Lightning doesn't strike twice
There are things in Thor: Love and Thunder - the fourth movie to exclusively focus on the Marvel Comics version of the Norse god Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, who thus becomes the first individual character to headline a tetralogy in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - that are pretty damn good. And conversely, there are things in Thor: Love and Thunder that are pretty damn bad. It is, in fact, one of the most shockingly erratic, all-over-the-place movies that Marvel Studios has ever produced, incoherent in the most strictly literal sense of the word. The film as a whole object has no identity that I can suss out; it's a bunch of slapped-together stuff that mashes tones together in ways that don't work, over-stuffs its plot so that no character arcs can breath, and generally feels like the very idea of "discipline" was banished from the film's set. On a scene-by-scene basis, this can work out for it extremely well: within this film are individual scenes that are better than anything else the MCU has given us in the five years since Thor: Ragnarok. As a unified 119-minute object, it's cluttered and messy and barely intelligible.
Insofar as this does have one single identity, that's pretty easy to summarise as "more Ragnarok". That film was a big deal in 2017, after all. The Thor movies were the MCU subfranchise that just didn't really work: there are people who like 2011's Thor, but there really aren't people who like 2013's Thor: The Dark World, at least not to any kind of excess. Ragnarok overhauled the series completely, with director Taika Waititi and writers Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost, knocking all of the self-seriousness out of the character and reimagining him as a bit of a self-aware dope, utilising Hemsworth's skills better than any other movie that actor has ever appeared in. People loved it, even MCU-doubters such as myself. And the great problem with this is that the people responsible for making Thor movies were aware of that love just as much anybody. So for Thor: Love and Thunder, they have tried to recreate exactly the things responsible for that love. But that movie was lightning in a bottle, and simply revisiting its jokes and ideas ends up making it feel lifeless and uninspired; Waititi, in particular, has transformed from a filmmaker who seemed hungry to prove himself in the wider world than his native New Zealand into one of the most over-exposed cogs in the Disney machine, and there's very little evidence in Love and Thunder that he actually wanted to make the damn thing at all; certainly, there's no sense of firm directorial control over anything as the movie goes slipping and sloshing in every direction.
So, for example, we get a first scene that is A) actually pretty great on its own terms as a piece of cinema, and B) almost disastrously inappropriate as the kick-off to these two hours. Somewhere in the universe, a man named Gorr (Christian Bale) and his young daughter (India Rose Hemsworth, Chris's daughter) are crawling slowly across a the cracked ground of a merciless desert. The girl dies, leaving the man to continue his horrible way towards death, as his skin burns and flakes under the unrelenting sun. He finds his way to an oasis, where the god he worships, Rapu (Jonny Brugh) is cavorting with fantastical creatures and preening because he just defeated an assassin wielding the "Necrosword", the only weapon that can kill the gods themselves (I feel like at some point, this franchise pivoted from "what we call 'gods' are just super-advanced, long-lived aliens" to "nope, they're actual supernatural gods", and I don't recall when that happened). As Rapu makes a big show of mocking Gorr's devotion and faith, the mortal man is able to sneakily grab the Necrsword and decapitate the haughty god with it. Cue the studio logo.
Love and Thunder never improves on this scene, for one main reason: it never feels comfortable giving Bale this kind of material again. Bale is, beyond a doubt, giving the best performance here, creating one of the few altogether terrific villains in MCU history, and he'll never stop being good, even when the film can come up with nothing for him to do but be a creepy hissing albino psychopath emerging slowly from the shadows as he wields hammy threats. That's boilerplate stuff, but Bale finds a way to make it work as something deeply threatening and dangerous, making sure that we understand Gorr's motivations even when those motivations are only leading him to be a one-note bad guy. But here, in the opening, he's being given a whole movie to himself, practically, with the sunburn makeup plainly inspiring him to really play up the character's physical torment, while he's so plainly anguished and soul-sick at the girl's death that it's sincerely painful to watch. The whole prologue isn't quite at his level - Brugh is overplaying the hammy self-satisfaction of his shitheel god, and it feels all wrong - but it's as emotionally moving as anything I've seen in this franchise in years.
