Thor: Love and Thunder is the strangest movie I have ever watched in my life. If you’re okay with being spoiled, read my review and you’ll understand why.
There is no way that I can write this review without spoilers. The movie is too weird and I have to talk about the weirdness of it in order to review it. Please be aware before you go any further — you have been warned.
So how weird is Thor: Love and Thunder? Well, I think it’s the most weird movie I’ve ever seen. It’s Willy Wonka on the psychedelic boat for two-hours weird. It’s late nineties Batman movies weird but only if you watch them in reverse with the color saturation cranked up to one-hundred. If you don’t believe me, I’m going to describe one scene in full detail so that you can grasp what I just had to watch. Halfway through the movie, I beheld Thor and Thor (the girl version who now calls herself Thor) riding on a tiny Viking ship pulled by giant CGI non-stop screaming goats with a neon bar sign that flows atop a rainbow wake through unnamed dimensions of space while ethereal glow-dolphins “swam” beside them. During this time, a disembodied face made of gravels compared Thor and Thor’s rekindled love to holding hands and making a lava baby.
Yes, that really happens.
If you worship all things Marvel, you might come away convinced that this movie is some sort of grand epiphany you just don’t understand yet. If you are very, very high or very, very drunk, you may think this is the greatest movie of all time. If you are not any of those things, however, you may walk out of the theater thinking you’ve just witnessed what it must be like to watch a Robot Chicken marathon while on acid. Don’t get me wrong, there is a very good movie buried in this thing. It’s just buried under heaps and heaps of utter stupidity. Heaps upon heaps upon heaps.
Christian Bale gives it his all as Gorr, the Mr. Freeze who likes shadows instead of cold. In the first minutes of this movie, you’ll be convinced by his performance that this is going to be an amazing film. That’s wrong, but you’ll be fooled like I was. And there’s a neat story to be had with Natalie Portman’s character having cancer and needing to be a superhero god person to not die of cancer. But it also somehow kills her with cancer. It’s a little fuzzy. There are also portions of the movie that are incredible — the black-and-white fight scene on a tiny planet is artistic genius. The problem is that for every one of those artistic genius moments, there are a dozen attempts at something ultra-creative that fail miserably. They don’t fail as miserably as the child actors this film somehow depends upon, but they fail nonetheless.
Something about the first #Thor plays different in a post-Loki world. @ElCapitanThtre #GOAT𓃵 Marathon pic.twitter.com/6u0kdUGnBe
— LaughingPlace.com (@laughing_place) July 7, 2022
Sometimes I thought this movie was going to miraculously pull it off. At other times, like at the temple of Zeus, I couldn’t believe the amount of money being spent on a live action version of the Lego Movie but nowhere near as entertaining. Putting aside huge plot holes that fill this film, by the end of the movie I came away realizing that all of this bizarro nuttery wasn’t worth the finale that we get. It makes absolutely no sense that the bad guy essentially wins what he wanted and the little girl he resurrects is a demon child that Thor will raise. I don’t know anything about this or the comics that may have lore regarding it, I just know it’s really dumb. And I don’t know what inch-deep water world we visited with with the cosmic pseudo-Hindi shadow box that grants you wishes while floating in the air, but all I know is we have reached the point where Disney Marvel movies are so far out into whatever this is that I can’t track any of it. Even describing it makes my sentences sound like they’re on psilocybin. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness we had to save the entire multiverse and every possible reality from obliteration. In Thor: Love and Thunder, we have to save a non-Abrahamic religion version of eternal life from being corrupted in a way that would destroy all of Marvel’s version of the ill-defined divine? Maybe?
Essentially, there are big, nebulous, undefined ideas in this movie. And maybe if we spent the full runtime figuring them out, they’d make sense. Maybe there’d also be time for Valkyrie, the Guardians of the Galaxy, or Zeus to have any real reason to exist in the film. Instead, this movie spends its entire time filling itself with those Marvel-style jokes that people either love or hate. Except in this movie, they’ve decided to fill the movie with those jokes at a level of about ten-times more than anything you’ve seen before. Rather than a tension-cutting bit of humor happening four or five times in the movie, it now happens every other sentence. I’m not exaggerating.
So I don’t hate this movie actually. You would think I’d hate it after this sort of review. But I could actually watch it again I think. I wouldn’t watch it for the story or because I necessarily enjoyed it. I would watch it because this is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. And you have to really appreciate that we have the sort of wealth in our society that we can spend two hundred million dollars on creating whatever this is that I just watched. We must have a lot of dispensable wealth.
One of the end credits scenes has Zeus ask, “When did we become a joke?” I thought, “I suppose in the last two years.”
This might ends Taika Waititi’s writing and directing career, although I doubt it. But if it is the end, and it probably should be, at least he went out with a spectacle. I still don’t know what I watched or what very much of it meant.
Review Score: 4.0/10
For all the latest news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place. As always, drop a comment down below and let us know your thoughts. Have you seen the latest Thor? What’s your review?
I think this film sums up the modern world pretty well. A post-modern, nihilistic and self-parody of a story, that contains pagan characters and exults the self above God.
It is the ultimate film that encapsulates modernity. And indeed, only those who worship Marvel, a private corporation in the pursuit of profit and profit alone, would find any of it enjoyable. The soyboys will analyze this film for weeks, until it’s out of the spotlight and it’s on to the next “event”. There is a very good reason I will never see this movie, or anything else from Hollywood ever again. It is poison for the mind and nothing more. There is no benefit to be gained by watching such drivel.
Dude, you reek of nihilism.
MARVEL: Hey Star Wars! What’s the name of that winning formula you reuse over and over again???? We’d like to use it more in our movies and Disney Pus Chows.
SWD: That’s the Dave Felonious Lone Wolf and Cub storytelling device. It works everytime. It worked with The Clone Wars movie — Anakin Skywalker with Ahsoka and Ahsoka with Baby Hutt, Rebels — Kanan with Ezra, The Mandalorian — Din Djarin with Baby Yoda, The Book of Boba Fett — Baba Fett with Baby Rancor, The Bad Batch — Abled Challenged Clones with Baby Clone Girl Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Chow — Ben Kenobi with Baby Leia.
MARVEL: That does seem to be the winning formula all these Disney Denizens seem to be slobbering their mouths over. We’ll use it for the Thor 5 movie. Thor will have Baby Gorr/a — a sassy-talking girl demon who schools all the White Cissy Males of the universe with her Slay Queen attitude.
Sounds like a DVD rental as I said in those days.
“I’ll wait until it comes out on tape” as I said in those days.
EEEEyeah, better luck with The Incal, Waititi.
I saw the preview to this movie while waiting to watch Elvis. I thought the trailer seemed weird. Thanks for the review!
Whatever the opinions on this film, this isn’t ending Taika’s career, Pro. Though Inwas expecting like a 5-6 based on how you worded your review. I’m just glad it wasn’t woke after all.