Thor: Love and Thunder - This Film Hates You

cancer [Laughter] dead children losing your family losing your faith tessa thompson's acting that is called a practical joke yep it's a tiger white titty film a couple of days before going to see thor love and thunder i was sitting at the local country club obviously with this accent enjoying my sixth pint on the playing field it's a family-friendly joint and there was a youngish couple at another table who'd been short-sighted enough to produce offspring their spawn was an amusing cheeky little girl she decided it would be great fun to break free from the shackles of her pram and run off across a field cackling everyone found this funny and dad ran after her caught her and brought her back much laughter ensued and after a few minutes the spawn did it again to the same result a few minutes later she did it again and then she did it again and then again and again and again eight or nine times but it started as hilarious childish exuberance gradually lost its luster the laughter stopped after the fourth escape attempt and had morphed into frustration and chastisements by the ninth in the end the spawn was chained back into her pram and the parents stayed for one more decidedly less joyful drink before departing and presumably wondering all the time whether all the sex had really been worth this i recount this story obviously because thor love and thunder is a taika ytt film and taika waititi is a child though i should probably invoke some kind of benjamin button qualifier because most children grow up and ytt seems to be growing down i quite enjoyed his earlier works and i know i'm not alone his zany approach to comedy as evidenced by say what we do in the shadows and hunt for the wilder people carved out a distinctive style tone and approach in the latter in particular warming a story about loss and displacement by the injection of light fuss ironic detachment and ultimately producing something that while out there was also and fundamentally personal the humor was used to tell a story and to give that story a distinctive flavor like the little girl at the country club everyone laughed the first time everyone laughed the second time most people laughed the third time but then something happened in steps hollywood in steps disney instep's marvel keenly scouting the latest bright young thing to inject new life and style into a middle-aged franchise and a character who though pivotal to a story unfolding over more than a decade had never quite found his niche the first thor film had its merits to be sure the second one and not so much captain america had gone through a similar experience but been rescued by the injection of a darker and more serious tone in his later installments they are dared to be different and it was time to be daring with thor yep i'm stretching the analogy a little bit now but it was as if disney and marvel had looked at that little girl running away time and again and had noticed everyone laughing and on the strength of the laughter alone had given her a contract to write several feature films the thing they noticed wasn't what had made her humor forgivable what had made it amusing to begin with it was not what had made why tt's earlier films work i don't think they understand it i don't think they care but rather with the most superficial response to that humor and to those films disney liked the laughter and it wanted the joke speaking for myself i enjoyed thor ragnarok it had the benefit of being tied to but fundamentally distanced from the main avengers arc at that time being bound only by the logic of what had gone before where the characters were at that point in time and then very loosely by the requirements of what came after somehow it had to end up in the post-credits scene that leads directly into endgame but besides being obliged to throw in a couple of cameos from a couple of equivalently displaced avengers the actual substance of the thing operated at a remove from the main franchise and that allowed for significant creative freedom bookended by a larger story the course of which was already set ytt wasn't even responsible for the bulk of that script but he could innovate to the point of reinvention thor's character and his arc turning the almost oppressively ornate and severe mansion of a universe established in kenneth branagh's film into a colorful play park replete with ball pit and zany eccentric performers to keep the kids entertained but even as i was enjoying ragnarok questions began to bug me whatever the faults of thor's earlier films he was an established character past events had serious and lasting consequences on him he was part of a universe careening toward thanos the overall tone of the mcu was by necessity darkening at that time and a break from that ragnarok was most definitely a break brought considerable relief a lot of the praise for that film comes because the contrast was so stark and so effective it was funny in its own right but the shock value played a significant role in the effect of that humor but was this necessarily a good thing once we've accepted someone trivializing much of the backstory of one of the avengers main cast for shits and giggles and making light of an ostensibly serious story in the present what then follows was there not a danger that the wrong lessons might be learned from its success was the balance maybe shifting too much toward the humor at the expense of the story being told the main avengers arc was strong enough and serious enough to resist the temptation to mimic though even in end game we saw the powerful legacy of waititi's infectious humor turning thor into the big lebowski was very funny sure but it also broke his character the problem well i say problem it's only a problem for hacks anyway the problem with continuing universes is that you have to have a mind to past events present character must be formed by the experiences of past character and it was becoming apparent that thor had been made an exception to that rule again for shits and giggles now though well [ __ ] where do you even begin with thor love and thunder i was going to go into the plot straight away and then say lol spoilers but i didn't because i'm not taika waititi and because the film doesn't really have a plot to begin with it's best understood as an extended slapstick sketch show where all the characters are merely props that allow jokes to happen and [ __ ] me do they happen it's a laugh a minute for the opening ten minutes then perceptibly in the cinema at least it was a laugh every five minutes then a laugh every ten then maybe one laugh per half an hour not because the jokes had slowed down though because they didn't the fact why titi can't get through two sentences in this film without telling a joke is itself kind of a joke but no the laughter slows and finally stops amongst the audience because