And this is ruinous, because Thor: Love and Thunder isn't trying to be an emotionally moving film. It's definitely not trying to position Gorr as a sympathetic figure whose side we might be inclined to take, though it does feel sorry for him again in his very last scene. This opening sets up expectations that the film is unprepared and unwilling to follow-up, in terms of its emotional severity, or simply using Bale to full advantage. Love and Thunder is frankly at a loss for what to do with such a good villain; it's not quite as panicked as Black Panther was about having accidentally made its bad guy the most thoughtful, convincing, and sympathetic figure in the cast, but it's very much in that neighborhood.
Where this does get the film off to a good start, though, is that it already trains us to expect a film that's going to buzz from one mood to another quite indiscriminately. The main narrative of the film finds Thor reuniting with his human girlfriend and the love of his life, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, whose reasons for coming back to a franchise she had earlier lost interest in are not clear; her performance certainly doesn't suggest that it could possibly be because she found the script worthy of attention). She's dying of cancer, and has discovered that by rebuilding Thor's old magic hammer (which he inadvertently willed to her, we see in a flashback), she can at least briefly stave off its advance by adopting Thor's superhero identity, though every time she reverts back, she's gotten much sicker and weaker. The two of them work together to stop Gorr from killing all the gods in the galaxy and have action scenes but mostly it's about reconnecting and Thor coming to grips with how impossibly lonely he's been since they broke up.
That's not quite as sad as "little girl dies of thirst and heatstroke in the punishing desert sun", but it's pretty sad. And Love and Thunder is no more ready to actually deal with this than it is deal with having accidentally made Gorr the most sympathetic figure in the story. Instead, what Love and Thunder wants to do is have lots and lots of flippant jokes. The whole thing is packaged as a campfire story being told by Thor's rock-man buddy Korg, a CGI effect voiced by Waititi, and that man is leaning extremely hard on the bright ironic tone that has become his default mode as a comic actor. The result is a film that never takes itself seriously - and it doesn't have to. Ragnarok didn't. But Ragnarok didn't build its entire main arc around one of the two lead's slow death from cancer, and the other lead's painful journey to accepting this fact. At a certain point, the jokes must stop, and when they do stop in Love and Thunder, the whole movie lurches grotesquely at it.
But, to the film's credit, a lot of the comedy works. Some of the action works, though it suffers from having remarkably unconvincing CGI even by MCU standards. This is Marvel's first project utilising StageCraft, the fancy new digital rear-projection technology that puts actors on all-digital "stages" that was debuted elsewhere in the DIsney Imperium, on the TV series The Mandalorian. It mostly works there, and it mostly doesn't work here; it looks like actors have been overlit and are standing in front of big digital screens. But anyway, sometimes (notably in the very first action sequence, featuring cameos from the stars of the Guardians of the Galaxy films) this is so fake that it becomes kind of enjoyably stylised, like Hemsworth is standing in front of a massive, planet-sized hair metal album cover. And for that matter, the film's shamelessly lazy use of actual hair metal (almost always in the form of Guns N' Roses) works far better than it should, hitting the perfect sweet spot of cheesy and sincerely energetic, and when Waititi turns the movie briefly into a music video, it gets a lot of momentum and vitality.
Basically, Waititi and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson have so thoroughly crammed this full of stuff that it almost can't fail to work sometimes. A layover at Planet God, starring a delightfully unhinged Russell Crowe as Zeus; a runner in which Thor makes his new hammer romantically jealous; these bits work. The fact that there is honest-to-God color visible in many scenes - including on Thor's gaudily shiny costume - works. And happily, more works as it goes along (the first act is honestly pretty dreadful, once the prologue is done), so it leaves one feeling better than not. It's just that what works doesn't come together at all. Thor: Love and Thunder feels like a ton of random story beats all scattered by a windstorm, good and bad, inspired and lazy, funny and tediously shrill and sad, it's all just lying there without any kind of shape to it. By no means is this the worst movie the MCU has produced - far too much of the comedy lands, and Bale is too good - but surely it ranks among the very sloppiest.
