Thor: Love and Thunder’s trailer had me hyped as hell for this film, Guns n Roses,
more wacky Taika Waititi Thor hijinks, Christian Bale as….you know whatever this is, looks like a
rip roaring fun summer time, count me in. Then I traveled and couldn’t see it for a few weeks and
I saw very divided opinions from fans, friends, and critics alike, some calling it too silly,
too inconsistent, some saying it’s just a bit of fun, chill out you people with sticks
up your butt. And having now seen it, I will probably be about half brain-turned-off fun hater
and half stick-up-my-butt critic, because as the title suggests, I thought this was a pretty fun
mess. I’ll probably be a little more stick-up-my-butt critic cuz I do think
the movie is more messy than fun, but overall I did leave the cinema decently entertained.
As far as positives go, this is obviously quite a comedic movie, and when the movie’s jokes hit,
they really hit hard. There were 4 or 5 moments in this movie that made me burst out laughing,
the main one I remember being when Thor is talking about how they can’t feast on the children. These
jokes that really got me weren’t incredibly clever, they were just simple and really well
delivered by the actors with great timing, and were just as funny as the best parts of
Ragnarok. I’m gonna have some complaints about the Jane story and the writing in general,
but I thought the conversation Thor and Jane had on the ship out in space was actually pretty
solidly done and sweet. There are some pretty fun action moments, some creativity like with
the black and white segment of the film, some fantastic visuals, I said some don’t freak out,
and…I really liked the Guardians part of the film, which is not very long but Thor’s conversation
with Peter Quill was one of the funnier parts of the movie. Also spoilers I guess from now on?
Let’s say spoilers you’ve all seen it. Generally speaking the film succeeds in being
an amusing enough way to kill a couple of hours. However…when you really start to look at it as a
story and an assembled product on the whole, in my opinion it does kind of fall apart a bit, and I’d
attribute that mainly to a lack of consistency in tone. The film cannot find a balance between
seriousness and comedy. I’ve complained about Thor: Ragnarok not really having much heart in
it in the past, but maybe that was a good decision because this film, in trying to implement lots of
emotional moments and pieces of storytelling, just ends up making the whole film fall pretty flat.
Guardians of the Galaxy is a film that is very comedic and very funny but also has
very heartfelt moments, and that's because both of those elements come naturally from the characters,
they fit into a story, and the emotional parts are more well done just as scenes which don't hurt.
But part of why it works there is that the movie is not a completely ridiculous comedy, yes it's
a crazy self aware space adventure but it’s not like an outright parody, where it’s winking at
the camera half the time, it feels like an actual narrative that also is very funny. Thor: Ragnarok
has a different style of humor, it doesn't really feel like a film story you’re that invested in
but that's ok because it is going for this almost parody style of comedy, you’re here for a fun time
and that's what you get. In Love and Thunder, they keep that very over-the-top, almost spoof type
of comedy, in fact they turn it up, but then they also try to squeeze in all of these deep emotional
moments and it just doesn't work at all because you aren’t taking the movie seriously, so when
it tries to tell you, no this is serious, it falls flat and is initially funny. You end up laughing
at how sappy the movie is rather than laughing with it. You can’t do an in-universe joke play
about how silly and over dramatic these superhero movies can be sometimes and then put in some of
the most cheesy melodramatic emotional moments I’ve ever seen. When Jane Foster is dying I’m just
thinking about how they're gonna get Pete Davidson to play the actor playing her in the next movie.
There are also so many plot holes in this movie and plot conveniences and normally I don’t really
like to CinemaSins that kind of stuff in a serious way, but just how many ridiculously stupid plot
moments there are here is again highlighted by the inconsistent tone. If you have just a straight up
comedy, which I’d say about 65-70% of this movie is trying to be, and there are dumb plot moments,
who really cares? Yes the best of them will also tie the plot together really cleverly
but generally speaking if you’re just there to laugh with the fun silly movie, it doesn't matter
that the plot of this James Franco Seth Rogen movie makes no sense or is unbelievably dumb.