the law of diminishing returns is universal and because while humor works well when it's augmenting a story a story that augments humor simply isn't as gripping in fact it's entirely ineffective as a narrative you can't take the film's three significant scenes seriously and there are only three because the whole structure and tone and message of the thing tells you you're not supposed to but since this is a review i suppose we probably should go through the plot and we can dispense with it i think fairly quickly at least by the standards of this channel because it is so incredibly shallow bruce wayne has fallen on hard times and his daughter dies in a desert his local god doesn't help him but he finds a magical god-killing necro sword conveniently lying in the grass and he uses said magical god-killing necrosaur to kill said god and the sword infects him driving him on a mission to kill all gods meanwhile we get a flashback to thor's backstory as narrated by korg who manages to make light of the fact everyone and everything thor has ever known or loved is dead lol i love existential crises thor is trying to find himself because this is thor and that is the only thing he ever does in the first film he gets cast out and has to find himself in the second film actually i don't remember what happens in the second film because it wasn't very good but in ragnarok thor is emasculated and has to find himself in infinity war he loses and in endgame he has to find himself when it comes to the basic mechanics of thor films the question isn't hmm i wonder what they'll come up with this time it's hmm i wonder when they'll come up with something this by the way is what really exposes ytt's makeover as being well that a makeover it's a dramatic shift in color in tone and delivery but at its base it's the same old rehash of a rehash of a rehash i defended the mcu against scorsese's now well-known criticism of it but if he wasn't quite right back then he certainly is now remember how at the end of end game everyone was quite looking forward to thor travelling around with the guardians of the galaxy well tiger wasn't he dispatches them right at the beginning of the film i said this was essentially a sketch show and one of the hallmarks of sketch shows with the odd honorable exception is that characters are not particularly deep because they don't need to be they have overt characteristics and ticks but only as much character as they need for the joke to work ytt takes a sketch show approach to the guardians but this categorically doesn't work when they are long-established characters because if they suddenly turn up shawn of anything that makes those characters the contrast with previous films is jarring and in their short cameo in thor love and thunder none of the guardians has a character none of them even drax who you'd think would be the easiest for waititi to repurpose given how much of his humor is physical he isn't drax he's just dave bautista and makeup picking up a check thor comically smashes a sacred temple and is rewarded with a couple of giant screaming goats from the displeased faithful this is funny for about 10 seconds but the goats are in the film throughout and with the exception of the occasional scene where their presence works they become very very annoying very very quickly the guardians leave and thor goes off to save a friend who was attacked by necro wayne meanwhile jane foster has cancer lol and i'm not even being facetious it's it's played for laughs it's been so long since we've last cena that i barely remember anything about her character but given how significant she is to thor and how significant she is to this story and how serious her condition is supposed to be you'd think we might get something by way of explanation as regards her absence how she ended up here how she feels about all this instead we get a joke a [ __ ] joke about stage four cancer because cancer is funny well that or why titi's humor has become cancerous which given his approach does to this film what the cancer is supposed to be doing to jane foster's body that's probably about right she decides that the shattered bits of mjolnir will help her mjolnir is an ambassador for the make-a-wish foundation mjolnir turns her into menopausal thor meno menethor menothors that's what we'll go with because of a spell actual thor unwittingly placed on it years ago in a flashback and she jets off to new asgard where she bumps into actual thor and tessa thompson who are defending against an attack from necro wayne and his army of badly rendered shadow monsters i've never really paid attention to tessa thompson i know the memes but i assumed they were just kind of exaggerated for a comedic effect this film was the first time i have consciously paid attention to her performance and oh [ __ ] me what a performance the memes are entirely accurate i should have known better than to doubt them please forgive me internet it's utterly inexplicable that thompson has managed to fail upwards in this manner but if she is actually aware of her luck if she really appreciates how fantastically unlikely it is that someone with less acting range than tree beard an actual lump of [ __ ] wood should have landed a major role in a major marvel film well she doesn't show it but then of course she [ __ ] doesn't show it because she can't her face doesn't work in that way or indeed generally it's possible that she is an excellent [ __ ] but then again how could you tell nah but then if i'm feeling charitable maybe i'm being too harsh she actually has a few different facial expressions in this film at least three maybe even four the problem is they're seldom deployed when they need to be while her usual deadpan which is a legitimate style don't get me wrong my humor and expressions are about as dry as a tuscan vagina detracts much more often than it adds to any given scene they beat back the shadow monsters but necro wayne snatches some children and escapes what you might ask is thor's reaction to meeting the love of his life again after all this time well again this is a taika waititi film so you can pretty well guess that it has all the emotional weight of a pot noodle and the film spends rather more time comically playing up sexual jealousy between mjolnir thor's x and stormbreaker because because lol lol it's funny it's like a breakup get it clever stuff taika as they discuss what to do next they're interrupted by heimdall's son astrid who has turned on windows movie maker and inserted his face into the scene in what has quickly been hailed as the cheapest tackiest looking bit of cgi in the entire mcu the thing is i'm not at all convinced that wasn't the intent we know waititi isn't above joking about the effects in his own film no matter how hard and in what pretty awful conditions people slaved to create them and actually we know he's not above joking about