Other MCU reviews (Phase 4)
Black Widow (Shortland, 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Cretton, 2021)
Eternals (Zhao, 2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts, 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Raimi, 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Coogler, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Insofar as this does have one single identity, that's pretty easy to summarise as "more Ragnarok". That film was a big deal in 2017, after all. The Thor movies were the MCU subfranchise that just didn't really work: there are people who like 2011's Thor, but there really aren't people who like 2013's Thor: The Dark World, at least not to any kind of excess. Ragnarok overhauled the series completely, with director Taika Waititi and writers Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost, knocking all of the self-seriousness out of the character and reimagining him as a bit of a self-aware dope, utilising Hemsworth's skills better than any other movie that actor has ever appeared in. People loved it, even MCU-doubters such as myself. And the great problem with this is that the people responsible for making Thor movies were aware of that love just as much anybody. So for Thor: Love and Thunder, they have tried to recreate exactly the things responsible for that love. But that movie was lightning in a bottle, and simply revisiting its jokes and ideas ends up making it feel lifeless and uninspired; Waititi, in particular, has transformed from a filmmaker who seemed hungry to prove himself in the wider world than his native New Zealand into one of the most over-exposed cogs in the Disney machine, and there's very little evidence in Love and Thunder that he actually wanted to make the damn thing at all; certainly, there's no sense of firm directorial control over anything as the movie goes slipping and sloshing in every direction.
So, for example, we get a first scene that is A) actually pretty great on its own terms as a piece of cinema, and B) almost disastrously inappropriate as the kick-off to these two hours. Somewhere in the universe, a man named Gorr (Christian Bale) and his young daughter (India Rose Hemsworth, Chris's daughter) are crawling slowly across a the cracked ground of a merciless desert. The girl dies, leaving the man to continue his horrible way towards death, as his skin burns and flakes under the unrelenting sun. He finds his way to an oasis, where the god he worships, Rapu (Jonny Brugh) is cavorting with fantastical creatures and preening because he just defeated an assassin wielding the "Necrosword", the only weapon that can kill the gods themselves (I feel like at some point, this franchise pivoted from "what we call 'gods' are just super-advanced, long-lived aliens" to "nope, they're actual supernatural gods", and I don't recall when that happened). As Rapu makes a big show of mocking Gorr's devotion and faith, the mortal man is able to sneakily grab the Necrsword and decapitate the haughty god with it. Cue the studio logo.
Love and Thunder never improves on this scene, for one main reason: it never feels comfortable giving Bale this kind of material again. Bale is, beyond a doubt, giving the best performance here, creating one of the few altogether terrific villains in MCU history, and he'll never stop being good, even when the film can come up with nothing for him to do but be a creepy hissing albino psychopath emerging slowly from the shadows as he wields hammy threats. That's boilerplate stuff, but Bale finds a way to make it work as something deeply threatening and dangerous, making sure that we understand Gorr's motivations even when those motivations are only leading him to be a one-note bad guy. But here, in the opening, he's being given a whole movie to himself, practically, with the sunburn makeup plainly inspiring him to really play up the character's physical torment, while he's so plainly anguished and soul-sick at the girl's death that it's sincerely painful to watch. The whole prologue isn't quite at his level - Brugh is overplaying the hammy self-satisfaction of his shitheel god, and it feels all wrong - but it's as emotionally moving as anything I've seen in this franchise in years.
