Spoilers Thor: Love and Thunder grade and discussion thread

Misplaced for you. He clearly has a large following (that includes myself) that loves his style of humor and does not see it as misplaced.

 

To each their own…. His work divides my household.
My eldest LOVES him
The rest of us in the household think he was a poor choice as Thor movies went from drama to “comedy “.
The movie will still make money, of course.

 

And that's fair. My main issue was Dee1891 speaking in absolutes and that Waititi needed to change his style of directing.

 

The Thor movies were never drama. They were full on action movies with the romantic subplot... which was far more dramatic and infinitely more emotional in Love and Thunder

 

Nowhere near as good as Ragnarok and actually bad in some places. The first half in particular feels so off. I loved Ragnarok and have no problem at all with a movie containing both comedy and drama (that's every MCU movie), but you have to take some things seriously. You can't present the movie's plot as a complete joke. There has to be stakes. But the scene where the Gods are being butchered all across the galaxy and Thor and the Guardians are watching it on tv feels like a comedy skit. The scene with Sif even more so (though "maybe your arm's in Valhalla" was one of the funnier lines.) These are the scenes that establish the threat of the rest of the movie and they're a total joke, so how can I take anything else seriously?

I liked Korg in Ragnarok (I won't mention Ragnarok again, just making the point that I don't have a problem with this type of movie) but he got really annoying here. None of his lines were particularly funny (though I kind of smiled at Dwayne the Rock) and many made me cringe. I felt relieved when he died - and thought maybe it would be the point where Thor starts taking things more seriously - but of course he just comes back to life right away as the blowjob paving slab from Doctor Who because nothing matters it's all stupid.

Things improve a bit as it goes on and it actually got good when it switched to black and white. It felt like a proper movie for a while there and the fight scene with the shadow monsters on the moon was cool. I kind of liked the kids getting powered up and fighting back, it was cute. But when it ended the movie felt too short because it only really go good in the last third. Why did we need to spend like three minutes on the stage play cameo fest which wasn't as funny as the one in Ragnarok and didn't have the plot relevance that one had (it was where Thor figured out Odin was really Loki)?

Natalie Portman was great: she's a great actress. The cancer plot has some weight to it (as you'd hope!) but even that I felt could have been better. If the first time we saw Jane in the movie she was already Thor then we gradually found out about the cancer through flashbacks at it went on I feel it could have avoided the tonal whiplash of Thor being a total clown with the guardians cutting right to Jane in chemo. Thor and Jane have a nice scene on the boat talking about her cancer but it's interrupted right away by another stupid Korg line. It would be like if Odin's death scene in Ragnarok had ended with Thor comically stumbling and falling off the cliff. There was a brief sweet flashback to Thor and Jane on rollerblades that I really wanted to see more of. Basically the movie could have used a lot more of the actual romance and less of the jokes about Thor's ex hammer.

Christian Bale was good but again the total lack of God butchering hurt a lot. And really given that every God we see in the movie apart from Thor is evil or insane I can't say I felt any stakes in his evil plan. Having him act like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in one scene was certainly...a choice.

Tessa Thompson was fun as always (great English accent too) but Val has nothing in the way of an arc. There's one scene where Fucking Korg (I LIKED HIM BEFORE) recaps her romantic history...but that's it. I thought for sure she'd be shown on a date at the end with the girl she flirted with on God City but no.

So yeah there's good stuff here and probably a good movie in there but the first hour was almost painful at times. DISAPPOINTING (I'm referencing Hercules because there's a Hercules in it.)

 

Accurate observation.

All too true, but I'm sure someone will tell you how their fates are "just so different" so how they were perceived was a "fault" of the viewers, not the filmmakers.

The MCU limps along with Thor: Love and Thunder, a film that overflowing with so much of the assembly line heartlessness of so many of its predecessors. Portman returning amounted to little; her best showing was in the original Thor, where she was being built to have a life and identity of her own. In this film, she was merely inserted to what end? The development ball was dropped with her so long ago, that beyond the optics of her briefly becoming Mighty Thor, the character lost so much meaning (overall in the MCU) to the point that her death was never going to resonate as anything with emotional weight (or investment) for the audience.
On that note, as I pointed out elsewhere, Thor is anything other than a reflection of the published version's greatest, defining persona (in the hands of Lee/Kirby/Conway, et al.), only coming somewhat close in the first Thor film. Instead of building on that and understanding that Thor was always an alien (of sorts) among humans in the grand scheme of things, instead of showing that no matter how much he loved Jane and fought in earth-based conflicts, his true self was exposed & set free in the realm where the earth-bound rarely appeared--substituted by a personality similar to that of some goofy beach-bound dullard, because some whined that he was "boring" in the original film (and its 1st sequel).

Anyone even remotely familiar with Thor's foundational / greatest published era would know that he always stood apart from humans in stature and personality, but now, the majority of his MCU appearances have reduced him to some guy you'd find laughing it up in the bar. Though the MCU is not new to some of its characters losing a strong or even inspirational connection to the source, Thor is now the full-page, textbook example of said loss--Thor more in name only.

GRADE: D, and that's only due to the idea (but not execution) of introducing Zeus (which should have happened as far back as the 1st sequel).

 

They did Zeus dirty. At least he isn’t dead.

 

First Adam for the Guardians and now Hercules for Thor. Doesn't it seem a bit repetitive? Alien or God race, having another person so mad at our heroes that they send their progeny seems a bit too repetitive.

 

Well, it would not be the first time the MCU was legitimately charged with being repetitive.

 

They did Zeus just right. He's a flaming asshole all the way back to the original Greek myths. If anything, they held back.

 

So Gorr got his wish. Why didn’t Thor then go up and wish for Jane back and cancer free?!

 

Because the MCU has developed a habit of killing off a good number of female characters throughout the years - even more so than male characters.

 

He didn’t open the portal.

 

I am curious what the rumored four hour assembly cut was like. The movie's almost exact two hour runtime make me wonder if it was cut down too much to make an arbitrary cutoff.

 

Could have stepped back out and opened it again.

 

Separated at birth?

 

Did the entity move afterwards? I don’t think it was there after the wish was given

 

Eternity only would grant a wish to the first one to find him, not the second.

 

All the kids getting empowered reminded me of the end of Buffy.