anything at all so i honestly wouldn't be surprised if he thought it would be funny to have this scene play out like a corny dated old film from the early days of cgi because uh because lol again whenever you find yourself asking of this film i wonder why this particular bit of nonsense has just occurred the answer is invariably for the lols astrid has decided to rename himself axel because because he's obsessed with guns and roses apparently now i'm not casting aspersions here i know maybe one of their songs and yeah the guitar if in sweet child of mine is pretty cool i might like them if i put in the time to familiarize myself with their back catalogue but the important point here is you know why i only know maybe one of their songs because i was born in the 90s and they are simply not as strong in the pop culture of my generation as they were in that of my parents now unless there's some lore i'm unfamiliar with and axel simply ages more slowly than us he's about 14 in this show so he's [ __ ] gen z now i don't doubt there are some redeemable members of that species for whom old is the new cool or whatever but the majority of them didn't need coronavirus to come along and deprive them of taste they've just never had any why under whose influence did astrid decide to ditch the name given him by his dead father we don't give a [ __ ] about that remember because lol in order to take the name of a singer famous decades before he was born now you might be thinking damn that's a bit of a nitpick but here's why it's not absolutely nothing about axel screams guns and roses fan he doesn't think talk or act like one it is entirely irrelevant to his character but do you know who it is relevant to do you know who does like guns and roses taika [ __ ] whitey that's who he uses their music in the film and never in any place where it's actually relevant to anything at all and too often for it not to get a bit old and a bit distracting he did it with led zeppelin's immigrant song in ragnarok but that was used sparingly maybe stranger things has set the bar too high when it comes to implementing real world music in works of fiction but i think this would still be irritating even if season 4 hadn't shown people how amazing kate bush is make a deal with god i'd get him to swap our places be running up that road be running up that hill be running up that building guns and roses in thor love and thunder is a reference but it's not a reference to anything meaningful it's a self-reference by the director it references his musical tastes his influences it's referenced because he wants it to be and not because it adds to or aids the film which is indicative of his entire approach to it it's pure self-indulgence taika getting away with something because he can because lol because meta because get it once again and as so often the humor in this film makes no sense in universe it's a reference the audience understands externally as observers of events on the screen the issue runs throughout the film it has no desire to draw you in to let you inhabit its story in fact it would much prefer it if you didn't but this does have pretty significant implications as we'll see later on the odd occasion the film decides to be semi-serious for more than 30 seconds if you don't inhabit the world if you're kept to remove from it and from its characters it's very difficult to care about anything that happens within it and it's very difficult to care about them in the way you otherwise would anyway axel tells them the kids are trapped in a cage and so thor menothor's rocky waititi and tessa thompson must go and rescue them from the shadow realm ugh insert yu-gi-oh reference here kyber if you really wish to know then talk to the hand they have to save the children but they'll need help to stop necro wayne so they tie the maddening goats to a viking tour ship and ride the rainbow road to omnipotent city where all the gods in the universe gather for orgies and such now there is a problem here actually well there are a few problems but one big one which is the size of the mcu this problem actually reoccurs in a much bigger way later but for now suffice it to say that thor love and thunder and mirror verse of munchkins before it and arguably the eternals as well and arguably captain marvel too is vastly expanding the size of the universe without any sense of purpose or direction or indeed any regard for what came before it whenever we learn that for example russell crowe's use and use is very powerful and all these thousands of gods exist that are supposed to protect or at least watch over different parts of the universe we have to wonder why exactly did no one think to ask for their help against thanos their existence is well known to the asgardians couldn't thor have gone and paid a visit rather than pissing about in ponds waiting for visions and then because these mechanics are all interlinked when thanos snapped his fingers did half these guards disappear as well and if they did and then they popped back into existence would they not have potentially taken an interest in some force in the universe that had just wiped out half of their number potentially interesting questions there with interesting connotations but we can't ask them because we've gone more than 30 seconds without taking the piss out of something so we see russell crowe's use as a fat lecherous lazy douche who's more interested in arranging orgies than leaving a meaningful mark on the universe actual thor meno thor's rocky waititi and tessa thompson have to sneak into omnipotent city because they haven't been invited tessa thompson disappears and returns with some colorful cloaks from the emotion gods and when asked where the emotion gods are she replies don't ask um okay now we know an awful lot was cut from this script but because it's incomprehensible even in its consistent and uncut moments it's impossible to tell what makes no sense because the context has been removed and what makes no sense because it is just [ __ ] dumb who or what are the emotion guards what did tessa thompson do to them why have they even been mentioned if the fact these cloaks belong to them is completely irrelevant to the purpose the cloaks serve their disguise is then broken because rocky waititi blurts out that they're not who they say they are and zeus summons thor to the stage he dismisses thor's concerns about necro wayne and the need for the gods to team up to stop him so thor argues with him and he strips thor naked now i am aware of the argument in some quarters of the internet that arose when this scene was first trailed on the one hand a group of fans said this kind of sexual objectification would never have been accepted had thor being a woman and on the other a group of people said that women have had this treatment for decades and so in a cosmic way this is acceptable vengeance i don't mean