I won't lie, I was a bit concerned when the movie spent a significant part of the first act undoing much of what had gone before: the chunky Thor who sailed off with The Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame? Gone, replaced by the burliest Odinson in all of his appearances (Chris Hemsworth apparently spent most of his Covid lockdown exercising and eating 8 meals a day). The quaint town of New Asgard in Norway, home to Asgardian refugees following their homeworld's destruction in Ragnarok? Now a Disneyland-like tourist hub with flying boat tours, t-shirt stands and hammy dramatizations of past events (yes, once again featuring Matt Damon, Sam Neill and Luke Hemsworth).
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| Go ahead, look for fat... |
And while it is obvious that Waititi doesn't take the tropes of superhero cinema very seriously, he uses them to great effect to shape a story with honest emotional impact, even if a lot of the run time is devoted to characters in capes getting into ridiculously destructive fights while dropping pithy catchphrases most of the time.
Case in point - the movie opens with a tragic tale of unreturned devotion between a man of faith and his fickle deity, and we finally get a villainous origin story equal in scope and pathos to those of the heroes. Christian Bale's Gorr the God-Butcher is on a mission to destroy all gods (a term which, in terms of the MCU at least, seems even more vague and undefined than in our own reality, and perhaps this is for the best), which inevitably puts him into conflict with Thors.
Yes, Thors! Natalie Portman's Dr. Jane Foster returns for the first time since 2013 (!) but enters the story undergoing chemotherapy for stage IV cancer of an undisclosed variety. As a last-ditch effort to strengthen herself, she is somehow (and the rationale is eventually revealed and is clever) able to reform the shattered pieces of Thor's former hammer, Mjolnir, and gain powers similar to his. Jane adopts the same name - not Lady Thor, not Ms. Thor, just the Mighty Thor, precisely as it was done on Jason Aaron's immense comics run. And Odin's ravens, does Portman look marvellous in the role.
When Gorr abducts the children of Asgard in order to bait out Thor, the stage is set for a mystical road trip that will take both thunder gods as well as Korg (Taika Waititi) and King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) through Omnipotence City, the dwelling place of many powerful beings on a broad spectrum of divinity, including Russel Crowe as a vain and impatient Zeus that feels spot-on to both mythology and the comics.
Bale is wonderful as Gorr, possessing a tremendous amount of charisma and even humour for a character so relentlessly ruthless and even cruel, and the character's real superpower seems to grow directly out of the actor's legendary intensity.
Like all recent Marvel movies, things build to a massive, effects-driven battle in the third act, but like the most clever of these Phase 4 offerings, the story does not reach its climax there. Rather, the battle sets up a far more satisfying and emotionally resonant resolution than I was expecting.
In the end, though, can I recommend Love and Thunder to everyone? Of course not. Many people have simply had enough Marvel for the time being, and I get that. And Waititi's tendency to bounce from broad, slapstick silliness to gut-wrenching poignancy, sometimes within the same scene, can leave a lot of people feeling off balance. There is also a lot of 80s-era metal and metal-adjacent rock used to excellent effect in the film, but which will not be to everyone's taste I'm certain.
But it is clear that he and his co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson have a lot of affection for these characters and their relationships, as encumbered as they might be with decades of comic book continuity and mythological influences. Love and Thunder is an entertaining time if your sentiment is, like Waititi's, more aligned with people and their experiences than the established structures of superhero cinema.
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