Film Review: Thor - Love and Thunder

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature
Violence Acceptable
Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

Your enjoyment of this movie will depend greatly on how you respond to writer/director Taika Waititi's humor.

I am not a fan.

His critically acclaimed Jojo Rabbit, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, is a tedious and pretentious movie that thinks it is deeper than it is.  I admit I am in the minority on this opinion.  Many, especially younger people, respond very strongly to his work.  Waititi's style is to wrap intense drama in ironic humor so that the two things become more impactful by juxtaposing each other. 

 At least that is the goal.  

Instead, I find that without mixing the two elements in the proper combination, the dramatic moments feel unearned and the humor comes off as cheap.  Perhaps younger people respond to him because his movies have the maturity of a teenager.

That is essentially the problem with Thor: Love and Thunder.

SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE FIRST ACT OF THE MOVIE.

The movie picks up after the events of Avengers: Endgame.  Thor (Chris Hemsworth), has been traversing the cosmos with the Guardians of the Galaxy.  But the god of thunder is weary and is looking for some meaning in his life.  Meanwhile back on Earth, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is dying of cancer.  Feeling her life slip away, she feels a call to Mjolnir, Thor's hammer that was shattered in Thor: Ragnarok, which lies in pieces at New Asgard waiting Excalibur-like for someone worthy to restore it.  Things come together when Gorr the God-Killer (Christian Bale) arrives in New Asgard and kidnaps several Asgardian children.  So it will be up to Thor, Jane, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Korg (Taika Waititi) to save the day.

On paper, this is standard Marvel stuff.  And this movie draws its source material from two very good comic storylines.

Gorr is a very intersting character.  On his planet, he was a very pious man, who begged his god Rapu (Johnny Brugh) to help him and his daughter (India Rose Hemsworth) as they were dying of thirst in the desert.  Rapu's callus and mocking response to Gorr's suffering causes him to renounce his faith in his god.  Gorr also happens upon something called the Necrosword which gives its user the power to kill gods.

In more capable hands, this could have been an incredibly deep exploration of the mystery of suffering and religious faith.  Instead, it feels like it was written by a college freshmen who has read Friedrich Nietzsche for the first time.  The gods are condemned as vile and noxious, worthy of our condemnation instead of our worship.  I wish Waititi would have read something like CS Lewis' Till We Have Faces, which handled this accusation in a very powerful way.

As a Christian, I don't take much offense at this.  Most of the pagan gods are vile and noxious.  It is one of the reasons why the loving and true God of Christianity was so appealing to the different pagan peoples of the world.  So when they portray Zeus (Russel Crowe) as a hedonistic, violent, egotist, it is very much in keeping with what we find in Greek mythology.  Marvel wisely does not lean heavily into this theme and make stronger parallels to modern religions.  That isn't to say that those digs are not present.  In the city of the gods, Omnipotent City, Thor points out the different gods.  One of them is off screen that he calls "The god of carpentry."  Again, Waititi thinks he is being clever when he is really being very tedious.

Waititi: (writes) "Look there is a the god of carpentry."

Audiences: (roll eyes)

Waititi: (mischievous grin) What?  I didn't say it was Jesus.  You can't get mad.

The second comic story that is here involves Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor.  The comics did a very good job dealing with Jane's contradictory feelings regarding wielding Mjolnir.  When she wields the hammer, she is healthy and powerful.  But the more she used the power, the faster her cancer worked at her body.   This is the backbone of a great character drama.  But Waititi whiffs this one too.  Even in her first scenes as she is getting treatment, the scene is filled with awkward jokes.  Movies like 50/50 showed that you can use even incredibly juvenile humor as a way to deal with the tragedy of cancer.  But Waititi never gets there.  It never feels credible or earned.  Portman does the best job she can with the part, but she is given very little space to explore this story.

Thor himself seems to get dummer with each movie.  He was never the brainiest, but he is clearly there to be the butt (sometimes literally) of most of the jokes.  He is dumb to the point of near incompetence.  This is not a good look for a hero.

Luckily, Thor never falls completely into that territory.  Hemsworth's charisma and performance always let you see his courage and his heart, despite the awkward humor.  He and Portman still have great chemistry that really helps sell their awkward but sincere relationship.  Bale chews the scenery, as if he enjoying the chance to play the "Joker" and not the "Batman" of the movie.  Thompson is fine as Valkyrie, but she doesn't have much in the way of personality.  The true is same for Korg.

Visually, the movie is very engaging.  The battle scenes are fun to watch.  Omnipotent City is more lavish and over-the-top than Asgard.  The fight in the Shadow Realm upon a tiny, tiny planet is incredibly well-shot and staged.  And I have to admit that Thor does something very intersting in his final battle with Gorr that shows the best of version of Waititi's mixing of the silly and the serious.

If Waititi did not feel the need to keep adding in more awkward humor and political/cultural commentary, there is an incredibly good Marvel movie here.  

MILD SPOILER AHEAD FOR THE ENDING.

I spent most of the movie slightly annoyed at the shifting tone and shallow drama.  But the last five minutes of the movie actually got to me despite my reservations.  I'm not saying that the ending fixes all the problems of the rest of the movie.  But I always tell my student directors that they want to end their movies "on an exclamation point."  You want to hit your audience in a way to make them feel something, anything in a strong way.  

And I'll be darned if that last shot and that last line didn't somehow get to me and make me smile.  For that reason I left the theater happier than I had seeing Thor: Ragnarok.  The ending reminded me that buried deep under the constant bombardment of awkward, modern humor there is a story worth watching.

Ragnarok film was its most successful Thor movie to date.  If Love and Thunder does equal or greater box office, then I think the god of thunder will be stuck with Waititi for years to come.