to add anything to this argument here besides saying that both sides are right and i i don't care you don't need to quit this is not this is not the major thing on which to criticize this film it is an interesting point in fact because if you remember the reaction to the trailers everyone was worrying this was going to be woke as hell and in the event it wasn't but it didn't need to be because it was still incomprehensibly [ __ ] in previously unimaginable ways oh and we get to see thor's back tattoos including a very tacky one reading r.i.p loki you and i know loki is alive of course but thor doesn't and you might remember how loki's death came understandably as a significant blow a massive character defining moment something with real weight and significance thor has lost another loved one another connection with home the person he grew up with and with whom his story has been inseparably intertwined from the beginning so how does love and thunder treat with this delicate subject yep yeah lol such funny much amuse dead family is is hilarious isn't it lol lmao zeus refuses to help so they steal his thunderbolt his thunderbolt is a very silly looking well thunderbolt weapon of some kind that's built rightly given its mythological roots as an amazing incredibly powerful artifact but which is reduced throughout this film to another shiny marvel weapon of minimal consequence there's a quick fight zeus gets stabbed with his own thunderbolt but disney's rules pretty well guarantee that nobody impaled in this way is ever dead so i'm sure we'll see him again besides stealing the thunderbolt which goes on to play a very slight role in the plot of this film nothing is here accomplished save the setup for the post-credits scene and we'll come to that presently but much is lost in this scene besides the mechanical questions about these gods absence from events until this point we've now seen the film wasting a third significant actor on a fundamentally frivolous and cheap excuse for a character it used to be fun cast your minds back when marvel still made you excited for its next film to imagine what great comic book character could be played by what great actor if you'd said back in phase 1 or 2 or even 3 that we'd get to see russell crowe christian bale and matt damon in the mcu because he's in this film though you'd barely notice you'd likely have been buzzing with the possibilities these are objectively great actors in our day there are many great characters they could play bring them into the mcu and [ __ ] hurry up but here we get matt damon again as essentially a comic relief extra an actor playing an actor in just two scenes recreating in comical fashion of course the events of previous films so he's out for the future russell crowe is a fat cheap pastiche of zeus deployed in comical fashion what else and christian bale who really does try with what he's given and more or less consistently steals every scene he's in and is far and away the most serious and competent performer throughout is wasted on the latest in a long line of conveyor belt villains who pop into existence in one film and out of existence by the end and with bale in particular you watch his performance and you think damn you really can act when you want to can't you such a shame they didn't give you a better character imagine the mcu with bale damon and crowe in significant multi-film roles playing pivotal characters that that could have been pretty damn good anyway having failed to secure the aid of the guards actual thor meno thor's and rocky waititi and tessa thompson's one facial expression go off to the shadow realm which looks a bit like a location from super mario galaxy on the way actual thor learns that menothor's has cancer and i want i really want to praise this scene because the acting it's not terrible both chris hemsworth and natalie portman can act this scene is crying out for emotion and i'm almost inclined to praise it because waititi at least allows maybe three minutes for it to pan out without cramming inane jokes into it but then you realize the guy actually doesn't care about these characters or this story the story is the thing he is obliged to insert occasionally to keep things moving but it's not what he's interested in the undergirding moral lesson of this film if you can call it that is and i'm not even reducing this for comic effect this is literally what it is it's the love is nice that's that's it love is love is nice that's that's the message of this film don't take it from me taika waititi himself said love was the guiding moral goal message and purpose of this story but as is his not at all endearing fashion he couldn't even treat that seriously saying in interviews i wanted to embrace this thing that i was always a bit dismissive of and explore this idea of love and show characters who do believe in love on paper it feels kind of cringy to me but there's a way of doing it with cool characters making a cool movie and doing that thing that no fan ever wants in a superhero movie which is people talking about love and characters kissing um this is a patent with waititi he act as if he's just too cool to be genuine to take things seriously to think to act to speak sincerely he's too cool to do his research he's too cool to bother with the law character history with building within a framework established by other people with venerating anything at all which an armchair psychologist might diagnose as a profound vulnerability a lack of confidence a compensating strategy who hasn't found themselves burdened with a task that seems so enormous they can't possibly succeed and reacted to that by flippantly dismissing the whole idea i'm just beyond that dude that's just cringe that's not cool enough for me the difference is none of us has been given a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars to indulge our own inadequacy and because it has nothing more interesting than that to say and because waititi is so afraid of sincerity even the serious dialogue in this film is quirky and disjointed and fundamentally shallow deracinated skittish and of equality you would expect from a below average teenage romcom combined with the fact the film has until this point been so violently frivolous and carefree you watch this scene and you see that you probably should care but you've been pulled so far out of the normal experience of movie going and storytelling you've spent so long watching it from waititi's studied cynical remove that you find yourself observing this scene like one of those gods he is so keen on pulling down with a kind of disinvested ironic detachment these aren't people with lives and stories to care about there they're specimens lower simpler forms of life to be observed dispassionately and perhaps lightly scorned for their irrational ways and their emotions and their peculiarities in super mario shadow