But here, it doesn't commit to that, so instead when they're trying to have exposition scenes
in the more serious parts of the film about this gateway and this item and this plan,
you’re left there thinking, this is really stupid and not in a way that the movie seems aware of.
There are a lot of moments that I could go through here, but my buddy Leilei made a Letterboxd review
that encapsulates pretty much all the moments where, as he puts it, “things happen because
the plot needs them to happen, not because it makes sense”, so I’d recommend checking
out his review linked down below, the_outluke on Letterboxd. Some highlights include how or why
can Mjolnir suddenly just reassemble itself, why has Thor never mentioned all these other Gods at
Omnipotence City, could’ve been useful in Infinity War or Endgame, and you know a bunch more.
Something more broadly that annoyed me storytelling wise is the lack of a point for
pretty much any character besides Thor and Jane? I guess Gorr also has an arc, we’ll talk about
Gorr in a second, but besides that one scene I mentioned they aren’t super well written
either. But my point was, what is Valkyrie’s purpose in this movie? What does she learn,
how does she grow, what does she do besides say some one-liners and appear in a few action scenes.
And Korg, I know he’s a comedic relief character and normally I wouldn't complain about that,
but this movie just has a feeling of empty air around it that they had to fill and that makes
the lack of anything that is interesting about the characters stand out more. Like this feels
like a 45 minute film idea padded into two hours, and all that padding isn’t bad. Some of it is
funny comedy, but there is still an inescapable feeling of dead air just being filled that makes
this movie feel, as the title says, messy. I know the CGI has taken a bit of a beating,
I think overall it’s not bad but yes there are definitely moments that aren’t…fantastic. It sort
of has the same issue as Ragnarok with its comedy type lighting and cinematography making a lot of
the film feel flat and SNL like, which again would work better if the movie didn't then take itself
wayyyy too seriously at other times. By the way speaking of dead air, the finale of this movie
goes on for so much longer than it needs to with the dramatic deaths of Gorr and Jane, you’re just
sort of waiting for it to wrap up. Also Gorr, very interesting performance from Bale, he kind
of feels like he’s supposed to be in a different movie, like the tone shift when he captures the
team is pretty distinct, but I honestly didn't hate that. That was a tone shift from fun when the
heroes are triumphant to ominous when the villain is there, that's fine. It’s the tone shifts from,
look we’re so funny and self-aware to and now here’s an unironically really cheesy scene.
Action was generally pretty fun I’d say, nothing insane but solid, the song choices were fun,
again nothing insane, if you had said name 5 Rock n Roll songs these would probably be up there
but still, made for some fun moments. The film does have style at times, but it feels like once
every few scenes they really tried to make something visually interesting and exciting
and then the rest was a bit of an afterthought. I don’t know man, there is definitely a lot of fun
to be had in this movie, but as someone who loves Ragnarok and was actually very excited for this,
I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit disappointing. It feels like it’s having
an identity crisis and like it was written at one time just off the top of the dome. I know
that's demeaning and insulting to presumably the hard work that went into the script, I am sorry,
I just felt like that was an accurate way of describing it, it feels like it wasn’t really
written with an endpoint in mind, someone started writing it, threw in whatever plot
moment was needed as it went along even if they didn't make sense, wrote serious and funny scenes
back to back without considering their tones, or the quality of the dialogue, and the end.
I know this review was pretty rough, I did again leave having had a decently fun two hours,
but I don’t think it’s a very well-written film is how I’d put it. I’ll give Thor: Love
and Thunder a 6.7/10 and here’s my rating system and here’s where I’d rank it in the larger MCU.
So those were my thoughts on Thor: Love and Thunder. What did you think of it? Let me know
all your thoughts down below in the comments. While you’re at it, be sure to like this video,
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