Director Report Card: Taika Waititi (2022)

7. Thor: Love and Thunder

The cinephile crowd is a fickle bunch. In the two years since "Jojo Rabbit's" release, Taika Waititi has gone from a beloved favorite of indie snobs everywhere to... Divisive, to say the least. Part of that is an inevitable backlash, following the New Zealand filmmaker's Oscar win for "Jojo's" script. (Itself a divisive film, which the Film Twitter crowd seems to completely loath these days.) After you're declared Great by Hollywood's inner circle, some folks will just instinctively say you were never good to gin with. Some of it is, no doubt, overexposure. Waititi and his quirky charm has started to pop up everywhere in the last two years. And it's not always been well used. Maybe it's just expected that some of your fans will turn on you, after you go from directing microbudget comedies to multimillion dollar superhero epics and having threesomes with Rita Ora. 

As the director returns to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with "Thor: Love and Thunder," the Taika Backlash combines with a growing distrust of Disney/Marvel's campaign to completely dominate all of pop culture. The latest "Thor" movie has received mixed reactions from professional critics but people on the internet fucking hate this movie. They've dragged it for its special effects, which has further shined a light on how Disney treats the nonunion visual effects industry. Taika's seemingly flippant attitude towards making it, and his supposed co-opting of queer culture, has now made him Film Twitter's public enemy number one. Many are saying that "Thor 4's" lackluster response is signaling the end of the MCU's box office dominance. (This has not actually been reflected in ticket sales.) At least, there's been a growing frustration with the lack of direction in Marvel's latest phase. Of course, nobody actually gives a shit what Twitter thinks about anything. What do I, your average comic book/movie nerd, have to say about Waitit's latest smart-ass superheroic saga? 

"Love and Thunder" returns to the Asgardian God of Thunder after the events of "Avengers: Endgame." Thor is paling around with the Guardians of the Galaxy, righting wrongs when he's needed, but generally feeling like he's lacking something in life. When he discovers that a madman named Gorr – wielding a reality warping weapon called the Necrosword – is slaughtering gods all over the universe, he returns to Earth to warn the residents of New Asgard. This is when Thor discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Jane Foster, now wields a reassembled Mjolnir. After Gorr takes the children of New Asgard to his shadowy home realm, Thor, Jane, Valkyrie, and Korg set off in a mission to save them. Along the way, Thor will meet Zeus and Eternity, Jane will grapple with having terminal cancer, and the two will rekindled their romance. 

In "Endgame" and here again, it was emphasized that Thor has lost all of his family. His parents are gone, his brother is gone, his closest friends are gone, and even his home world is gone. He's still doing what he's always done, being a superhero, but he feels unrooted from the life he's known. It's a dilemma that faces many people as they get older and the people they've always relied on die or drift away: Thor is having a mid-life crisis. Taika Waititi, being the filmmaker he is, is all too aware of the inherent humor in a larger-than-life literal God struggling with very Earthly emotions of loss of direction. Yet "Love and Thunder" works best when addressing this idea. That, at some point, all of us (even superheroes) have to decide what we're going to do with the rest of our lives.

Ultimately, Thor's latest adventure points him towards an answer. Gorr the God Butcher is a villain that has embraced revenge. A monk of his world's religion, whose gods ignored his cries when his daughter was dying, Gorr has decided that destroying deities is the way forward. Thor, on the other hand, re-devotes himself to human connection. It's no mistake that kids play such an important role in the story. Gorr can't let go of the pain of the past and move forward. Thor, similarly, is grappling with his emotional baggage. He has to learn to look forward to the future with a renewed hope. This sees the themes of arrested man-children struggling to grow up, that have characterized several of Taika's films, coming to its inevitable conclusion: Thor matures and starts the next stage of his life.

As much as I appreciate the themes "Love and Thunder" plays with, I do agree with a lot of the criticism the sequel has received. Waititi claimed the "Thor" franchise as his own with "Ragnarok," injecting a much-needed degree of irrelevant humor and wackiness into the stately sci-fi fantasy series. It was a good anecdote to the Shakespearean grandeur of "Thor" and the comic book "Game of Thrones" thing "The Dark World" did. Yet I think it's possible that Thor has gone too far in the other direction now. The amount of jokes and gags in the first half of "Love and Thunder" is overwhelming. There's sight gags about New Asgard becoming a tourist attraction. A pair of screaming space goats is an absurd joke the movie returns to way too much. The dry one-liners, silly quips, and comic relief is unending. This is most apparent in the character of Korg, whose constant jokiness is frequently overbearing. Is the movie taking any of this stuff seriously? Is the goofy himbo Chris Hemsworth now plays Thor as related at all to the somber hero of those earlier films? 