realm they discover an inscription showing stormbreaker which remember was basically forged five minutes ago opening the way to eternity where necro wayne will get the chance to wish the guards out of existence in revenge for his daughter dying of thirst in a desert so to recap this film has happened because necro wayne stumbled into an oasis and just happened to find big evil sword he wants to use stormbreaker to open a path to eternity and there he will be offered a single wish which he will use to kill the gods this is not serious writing there are so many issues here a how very [ __ ] lucky that necrobane just happens to stumble across the one sword in all the galaxy he needs for this mission b how very [ __ ] lucky that an axe that didn't exist until end game is hard coded with the eternal means to warp into the eternity dimension c how very [ __ ] lucky that eternity not so far established in the mcu with no mechanics in place just happens to grant the guy one wish but not as we'll see later any more wishes than that or any other guy any other wish or any wish with multiple clauses was thanos aware of eternity if so wouldn't it have been far easier for him to forge stormbreaker and use eternity to permanently wipe out half the universe rather than pissing around with infinity stones over the course of decades anyway necro wayne shows up and they have a fight which necro wayne wins he traps actual thor menothor's and tessa thompson in tentacles but only after menothor's has thrown stormbreaker away so he can't use it mjolnir by the way is yet another disappearing weapon it's just gone necrowane delivers some boilerplate villainous spiel about how the gods are evil and won't help them while while he's talking to a god and he baits actual thought into summoning stormbreaker back so he can save menothor's and it appears in his hands and everything explodes and then in the very next scene menethors has mjolnir again leaving us to wonder where it went and why neither of them as far as i could make out attempted to summon it i'll happily praise christian bale's performance by the way but it has to be pointed out that he's playing two or three entirely separate characters in this film at times necrobane is the joker at times he's voldemort at times he's the innocent loving father the last is forgivable it is supposed to be a duality after all the big bad sword corrupts the one and turns him into the other but the inconsistency in the latter is purely down to writing and direction it's as if waititi has two or three other villains in mind when writing individual scenes and he just runs with whichever one happens to occur to him at any given moment which is a shame because bale plays each part well it's just that the things he's playing are inconsistent shite in the subsequent battle zeus's lightning bolt is again revealed to be pretty [ __ ] useless tessa thompson stabs necro wayne with it but he's fine then he knicks it and tessa thompson is stabbed not that you could tell and men of those decides they have to escape what exactly is the point of this sparkly zigzag piece of [ __ ] they tried to escape but as they're warping away necro wayne grabs stormbreaker and rather than being pulled through the portal with everyone else he just kind of stands there and outmuscles actual thor and so now he has stormbreaker and our heroes are back in new asgard and here is another of the film's ostensibly somber moments menothor's absent mjolnir is just mere jane foster again and back on her cancer meds and his suffering might this be the opportunity for the film to delve into the real meaning of her condition a young and brilliant life cut short potential that will never be fulfilled a desperate but almost certainly doomed desire to live the fact foster is the last literally the last person in existence inextricably bound to thor's history his character his loves his planet's gone his parents are gone all his friends are dead he has lost everything but her and here she is dying in front of him there is a lot you could do with that it is crying out for sincerity we've been told the point of phase 4 is dealing with the traumas of the avengers arc living with its consequences here is thor's last consequence the meta as defined by those in charge of this whole [ __ ] enterprise demands that this scene has consequence but but nah why tt can't do it not really thor smashes a vending machine because some idiot made a fridge without a door they share a few lines of serious dialogue and you are left with the feeling that this could have been such a better film if it had been written by someone above the mental age of six portland and hemsworth have chemistry they can both act and here for a brief moment the humor is a conscious in-universe attempt by the characters to distract themselves from the brutal truth that's a good thing that's the kind of humor that works not this meta [ __ ] but then but then inevitably it ends with another joke and you realize this is just another slow moment why tt is compelled to include to keep up the pretense that this is a film and not a skit and so as with everything else it's tied to a contrived event that will drive us forward to the next sketch in the show mjolnir we learn isn't saving foster it is sapping her power and preventing her from fighting her cancer which to be fair she was doing a pretty [ __ ] job of fighting anyway but if she uses the hammer again she will die hmm i wonder where this could possibly be going as for where thor's going and because this film has a very low opinion of its audience tessa thompson gives us an exposition dumped couched in yeah you guessed it comedy she essentially tells him not to get lost on his way there and reminds everyone that necro wayne's power comes from the sword and he will die if the sword is destroyed well i say she reminds us does she remind us has this actually been established yet i honestly don't remember either it's reminding us of something we should have already known but forgot because the film doesn't compel you to remember or it's not been set up at all and this exposition just is designed to try and make subsequent events work because no forethought went into it either way not particularly good either way not particularly good that i can't remember if this is actually a rule that's been set up in the universe so thor takes zeus's lightning bolt and goes off to fight necro wayne alone i don't quite recall but i think the lightning bolt is another of the weapons arbitrarily given the ability to do the time warp solely in order for the plot to happen and heedless of the significant mechanical consequences but back in mario galaxy noir thor rescues the kidnapped kids and here we go again he imbues all the children with his own power so they can fight the shadow monsters while he takes on necro wayne this okay let's quickly cast our minds