does a great job at it even if it is contradictory within the character.
But even other parts of this film that you feel would be a slam dunk are missing pieces of the puzzle. The ending feels off. Thor spends most of this movie wanting to be alone, only to realize he needs to bring love back into his life. So he pines after Jane to only smash cut to him being a… dad, out of nowhere. It feels like a tonal misstep for where the movie was going. The soundtrack? Rockin’… if you enjoy Guns N’ Roses. This is not nearly as engaging as Ragnarok. The art direction and set design? Fine, sure. Most of these sets are beautiful. But most of them aren’t even real. It’s clearly just actors standing in front of green screens, and the film doesn’t always do the best job of hiding it. How about the visual effects? Even that is a disappointment. A movie that’s a part of the MCU, being funded and distributed by the House of Mouse, with a $250 million budget, should not have an issue with its CGI. And yet, it does. There are some scenes that are gorgeous. The battle in the Shadow Realm is easily the highlight of the film. The cinematography makes it look gorgeous. The faded colors fighting back against the ever encroaching darkness. Superb. But what about the shadow monsters attacking New Asgard, or when they attack the kids at the edge of Eternity? Be honest with me, could you even understand anything that’s going on in these scenes? Because you’re lying if you say, yes. These sequences are indiscernible. The pitch black creatures being layered atop one another makes it impossible to differentiate one being from another, one limb from another, one attack from another. There’s no way you have any understanding of what’s transpiring. It’s just giant shadow noodles wildly flailing around, and our heroes trying desperately to fight back against things that aren’t really there in front of a green screen.
It’s at this point we have to take a hard look at the MCU as a whole and wonder what we’re doing here. In 2008, we were blessed with Iron Man. An amazing film that started something bigger than we could’ve possibly envisioned at the time. Counting that film, it took five movies, and four years, to get to The Avengers. There was purpose and direction. The movies were leading us somewhere. Ever since then, there has been a driving force throughout these stories. We would get roughly a handful of solo hero flicks that had slightly unifying purposes or themes that would culminate in an Avengers film where we would get resolution to some of our overarching narratives. It was working really well. It took five movies to get to The Avengers. Since then, we’ve never had more than seven films between our epic team up pictures. These usually happened every three years, but never more than four. Now, I have no idea what’s going on.
Thor: Love and Thunder marks the seventh film since Avengers: Endgame, tying the record for films between Avengers movies. We also have five more announced films from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever later this year, to Fantastic Four and Blade in the future, without a single Avengers film being announced. That’s not even counting the fact that we now also have a bunch of Disney+ shows to wade through, and we’ve already had six shows so far. Seven if you count What If…? There’s also an additional seven shows announced, a couple specials, some animated kids shows, and even a season two of some shows all on their way, without a single Avengers film being announced. It has also already been three years. These announced films and shows put us out to five years, without a single Avengers film being announced.
Where are we going? What are we doing? Why should we care? With the Infinity Saga we were constantly building towards something. That’s what made Endgame so special. Even though the movie certainly has its flaws, the fan service it provided, and the catharsis for following and completing such a grand cinematic journey over the course of a decade, was wholly rewarding. There’s nothing to look forward to at this time. Our stories aren’t coalescing into anything great. There’s no big bad on the horizon. And we’re now at the point where our movies, and our characters, are becoming so powerful that they are losing all sense of tension and stakes. In Multiverse of Madness, we eliminated the fear of death. Someone died? No worries, there’s a new universe where they can come back. Someone died in another universe? Doesn’t matter, we still have them in our universe. When there’s an infinite amount of possibilities, it makes it really difficult to care about anything that happens, because everything can be changed. Here, with Love and Thunder, we are even now saying that the powers of a literal god are actually trivial. Gods are slain left and right here, by a ton of different people. Even Thor is killing gods without remorse or challenge. Also, apparently Thor can just give his powers now to… anyone. There are over 30 Thors flying around and killing shadow monsters at the end of this movie! It’s insane, and it trivializes power levels which are needed to make the MCU work. Because if everyone can be a god, then no one is a god.
I don’t know where we go from here. Most of the purpose and stakes that made the MCU so great have been stripped away from the franchise as a whole. Even when backed by legendary directors such as Sam Raimi and Waititi, these movies are drowning under the weight of misdirection and clear studio guidance (read, interference). After loving Ragnarok so much, I came into this experience with such high hopes. I’m saddened that those hopes were shattered, crashing down to Earth. I truly hope that these movies, and this franchise, correct themselves. I love these characters and these stories, and I want better. We all deserve better. Because as it stands, Thor: Love and Thunder is a massive letdown, and one of the worst films in the entire MCU.
Score: 5/10
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