After taking three posts for the larger part of Marvel Phase Four – two for the TV shows, starting with WandaVision and ending with Ms Marvel, and one for the movies before Thor: Love and Thunder – I really thought I could end my overview with one final post. But no. The phase's two final movies are worth discussing at some length (for different reasons), and I also want to have plenty of space to shred She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. So here I go again, splitting the final roundup into several posts. Did I mention that Phase Four is really packed?
I recently watched Wakanda Forever, but it will have to wait as I find I have surprisingly much to say about Thor: Love and Thunder.
Movie setup: Thor is hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, but after losing his whole family in previous films, he's lonely and unsure of his future role. Then, on a visit to New Asgard, he crosses paths with the sinister Gorr the God Butcher, who kidnaps Asgardian children in an attempt to catch Thor's attention. At the same time, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster shows up wielding Thor's ex-hammer Mjolnir as "The Mighty Thor", but she's not doing as well as it appears. It's up to Thor to save the kids and his fellow "gods" (yes, there's a reason I use those quotation marks). But can he save Jane?
Overall impression: I can't help feeling sorry for Taika Waititi. His previous Thor movie Thor: Ragnarok, which handled a serious theme with plenty of jokes, was generally popular. Whereas this Thor movie, which handles a serious theme – actually more than one – with plenty of jokes, is generally considered a disappointment. He could be forgiven for asking himself: what do Marvel fans want?
And I'm afraid I'm just like the others here. I really liked Thor: Ragnarok, but though I had a good enough time with Thor: Love and Thunder when watching it, the more I think about how it handled its plots, the more I see it as a misfire. Even when watching it, I found it uneven, though it gave me a couple of good chuckles.
Many commentators have claimed that "Marvel humour" ruined the film. For myself, I love Marvel humour – it's one of the things that got me through all of the Marvel back catalogue in the past years – but the problem with the humour in Thor: Love and Thunder is that fewer jokes land than in Thor: Ragnarok. It's often annoying when it's trying to be funny. Sidekicks like Valkyrie and Korg, who were a definite asset in Thor: Ragnarok, got on my nerves here. For my part, I don't mind Marvel movies being full of jokes, but they have to be good jokes.
One thing I appreciated, though, was that we got a moving conclusion to the Thor-Jane love story. It didn't sit well with me that Jane simply "dumped" Thor according to Thor: Ragnarok, after their romance had been built up during the two first Thor films. Here we get the background and a sweet reconciliation. I liked Natalie Portman's Jane and the fact that she didn't try to put Thor in the shade when she was in superhero mode. When prepped on the "The Mighty Thor" plotline from the comics, I thought it sounded weird and morbid (also, "Thor" is a boy's name, not a title, as every Scandinavian knows), and I'm still no fan of it, but if it had to be included it could have been worse handled.
Which is more than one can say for the Gorr the God Butcher storyline.
Ah, yes, the villain. He sounds scary. Was he scary? Maybe too scary? He was impressively acted by Christian Bale, and I was on his side the whole time.
Wait, what? How come, when he's... you know... Gorr the... Let me explain. The biggest problem with Thor: Love and Thunder for me is the mythological mess it leaves the MCU in. Odin spelled out in Thor: The Dark World that Asgardians were not gods, simply a powerful people who nevertheless live and die as humans ("give or take a few thousand years", Loki grumbled). This was a perfectly decent way of explaining the appearance of various mythological personages in the MCU, though it raised the question why the Egyptian deities in Moon Knight "abandoned" humankind after humans "stopped believing" in them: if they weren't real gods to begin with but rather powerful interdimensional or space whatsits, why go into a huff when they're no longer considered to be gods?
Thor: Love and Thunder confuses things further. Here, Thor clearly identifies as a god, and he goes to "Omnipotence City", (loosely) ruled over by Zeus, where he meets up with a bunch of other characters from different mythologies who also claim to be gods. But if they are, they are absolute rubbish. Gorr's beef with god-dom is that his god not only failed to help when Gorr lost his people and his family etc., he also turns out to be a bastard. Swayed by a dark magic sword that appears at a strategic moment, Gorr draws the drastic conclusion that all gods are bastards and must die.
The Gorr storyline from the comics as explained to me by YouTube sounded fascinating, and a way to dip a toe into weighty philosophical issues before hastily withdrawing it again with a reassuring explanation: that of course Gorr's god let him down as he wasn't a real god but an alien impostor of some kind. But if Zeus & Co. are supposed to be the real thing, and a bunch of bums, that is not a happy state of affairs for the MCU. And I thought the celestial robots from Eternals were bad...
Now, I don't think Waititi thought through the implications for the MCU when scripting "Omnipotence City"; I believe he only wanted to make some irreverent jokes and fun around with larger-than-life characters like Zeus. ("Since when did we become the joke?" Zeus laments in a post-credit scene. Since you appeared in a Taika Waititi film, buddy.) The best thing to do is probably what Doctor Who fans are used to doing when a bothersome bit of lore turns up in the Whoniverse: simply ignore it.