back who can name me another instance where this ability to imbue others with the power of thor might have been incredibly [ __ ] useful this one maybe and um this one this is another one this too it would have been useful here it would have been very useful here it would it would have been very useful here as well in fact is there any fight thor has been involved in where he is not the only one present where this wouldn't have been an incredibly [ __ ] useful thing to do look i've had people tell me for criticizing instances like this in other marvel films that i just don't get the point of soft magic systems for the uninitiated under a soft magic system magic is not really defined it operates by few if any knowable identifiable rules harry potter magic for example is quite soft the argument for that is that there are settings books films and comics where the rules are not necessary for the magic to fit within the story and sometimes setting out rules might hinder your enjoyment of that story but with something like the mcu when you arbitrarily introduce powers like this very late on it poses the obvious question why the hell didn't you use that earlier when it would have saved lives and won battles franchises continuing stories multi-part narratives require the existence of rules in order to maintain their integrity it doesn't require that you spend pages or minutes setting it out in detail but it does require that the rules exist and can be discovered as time goes on because otherwise well the previous entries are called into question you could make this power fit within a rules-based system skills progression the learning of spells the gaining of powers all fit within a rules-based framework to magic and aren't that hard to work in demonstrating a weaker form of the same power earlier in the story showing the character learning the new skill imbuing him with new abilities via items and objects this film did this same thing with necro wayne it was hackneyed to be sure it was too convenient it was contrived it was incredibly [ __ ] lazy but it accepted the need for rules you could if you try very hard to do work on the writer's behalf contend that zeus's thunderbolt gives thor this power except of course that he's not imbuing the kids with its power but with his own he after the spell we've heard before the one that imbues mjolnir with specific powers and the lightning bolt does go a little bit sparkly but if it were the lightning bolt that's doing all this why is thor first imbuing it with power why would a spell that works on mjolnir also work on the lightning bolt which has an entirely different provenance and construction and mythos if that is what's happening can thor do this with any weapon and even if he can do it with any weapon why does he need to when the source of the power is not that weapon but himself no in the event i think the flashy thunderbolt is just there to look pretty i think waititi just thought it would be funny to have children wielding stuffed bunny rabbits imbued with the power of thor and so that is what happens rendering massively consequential scenes in earlier films deeply suspect necrobane is winning their personal battle which foster magically senses while she sleeps and so she picks up mjolnir again transforms into menothor's for the final time hops aboard charlie the unicorn and warps across the galaxy to save them necro wayne calls her lady thor during their fight and that sends her into feminine rage and she saves the day with a meta comment on the internet backlash against fans who laughed at the term lady thor i'm sure we can all agree that this was a totally necessary thing and her saying it's mighty thor really redeems her character to be clear i don't have any mythological dog in this fight i'm not against recasting per se it is possible to earn your title there are ways to write it that do not entail an ima skywalker style identity theft portman is a capable actor she'd been able to carry that through with her performance but she is entirely reliant on the writing and rather than strike a blow for the fairer sex by delivering an objectively good female character worthy of the mantle and title waititi has given us another shallow unconvincing unnecessary screen mannequin which i have to keep saying is utterly [ __ ] extraordinary given the wealth of material in the premise she is dying of cancer she is incredibly important to thor she is here martyring herself in the full knowledge that she has laid down her life for her friends and with all that richness with all that wealth of material we get a lame catchphrase and equip against angry internet nerds what a [ __ ] waste mjolnir breaks big evil sword and then there is a very peculiar scene where bits of it try to reform but then menothor sucks them into mjolnir but then they start falling out of mjolnir but then she shoots some lightning and smashes it on the ground and then the hilt of the sword that necro wayne is still holding dissolves making it seem more like a mogul blade than ever and then that's that's kind of it not really sure how or why any of that works but i guess we'll run with it it's not as though the rest of the film makes any [ __ ] sense unfortunately the portal is open now and they all get sucked into eternity's world now i'm not a fan of the comics i don't know the provenance of eternity i am not familiar with the law but if phase 4 in particular has proven anything it's that nobody involved in writing these films knows anything more about the comics than i do arguably they know less i at least know that they've effectively nerfed necro way in here in any case i've pointed out in videos and comments before that the mcu and the comics are not the same universe that means the writers cannot fall back on comic's law to excuse their failure to explain events in the mcu you can't make whole changes in one area and then in another require for knowledge of the same source materials you've just discarded in this the mcu's relationship with the comics is kind of like that between star wars and tire novels so if eternity is explained in the comics in a way that makes sense of what follows well their failure to establish it in the mcu is still a fault with this film and if it isn't established in this way in the comics there is simply no way of qualifying this floor out of existence in this universe pretty much right now it is decided that eternity grants wishes specifically it grants one wish it grants one wish to one person it does not admit of multiple wishes it does not admit of wishes with multiple clauses you cannot wish for x and y because um because suck it thor makes his case to necro wayne don't use your one wish to kill the gods use it to bring back your dead daughter because because love or something necro wayne responds that he's dying now that the sword is dead so his daughter would be all