Eventually, after a visit to a cartoonish CGI city full of obnoxious gods and pratfalls, "Love and Thunder" does find its center. The more the focus turns towards Thor and Jane's relationship, the better the movie gets. One of the sequel's better montages is devoted to showing the peak of Thor and Jane's relationship and how it slowly fell apart. And it wasn't because of world-ending cataclysms. It's because they were two people with different life goals who slowly grew apart, despite loving each other. As they meet again, and realize how much they mean to one another, that bond reforms. It's a well done demonstration of resolving baggage with a long time ex and builds towards a touching finale.

And it is nice to have Natalie Portman back. She still has dynamite chemistry with Chris Hemsworth. Portman is most charming as a newcomer superhero trying to get a handle on the traditional aspects of the role. Unfortunately, the scenes devoted to Jane's cancer diagnosis do stick out a bit in such a flippant film. Tessa Thompson returning as Valkyrie is another welcome sight and she gets to exercise a little more of that energetic screen presence of her's. Thompson really can say a whole lot with a single wink. Russell Crowe, sad to say, totally obliterates his scenes as Zeus. He puts on a ridiculous accent and squeals his way through some painfully bad “funny” dialogue, sucking all the grandeur out of the Greek king of the gods. 

Luckily, the film does find a compelling villain. Christian Bale returns to the world of superheroes as Gorr the God Butcher, the Nosferatu-looking adversary. (A nice detail is that the religious markings Gorr wore as a monk are scarred over once he turns to god butchering.) Bale brings a lived-in weariness for the world to many of Gorr's scenes, which nicely establish him as a man who carries enormous loss on his shoulder. Yet the actor also gets to really ham it up a couple of times, vamping wickedly for an audience of captured children or taunting the bound heroes. It's refreshing to see Bale, so intense and grim in most of his roles, really cut loose like this and just have some fun. He adds a lot of pep to “Love and Thunder.” 

Gorr's backstory, though it falls short of the epic storyline the character had in the comics, also helps make him a compelling villain... In fact, he might be a  little too compelling. “Thor: Love and Thunder” repeatedly shows the gods Gorr is butchering to be vain, self-obsessed tyrants that do not care for their worshippers. It's hard to argue with the villain's conclusion that they need butchering. I's certainly implied that the murder of their gods have negative effects on various civilizations but the film only gives us glimpses of that. While providing plenty of examples of the gods being assholes. I suppose the only reason we're suppose to root against Gorr is because we like Thor and his friends and want them to live. I kept waiting for Gorr's scheme to threaten everyone, not just the gods, or for Thor to realize the villain's grievances were at least valid. The movie just glosses over all of this. The result is a bad guy who is bad mostly because he opposes our heroes. (And I guess his methods are brutal but the gods really had it coming.)

Ultimately, Taika Waititi's approach to epic sci-fi/fantasy has its ups and downs. Blending his take on Thor with eighties style day-glo imagery, heavy metal font, and some choice needle drops – lots of Guns 'N' Roses, this time out – definitely is a fun take. Gorr's Shadow Realm is definitely the visual high-light of the film. Presented in high contrast black-and-white, it's a moody setting that fits the horror movie style antagonist. Yet other parts of “Love and Thunder” are honestly tacky looking. Omnipotent City, the home of the guys, is a mishmash of Moebius-style architecture with a hundred different colors and style, which just sears the eyes. The same is true of several of the alien worlds visited in the opening montage. 

And, as the Film Twitter crowd have been happy to point out, some of the visual effects are surprisingly shoddy at times. It's not that the CGI characters look bad. That's never been the issue. Instead, the way the green screen is aligned with the other actors looks inexcusably bad sometimes. Thor on a platform before the council of Gods looks incredibly awkward, for one example. You see this in the action sequences as well, which are unusually choppy and overedited at times. The shadowy monsters Gorr summons seem like they're cool looking but we never get a good look at them. Too many of the action scenes seem to degraded into characters knocking each other across the room. 

It's fair to say that “Love and Thunder” is uneven. It takes far too long to find its footing, the script is underdeveloped in some regards, and it's surprisingly sloppy in departments that a big budget movie this expensive to make really shouldn't be. If one were to accuse Marvel of starting to coast a little on their past successes, it perhaps wouldn't be totally unfair. Yet I still found plenty to enjoy here. The film's heart is in the right place and the cast largely nails the landing. I definitely think Taika Waititi needs to return to low-budget comedy to re-calibrated his sensibilities. (That doesn't seem to be the plan as, aside from that soccer movie that's never coming out, he's got three different sci-fi project lined up.) And perhaps Thor should be handed over to someone with a little more respect for mythology. Nevertheless, “Love and Thunder” kept me largely entertained throughout its run time. [Grade: B]