The release ofThor: Love and Thundermarked yet another entry into Marvel’s constant onslaught of new content. The much-anticipated film marked director Taika Waititi’s second dip into the MCU after the hit that wasThor: Ragnarok. Naturally, because of Waititi’s popularity online, most people were incredibly excited for this fourth chapter in Thor’s story, especially as the MCU had been drifting away from stories with the original Avengers in them, and a lot of fans were eager to see one of the MCU mainstays back in action.
However, the overall reception to the film was mixed. Some fans really appreciated the bright, goofy tone of the movie in the same way that they lovedRagnarok, while others were more critical of the film and its writing choices. The problem withThor: Love and Thunderis that while it delivers the fun tone that fans expected, that tone doesn’t mesh well with the muchmore serious subject matterthat the movie is attempting to cover, which leaves the whole thing feeling a little disjointed.
RELATED:Loki’s Absence In Thor: Love and Thunder Hurts The Movie
Love and Thunderis not just a successor toRagnarokin terms of chronology; it actively attempts to recreate the same tone and style that the previous movie employed. This makes sense, of course, as fans absolutely lovedRagnarokand the freshnew feel it brought to the MCU. However,Love and Thundersuffers from trying to emulateRagnaroka little too much, to its own detriment.
Love and Thundertries to explore themes related tothings like self-identityand even death, but the goofy tone doesn’t really fit in with that. This isn’t to say that movies that touch on sensitive topics can’t also be funny; Waititi himself has managed to walk that line gracefully in the past with movies likeJojo Rabbit. However,Love and Thunderreally just feels like it’s trying to be too many things at once because the humor and the more serious elements aren’t mixing as well as they should.
The whole storyline around Gorr the God-Butcher, for instance, would work much better in a totally different movie. As it is, the plot line is an interesting idea andGorr is an engaging character, but he gets so little to do in the movie because his vibe doesn’t fit with the rest of what the movie is trying to be. His arc, along with Jane’s cancer story, feels like it’s treated a little too lightly, or at the very least is being overtaken by the silliness of the rest of the film.
Again, these things should be able to coexist, theoretically, but in practice, it’s simply too unbalanced. A lot of the movie in general feels disjointed, like there were too many threads that they wanted to follow and instead of picking a few, they decided to try all of them. For instance,the Guardians of the Galaxyappear for a very brief portion of the film in the beginning, and then aren’t heard from again. It seems they were only there to tie up the loose thread of Thor joining them at the end ofAvengers: Endgame, but with no real follow-through.
This is one of the problems with switching directors around a lotwithin the MCU; sometimes one person’s creative vision doesn’t mesh with another’s, but they get stuck with a plot line that was set up in a previous film. It’s clear that Waititi didn’t really want to tell a joint Guardians/Thor movie, so he had to get rid of them early on, but it just makes their presence in the movie at all feel pointless. While most movies have the main storyline, or A plot, they usually have a few secondary plots as well (a B or even C plot).Love and Thunderfeels like it has an alphabet’s worth of plots, to the point where none of them have the proper space to fully develop. Most of the plots don’t conclude in a super satisfying way because there wasn’t enough time to pay attention to them.
Love and Thunderunderstandably tries to mimic the success ofRagnarokby giving fans what they loved about that previous movie. However, this works to the detriment of the film becauseLove and Thundercovers such different subject matter. WhileRagnarokhad its serious moments, it could get away with being sillier because it managed to balance the tones.Love and Thunderplays like a comedy with some of the wackiest moments in the MCU so far, but a lot of the subject matter it’s trying to cover (like death or the need for faith/deities in the world) is so far removed from that tone that it feels jarring to switch between them.
It feels likeLove and Thunderwanted to be too many things at once, and wanted to be even bigger and more absurd thanRagnarokwas. The problem is that this means it sacrifices what could have been its own unique identity for in exchange for just being a poor copy of whatRagnarokdid so well. There’s no strong thread or feeling that unites the movie and makes it cohesive, it just feels like a collection of ideas for three different movies that were thrown together without consideration for whether or not they would actually work together. Unfortunately, it just comes off as the next ina line of Marvel entriesthat are progressively having less and less thought put into them, just so that the studio can pump out as many as possible.
Thor: Love and Thunderis now streaming on Disney Plus.
