Reception to Thor: Love & Thunder hasn’t exactly been glowing. After the deserved praise for🍬 how Ragnarok rebooted Thor’s character into a funn𒁏ier, more sympathetic lead and subverted the MCU formula, we all assumed that Taiki Waititi would pull off the same trick twice. Spoilers: he didn’t. But also, actual spoilers.
The film is a stylish and often hilarious adventure, but it’s also riddled with tonal inconsistencies, rushed storytelling, and a betrayal of characters we’ve spent years watching grow into some of the MCU’s finest superheroes. Waititi takes his jovial self-aware tone too far this time around, with dialogue so obsessed with cracking jokes and making needless little observations that the powerful moments fall apart or feel ou൩t of place. Love & Thunder wants to be both an emotional blockbuster and a parody of the very universe it inhabits.
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Love & Thunder’s worst sin however is Thor himself. Following the events of Infinity War ꦕthis once illustrious god is reduced to a broken man because of everything he’s been through. This development made us root for him, sympathising with him despite our frustration that he wasn’t w🔥illing to work through his own trauma to save his friends and bring balance back to the universe. He killed Thanos, but that victory was never going to revive the people he’d lost. He still had to live with that failure.
I was hoping that Love & Thunder might return to that well, examining how he rose from the ashes to build a life for himse꧃lf now the world was adjusting to this new normal. New Asgard is thriving and his friends are alive and well, but personal trauma doesn’t fade away the second its root cause has been eradicated. It tends to linger, forcing us to make rash decisions and distance ourselves from people in the fear of continued mistakes. Instead we’re given a tongue-in-cheek montage that brushes over that entire character arc in a matter of minutes so we have time for super happy fun space hijinks. Loki’s death is even reduced to a visual gag of a tattoo.
Sad Thor is gone, replaced by a smiling dumbass who prefers to make jokes and swing his axe instead of actually talking about his problems. I understand this film is trying to have fun and never take itself too seriously, but it leans into that direction so heavily that any attempts at weighty drama feel unearned. Jane Foster’s return and the reality of her terminal cancer diagnosis should have crushed Thor, teaching him to value the 🍬return of a for🥀mer lover as he also comes to accept her inevitable death. Instead he makes a joke, and another joke, and another joke - until they’re suddenly in love again and we’re expected to buy right into it.
You felt sorry for Thor throughout Infinity War and Endgame because this unstoppable god should have been able to save the day. He forged a new weapon in the remnants of a dying star and came crashing onto the battlefield with unparalleled confidence, dwarfing the power of all those who stood before him, and for a fleeting moment, we believed the war was won. Yet he failed. He had victory in his grasp, but he didn’t go for the head. Thanos snapped his fingers and brought the universe to its knees, with all who remained forced to deal with a collective loss that changed everything. I’ve always thought the MCU never spent enough time exploring the impact of the snap, and how characters came to recover from an event that should have changed this cinematic universe forever. Instead, it's joked about, like pretty much everything in these films nowadays.
Jane’s cancer is a more concentrated loss, but serves to hit Thor so much harder because of their shared history and losing the first person he ever really loved. Love & Thunder tries to explore this, offering a glimpse into their relationship and how she taught Thor so many things he would carry into the future even as they grew apart. But even as Jane becomes a temporary god herself and catches a glimpse of her frail for🐈m upon losing the hammer, this denial of eventual grief is passed aside for jokes that don’t land and a villain who only exists to give our heroes something to fight against while working through other stuff.
It’s like a different film, with emotional crescendos crammed in between scenes of screaming goats and annoying children. It feels like Taika Waititi wanted to make a sequel to Ragnarok, but failed to consider how much the character of Thor has changed in the years since. He isn’t the man we once knew, but Love & Thunder wants him to crack jokes and do everything in his power to avoid confronting his own demons, and the result is a lead who feels l🐭ike a damaging parody of himself more than anything. The supporting cast don’t help either, only serving to reinforce the film’s misguided comedy as the whole package begins to fall apart.
Gorr the God Butcher is driven by his own grief, believing that revenge on a galactic scale will somehow make up for the loss of his daughter. Thor has experienced similar loss, and will do so again as Jane Foster circles the drain, and this idea of accepting tragedy but still believing in the inherent good of people could have been a beautiful narrative for the film to explore, and it almost does, but every attempt at this is diluted by misplaced comedy and a tone so wildly inconsistent that I can’t believ꧅e the final cut even exists.
I think the screaming goats sum this film up perfectly. In♕ a press interview Waititi couldn’t even recall where their signature quirk came from, it was just something funny that he decided to throw into the film regardless of whether it belonged or happened to inform the overall narrative. We know this director can combine excellent characters, poignant storytelling, and side-splitting humour, we’ve seen it so many times before, but Love & Thunder fails to deliver on all♚ of these fronts and butchers its main character as a consequence.
Gods might be in possession of untold influence and power, but in the end they’re flawed beings like𓃲 the rest of us. Love & Thunder refused to see that, reducing its titular character down to a shadow of his former self who has become almost impossible to empathise with.
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