alone in the universe to which the obvious response is well okay why didn't you try wishing that you and your daughter could live together in happiness but now we can't have that and i can't even say because reasons because there are no discernible reasons it's just the way it is so thor says she won't be alone so necro wayne says all right then and wishes for his daughter to return which she does and with the power of eternity inside her in case you'd miss the profound deep moral and philosophical payoff this film has been going for she is she's called love she is literally a crazy little thing called love she has a final scene with necro wayne who then dies actual thor has a final scene with menothor's who then dies actual thor and i wanna know what love is grab the children and head back to new asgard to live happily ever after we get to see them living a happy domestic life stop in the name of love has laser powers and such then they are summoned away to fight some invading army thor has mjolnir again and love will tear us apart has stormbreaker which means waititi can't even follow his own stupid jokes through to conclusion because you might remember how earlier in the film he decided he was too cool to do an actual love story with actual thor and menothose and instead decided to play up a lover's rivalry between stormbreaker and mjolnir that just um well it is just gone now it no longer exists apparently actual thor and aldinida's love jump into a battle and that's the end except of course for the post-credits scene where it turns out that zeus is still alive nobody anywhere across all existence dies from massive chest wounds anymore you can poke holes in people and they'll just recover a few scenes later tessa thompson survived it i think i mean she might be dead kind of hard to tell zeus has survived it too and he has a moan about how nobody fears the gods anymore so it's time to do something about that then hercules appears and the audience kind of regards this with faint bemusement because what the [ __ ] is going on menothor's ascends to valhalla and that's the end again this is not an easy film to sum up but i want to say at the outset to the small number of people who will otherwise miss this point i am not saying you cannot enjoy this film i'm not even saying there is nothing to enjoy in this film i'm not saying that none of the jokes work some of them do some of them are very funny you can laugh at what you want you can enjoy the film if you want enjoyment is largely subjective but quality is not this film is objectively very [ __ ] silly and you might well reply yeah but that's the point but of that i have to ask okay but what's the point what does it achieve where does it leave us comedy and silliness are not the same thing some of the most intelligent cutting and incisive films in world history are comedies in each and every case comedy is leveled as a weapon to drive home a point comedy is a tool comedy is mjolnir comedy is stormbreaker comedy is uses lightning the point is the point should be the point ought to have been thor jane foster and zeus the point is or to be should have been characters it should have been story but this film barely has one its narrative is threadbare evil man kidnaps children and wants to kill gods thor saves children and stops him killing gods the end it shouldn't be that easy to sum up the plot of a stand-alone two-hour film never mind the umpteenth film in a long and continuous story with a rich history and mythos a vast and interlocking narrative long established characters and relationships ytt views comedy as the point itself to the exclusion of everything else and to the detriment of everything else everything is a joke the film views sincerity as its enemy what ought to be a profound moving culmination of a relationship built however haphazardly over a decade or more of films is given a few minutes fleshing out bookended by jokes and a perfunctory end that provides no resolution nor even satisfaction because the unrelenting comedy has disinvested us of the stakes for these characters we simply observe their relationship lip curling at the corner always waiting for the next punchline and this is no way to write characters the film vastly expands the universe in which this and all other stories are set but like multiverse of badness it tells us nothing meaningful about any of it we developed no attachment to it no understanding of it much that we see for the first time in this film we will never see again which again would be forgivable in a standalone film but the point of the mcu is that it is an overlapping and continuous universe events in one time and place occur in the same story as events in another they impact them they have a bearing upon what happened before and on what happens next phases one to three of the mcu understood this and understood the need to localize first and expand piecemeal thereafter the whole point of the first thor film was to localize the character to establish his relationship with the world of the avengers and the relationship of that world to him it established rules and order without which there can be no stakes it wasn't always especially intelligent about it but it didn't need to be to achieve its desired goal asgard's indifference to earth was established and then allowed for events on earth to proceed without us constantly asking well where's odin why aren't the valkyries stopping this relatedly when the universe did expand it was with a purpose in mind here is a new story in a new place with new characters and powers but here always is how this relates to us to established events to our world these are the terms by which these two stories overlap the project was built from the ground up and with a clear direction in mind the expansion of the universe in phase four has been anything but so orderly and purposeful vast realms and incredible powers are introduced with no thought to how they impact prior events and no explanation as to why for the most part they didn't impact past events rather than a story with direction and based on order we get the invention of new wonders without reference to anything other than the needs of the moment in the case of love and thunder we have the whole pantheon of gods only one of whom is of any relevance to the story and the rest of whom merely exist as with everything else in this film as the punchline of a joke and we should be clear about this every one of these new characters organizations and events that are introduced and then discarded for convenience is a missed opportunity both multiplex of minge mops and thor love and thunder have introduced stories objects and characters who could have formed the basis for an entire phase of films imagine a phase building toward a battle with the scarlet witch this phase could have shown wander's descent into madness across multiple films