And this is ruinous, because Thor: Love and Thunder isn't trying to be an emotionally moving film. It's definitely not trying to position Gorr as a sympathetic figure whose side we might be inclined to take, though it does feel sorry for him again in his very last scene. This opening sets up expectations that the film is unprepared and unwilling to follow-up, in terms of its emotional severity, or simply using Bale to full advantage. Love and Thunder is frankly at a loss for what to do with such a good villain; it's not quite as panicked as Black Panther was about having accidentally made its bad guy the most thoughtful, convincing, and sympathetic figure in the cast, but it's very much in that neighborhood.
Where this does get the film off to a good start, though, is that it already trains us to expect a film that's going to buzz from one mood to another quite indiscriminately. The main narrative of the film finds Thor reuniting with his human girlfriend and the love of his life, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, whose reasons for coming back to a franchise she had earlier lost interest in are not clear; her performance certainly doesn't suggest that it could possibly be because she found the script worthy of attention). She's dying of cancer, and has discovered that by rebuilding Thor's old magic hammer (which he inadvertently willed to her, we see in a flashback), she can at least briefly stave off its advance by adopting Thor's superhero identity, though every time she reverts back, she's gotten much sicker and weaker. The two of them work together to stop Gorr from killing all the gods in the galaxy and have action scenes but mostly it's about reconnecting and Thor coming to grips with how impossibly lonely he's been since they broke up.
That's not quite as sad as "little girl dies of thirst and heatstroke in the punishing desert sun", but it's pretty sad. And Love and Thunder is no more ready to actually deal with this than it is deal with having accidentally made Gorr the most sympathetic figure in the story. Instead, what Love and Thunder wants to do is have lots and lots of flippant jokes. The whole thing is packaged as a campfire story being told by Thor's rock-man buddy Korg, a CGI effect voiced by Waititi, and that man is leaning extremely hard on the bright ironic tone that has become his default mode as a comic actor. The result is a film that never takes itself seriously - and it doesn't have to. Ragnarok didn't. But Ragnarok didn't build its entire main arc around one of the two lead's slow death from cancer, and the other lead's painful journey to accepting this fact. At a certain point, the jokes must stop, and when they do stop in Love and Thunder, the whole movie lurches grotesquely at it.
But, to the film's credit, a lot of the comedy works. Some of the action works, though it suffers from having remarkably unconvincing CGI even by MCU standards. This is Marvel's first project utilising StageCraft, the fancy new digital rear-projection technology that puts actors on all-digital "stages" that was debuted elsewhere in the DIsney Imperium, on the TV series The Mandalorian. It mostly works there, and it mostly doesn't work here; it looks like actors have been overlit and are standing in front of big digital screens. But anyway, sometimes (notably in the very first action sequence, featuring cameos from the stars of the Guardians of the Galaxy films) this is so fake that it becomes kind of enjoyably stylised, like Hemsworth is standing in front of a massive, planet-sized hair metal album cover. And for that matter, the film's shamelessly lazy use of actual hair metal (almost always in the form of Guns N' Roses) works far better than it should, hitting the perfect sweet spot of cheesy and sincerely energetic, and when Waititi turns the movie briefly into a music video, it gets a lot of momentum and vitality.
Basically, Waititi and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson have so thoroughly crammed this full of stuff that it almost can't fail to work sometimes. A layover at Planet God, starring a delightfully unhinged Russell Crowe as Zeus; a runner in which Thor makes his new hammer romantically jealous; these bits work. The fact that there is honest-to-God color visible in many scenes - including on Thor's gaudily shiny costume - works. And happily, more works as it goes along (the first act is honestly pretty dreadful, once the prologue is done), so it leaves one feeling better than not. It's just that what works doesn't come together at all. Thor: Love and Thunder feels like a ton of random story beats all scattered by a windstorm, good and bad, inspired and lazy, funny and tediously shrill and sad, it's all just lying there without any kind of shape to it. By no means is this the worst movie the MCU has produced - far too much of the comedy lands, and Bale is too good - but surely it ranks among the very sloppiest.
Other MCU reviews (Phase 4)
Black Widow (Shortland, 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Cretton, 2021)
Eternals (Zhao, 2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts, 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Raimi, 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Coogler, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
