The hatching of Thor: Love and Thunder marked yet another entry into Marvel’s constant onslaught of new content. The highly anticipated film marked director Taika Waititi’s second plunge into the MCU after the hit that was Thor: Ragnarok. Of course, due to Waititi’s popularity online, most people were incredibly excited about this fourth chapter in Thor’s story, especially since the MCU had drifted away from stories with the original Avengers in them, and many fans were eager to see one of them. the MCU mainstays back in action.
However, the general reception of the film was mixed. Some fans appreciated the film’s bright, goofy tone the same way they loved it Ragnarok, while others were more critical of the film and its writing choices. The problem with Thor: Love and Thunder is that while it delivers the fun tone fans expected, that tone doesn’t fit well with the much more serious subject matter the film tries to cover, making the whole thing feel a bit disjointed.
love and thunder is not just a successor to Ragnarok in terms of chronology; it actively tries to emulate the same tone and style that the previous film used. This makes sense of course because fans absolutely loved it Ragnarok and the fresh new feel it gave the MCU. However, love and thunder suffers from trying to emulate Ragnarok a little too much, to its own detriment.
love and thunder tries to explore themes related to things like self-identity and even death, but the goofy tone doesn’t quite fit. This isn’t to say that movies that touch sensitive subjects can’t be funny too; Waititi herself has managed to gracefully walk that line in the past with films like Jojo Rabbit. However, love and thunder it just feels like it’s trying to be too many things at once because the humor and the more serious elements don’t mix as well as they should.
For example, the whole Gorr the God-Butcher storyline would work much better in a completely different movie. As it is, the plotline is an interesting idea and Gorr is an engaging character, but he gets so little to do in the movie because his atmosphere doesn’t fit with the rest of what the movie tries to be. His story, along with Jane’s cancer story, feels like it’s being treated a little too lightly, or at least overtaken by the silliness of the rest of the film.
Again, these things should theoretically coexist, but in practice it’s just too unbalanced. Much of the movie generally feels disjointed, like there were too many threads they wanted to follow and instead of picking a few, they decided to try them all. For example, the Guardians of the Galaxy appear in the beginning for a very short part of the film and then nothing more is heard of. It seems they were only there to tie up Thor’s loose thread at the end of Avengers: Endgamebut with no real sequel.
This is one of the problems with director switching within the MCU; sometimes one person’s creative vision doesn’t match that of the other, but they get stuck in a storyline set up in an earlier film. Obviously Waititi didn’t really want to tell a joint Guardians/Thor movie, so he had to get them out early on, but it makes their presence in the movie completely pointless. While most movies have the main storyline or A plot, they usually also have a few secondary plots (a B or even C plot). love and thunder feels like it has an alphabet of plots, to the point where none of them have the right space to fully develop. Most plots don’t end in a super satisfying way because there wasn’t enough time to pay attention to them.
love and thunder understandably seeks the success of Ragnarok by giving fans what they loved about that previous film. However, this works against the film because love and thunder encompasses such different topics. While Ragnarok had its serious moments, it could get away with crazier as it managed to balance the notes. love and thunder plays like comedy with some of the craziest moments in the MCU yet, but much of the subject matter it tries to cover (like death or the need for faith/gods in the world) is so far removed from that tone that it feels shocking to switch between them.
It feels like love and thunder wanted to be too many things at once, and wanted to be even bigger and more absurd than… Ragnarok used to be. The problem is that this means it sacrifices what its own unique identity could have been in exchange for being just a bad copy of what Ragnarok did so well. There’s no strong thread or feeling that unites the film and makes it cohesive, it just feels like a collection of ideas for three different films thrown together without considering whether or not they would work together. Unfortunately, it just comes out as the next in a series of Marvel entries that are getting less and less attention so the studio can pump out as much as possible.
Thor: Love and Thunder is now streaming on Disney Plus.
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