have introduced the good and the bad books as objects akin to infinity stones it could have introduced the multiverse slowly using it as an opportunity to introduce new characters everything then could have built toward a final confrontation with an established character with a fully fleshed out arc investing that final battle with stakes born of our familiarity with love off and sympathy 4 a hero turned villain similarly thor love and thunder introduces and then dispenses with a villain who could have anchored an entire phase of films christian bale does magnificent work with the awful material he's given he is an actor around whom you could base a franchise it's been done before his character has the powers and the motives required to be an epochal villain the pantheon of gods like the multiverse in our previous example could have been used to introduce new characters replenishing the stock depleted since endgame hell you could have even spun two phases out of it have necromane play the role of villain across phase 4 building his power exercising more and more influence over the universe with deadlier and deadlier consequences make him a character befitting bale's performance in this film and this would be a hook that would keep people coming back at the close of the phase he could be defeated but he could have come close enough to winning that it spurs used to action as a vengeful dominating god intent on securing his position and re-establishing order in the universe through force in order that he never faced such a threat again zeus then is the main villain in phase 5. and i'm spitballing here none of this is difficult to come up with those who say the mcu is necessarily dead are wrong there is still so much potential left in it all it requires is a bit of a vision a bit of purpose a mind to the integrity of the world the continuity of narrative and the purpose of its story sure it might have taken some time to flesh it out to plan it to piece it all together but there's nothing wrong with waiting with taking that time the great mistake made was in not taking time out after endgame to refresh and renew to allow the audience to take in the culmination of that story and to let anticipation build for the next instead we've had a constant stream of content using ever more depleted reserves without any apparent planning or forethought instead we've had an entire phase dedicated to experimentation as if these films and these stories can exist in isolation and we've had experiments with tone we've had filler we've had lots of movement but we have had no progress it's this approach this content for content's sake this idea that all the mcu needs is a fresh look and not a fresh story that led to taika ytt stock rising and then to his stewardship of this film unconstrained by budget by story continuity and direction from above he's been allowed to indulge his worst impulses producing a film that could well go down in history as one of the most weightless pointless entries into modern cinema let alone the mcu thor love and thunder was entertaining in places it did have some great performances christian bale as mentioned but chris hemsworth comic timing is understated and excellent but it had no purpose it had no message it had no story to tell and it was allowed to cheapen what came before it and also one of the mcu's most important legacy characters in the name of cheap laughs if that's enough for you well fine but sometimes you do have to defer gratification sometimes you have to sacrifice in some aspect to attain something better later on i hope the reaction to this film has been sufficiently mixed that they will hesitate before they try it again but if not the audience would have said loud and clear that there is no need to put in the work that made the avengers are great because we don't need that to be entertained and that in turn means we will never get another one because we're content with pretty lights and cheap gags and screaming goats as the poet said irreverence is a greater oath than superstition that is the unintended message of thor love and thunder and that brings us to the close of this review i want to praise something next critics on youtube are sometimes stereotyped as professional complainers people who hate things for clicks and that is a load of crap of course it's not our fault that mainline entertainment these days is essentially a conveyor belt of nonsense carrying boxes stuffed with [ __ ] made by talentless drones to sell to morons and as i'll keep pointing out the point of criticism is that we want things to be better and i at least will deliberately try and insert comparisons wherever possible even from the relatively recent past to prove a that i do in fact like things and b that these things are objectively better than modern offerings part of the reason modern offerings are so crushingly bad is that in the recent past they weren't or wouldn't have been even if you enjoyed this film or any of the things i've spent days weeks it's months i think now complaining about the point is that everyone would benefit if they had been better but it can get a bit oppressive as a creator never mind for you poor listeners there's been so much to cover that i've not had time to do this yet but my plan is to get a short video out sometime next week in praise of stranger things season 4 and or in qualified praise of the boys season 3. that should be a much shorter video than this and it then won't take quite so long to put together after that i plan on getting the final part of the star trek discovery critique out of the way it is pretty much done absent a few finishing touches that hopefully will be next weekend's offering and after that the final video we're doing on obi-wan kenobi that has morphed into a big ass project essentially four essays in one because i want it to be as comprehensive as possible given it'll almost certainly be our last word on that topic i'm not sure yet exactly how long that's going to take to finish a fortnight might be optimistic but i'll aim for that and we'll see how we go after that well that conveyor belt keeps churning out content so i hope you'll join us again as we continue writing the obituary of western culture and on that cheery note that's all folks see you next time

Channel: The Little Platoon

Views: 1,581,421

Keywords: thor love and thunder, taika waititi, chris hemsworth, Thor Love and, thor love and thunder review, thor love and thunder official trailer, thor vs hulk, thor vs gorr, Thor Ragnarok, Doctor Strange, doctor strange multiverse of madness, Mighty Thor, Natalie Portman thor, Natalie Portman interview, Taika Waititi interview, Tessa Thompson, Tessa Thompson Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Thor, Thor and Star Lord, thor love and thunder breakdown, Odin

Id: GYFKr0gNouY

Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2022