Formula: Thor: Ragnarök / Thor: The Dark World
There’s a thing about the MCU that we all intuitively know but forget whenever a new film comes out: the MCU is a series. We’ve never seen anything quite like it, so our attempts to make sense out of it really mucks up our ability to judge it. With most franchises, there’s a movie then a sequel. You judge the sequel by how it compares to the first movie and the success of the sequel tends to dictate if there will be another sequel. The MCU throws all those metrics off. What do I compare Thor: Love & Thunder to? You’d think it’s the last Thor movie but that came out 5 years ago with about a dozen MCU movies in between. In a normal franchise, I’d look to the last movie, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but that’s not exactly comparable. Or there’s the larger question of the phases. Should I rate a movie by how it sets up the conclusion of some phase? And that’s where I realize it might be best to look at MCU movies as episodes in a series.
Think of a show like Community. Some episodes stand on their own. Others link different episodes to another. Parts of each lead to pay off in later episodes. When I think of Community, I think of it in terms of seasons or the entire series, not individual episodes. I remember watching Community week-to-week. Some episodes I wouldn’t like as much and I’d pick at the individual episode for a week because that was the new content I had to look at. However, when I go back and watch the show now, it’s just a single episode. I barely even think of it on its own anymore. It has little impact on my overall feelings of the series. Sometimes, that episode I didn’t care for even gets better when I look at the season as a whole, because I can appreciate it as a touch of variety.
Thor: Love & Thunder appeals to me more as the movie between Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever than as a film taken on its own. I largely stay out of the “Is the MCU cinema?” discussion. First, because it’s a tedious, underdefined question. Second, because when I say that I look at it much more like a multi-billion-dollar TV series, I don’t mean that in any way as a bad thing. This post is a reaction of Love & Thunder though, so I should talk about it some specifically.
Love & Thunder is one of the best 29th installments of a movie series you will find.
I’m being glib of course, but it’s also a nice reminder of what we are talking about. It’s the 2nd Taika Waititi movie. It’s the 4th Thor movie. It’s the 8 credited time Chris Hemsworth has appeared as Thor. Saying Love & Thunder is a little stale is like criticizing a James Bond movie for being formulaic (which I’ve done): true but not insightful. With Waititi at the helm, the Thor movies have moved into a less serious place in the MCU. I disagree with calling this an outright comedy due to several plot points, but Waititi has always been about puncturing a story structure without abandoning it. What We Do in the Shadows has fun with vampire stories without ever feeling like he dislikes them. Jojo Rabbit is about rejecting the Nazi ideology while recognizing their destructiveness. One can certainly argue about his effectiveness at doing this. He does the same thing with the Thor movies. He attempts to laugh at the premise of the movie while serious things are happening*.
*Little side rant here: All MCU movies are jokey, but the Waititi style isn’t the dominant style. It’s mostly him and James Gunn choosing this method. The rest of the MCU movies are more about the characters having fun for jokes. When the Avengers joke, it’s because they aren’t taking a particular mission or moment seriously. With Waititi and Gunn, they tend to poke fun at the entire concept of the movie. That’s playing with dynamite, because it risks negating the entire movie.
This movie picks up a while after Endgame. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets back in shape and works with the Guardians of the Galaxy for a while. Thor is getting bored of the god life, as there’s little challenge and it’s quite lonely. Eventually he leaves the Guardians to check on New Asgard, which is run by King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), who is similarly bored by her administrative duties. The one person having a good time, it turns out, is Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). She actually has Thor powers now due to flimsy but plausible within the MCU reasons, although this new role is masking severe personal problems in her life. It turns out the trouble in New Asgard is tied to a guy called Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) who has come to kill Thor because, well, as the name implies, Gorr kills gods. There’s some further mythology that leads them to meet some other gods, including Zeus (Russell Crowe), but ultimately it’s about Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane (aka The Mighty Thor) killing Gorr, who has taken Asgardian children as hostages.
I understand that Ragnarök has been a bigger critical and audience hit so far. It’s a more successful funny movie. It had more characters with history like Loki and Hulk who could be mined for jokes and had Jeff Goldblum, who simply is funny. I’m among the many who preferred Ragnarök, because it didn’t try to take on too much. Love & Thunder has higher ambitions yet it’s not as successful. Simply put, the jokes have more trouble landing. If you aren’t a big fan of Taika Waititi’s Korg, then his narration can get tedious. Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane are the other main returning characters and it’s harder to mine jokes out of their dynamic. Thor needs more of a straight man to play off. Unfortunately, he’s friends with Valkyrie now who is used to him and Jane is jokier than he is. It’s a weird balance, even though I do like seeing Natalie Portman in a more playful mood than I normally get to see her. Love & Thunder touches on more topics of death and loss this time. It makes sense, given Waititi’s success with Jojo Rabbit, but I didn’t find the mix of the comedy and serious that successful. Instead of complimenting each other, they tended to step on each other.
While I thought the movie had issues on a story and interpersonal dynamics level, I have few complaints about the cast individually. Hemsworth has really mastered the himbo appeal of Thor. Tessa Thompson is a walking sight gag as a peace-time leader. Natalie Portman, as I said, is a lot of fun as the Mighty Thor. I don’t know the truth to if there was any drama between her and the MCU before this, but I get why she would return for this movie. She gets a fun hero role and doesn’t have to show up in more if she doesn’t want to. I love “experimental prestige cinema Natalie”, but it’s nice to have “blockbuster Natalie” back for a minute. Bale’s Gorr is a villain who works best leaving you wanting more. Similar to Blanchett’s character in Ragnarök, he looks really cool in his few scenes but doesn’t really have the depth to show up much more than he does. He’s better than the role needs, and I’m happy that they didn’t get fooled into thinking that meant the movie needed more of him.
As I ranted about in the beginning though, more than anything, Thor: Love & Thunder feels like a MCU installment. It takes a stab at evolving the longest tenured Avenger. It took some swings with how it mixed the light and the dark elements of the story. It didn’t totally work for me, but it wasn’t an egregious failure. From a larger series perspective, I appreciated the step away from multiverses after the last two films leaned heavily on them. Perhaps the reason why I’ve been seeing people push to call this a comedy movie first is because Waititi isn’t the best director of action sequences out there, so don’t expect Russo Brothers quality there. Given that this is one of four MCU movies that will come out in a 12-month span, Love and Thunder is a fine holdover until I get my next fix.
Side Rant: OK, this may be very specific to my Twitter feed, but what’s up with this mini-social media trend of attacking how bad Thor: Love & Thunder looks? It’s not the most gorgeous movie I’ve ever seen, but it looks fine. I really don’t get people comparing budgets and quality with RRR. I liked RRR, but the CGI is not what you should be pointing to as the selling point on that one. Besides, CGI quality isn’t linear. You can get 90% of the way there a lot cheaper than that last 10%. That said, VFX crews all around have to work under crazy conditions (pay cuts and arbitrary time constraints), so I’m normally happy as long as any film looks better than The Mummy Returns.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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