BEFORE: Yes, I snuck out to the movies once again, during the first week of August, while I was still watching and reviewing documentaries - so yeah, I watched this between "We Feed People" and "Julia", what can I say, I was desperate for some fiction, like a superhero movie, after watching about 35 documentaries. Doc fatigue had definitely set in - by contrast, when I watched "Jurassic World Dominion" at the theater where I work, I was only 2 docs into the chain. Right now I can't wait for the chain to end.
Chris Pratt carries over from "The Tomorrow War".
THE PLOT: Thor enlists the help of Valkyrie, Korg and ex-girlfriend Jane Foster to fight Gorr the God Butcher, who intends to make the gods extinct.
AFTER: There's an upside to having a path to the end of Movie Year 14, it means I don't have to worry about scheduling until December, just stick to the plan, watch another 72 movies over the next four months - easy peasy, the math is in my favor - and just wait for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas to roll around, I've got holiday-themed movies for all of those. The downside, however is that I haven't really taken a hard look at what's being released this fall, because there's no way I can schedule them in. I have to work at a screening of "Beast" this week, and even though I've got other movies with Idris Elba coming up, I can't watch the film. What else is coming out this fall? "Bullet Train", "Black Adam", the long-awaited "Avatar" sequel, and then there's "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever". I'm going to have to take a pass on all of that, the last one probably hurts the most. But that's my trade-off, for the security of knowing I'm going to have my fourth totally linked Movie Year in a row.
So I figure that "Thor: Love and Thunder" is the last movie I'll watch live in a theater for the next few months, unless something changes. How ironic that I'm going back to work in a movie theater next week, for what I hope is a very busy August & September (many of the orientation events for the college's fall semester take place at the theater) and well, some of those events don't even involve movies, they're just the closest thing to an auditorium that the school has. Maybe they will run some orientation-related videos, but that's not my concern, I'm mostly there to open the doors, make sure the events run smoothly, and then lock up after. Good gig, right? Sure, put me on a 12-hour shift, because I get paid by the hour. Anyway, working there and not watching movies kind of feels like I'm following that old advice, "Don't get high on your own supply..."
Anyway, back to the fourth (!!) "Thor" movie, his first movie post "Endgame", in Marvel's Phase 4 or Phase 5 or whatever it is. By now Marvel's fighting franchise fatigue, looking for ways to move each hero's story forward without repeating themselves, but really, I think they could have just made another "Ragnarok", because to do anything else after that feels like a bit of a letdown. So many important things happened in "Ragnarok" because they really went for it, they had Thor battling Hulk, revealing Hela as Thor's sister, then the destruction of Asgard by Surtur, so much went down! The giant Fenris wolf, the death of Odin, and then knowing that the battle with Thanos was just around the corner, that was a big freaking deal all around! So to have Thor & friends battle just ONE villain here, well there's really no comparison, is there? "Ragnarok" for the win, it's going to be regarded as the high point in the series.
That being said, I'm familiar enough with the comic books that I know the storylines that Taika Waititi is "borrowing" from here, it's the same formula as "Ragnarok" in that they're stitching together several comic-book plots and hoping that the result becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Gorr the God-Butcher was a notable villain from a particular run of the "Thor: God of Thunder" series in 2013. In the comics, not only did Gorr try to kill every god he encountered with his Necrosword, but he also once whispered a secret to Thor that caused such a lack of confidence that Thor was unable to wield his hammer Mjolnir for months. The secret, which was eventually revealed, was that the universe would have been better off without gods - and I can't say that I disagree. The movies follow the basics of Gorr's story, namely that his whole family dies after he prays for his god's help, and he then learns that his god COULD have helped him, but chose not to - then once he gets the god-killing sword, Gorr sets out to kill all gods around the universe, and of course Thor gets in his way.
Another storyline mixed in from the comics is Jane Foster getting powers similar to Thor's - Jane was Thor's human girlfriend WAY back in the Marvel comics of the 1960's, back when it was believed that Thor was inhabiting the body of a human doctor, Donald Blake (later revealed as an unreal construct of Odin, designed to teach his son Thor humility). You can kind of see how a new writer takes over a Marvel character every few years and then tries to put a new spin on the stories that have come before. Donald Blake's a human who found a hammer - no, he's not, he's just a part of Thor's personality - no, wait, he's an artificial being and a walking lesson plan - and the latest was that Donald Blake turned evil and tried to imprison Thor in his non-real limbo (the place where characters go when the writers aren't using them, I guess.).
Anyway, the comic books didn't do anything with Jane Foster for a few decades, then suddenly decided it would be great if more teen girls were reading comic books, so they made female versions of all the popular male characters, there was a female clone of Wolverine, a black teen female who built her own Ironheart suit, and then the "Young Avengers" with a teen female Hawkeye and an alt-future teen version of Spider-Man's daughter for a while. Around this same time they brought back Jane Foster but gave her cancer, and then threw in Thor-like powers at the same time, for balance I guess. You might think that the powers of Thor would heal her cancer, but over time they had the opposite effect, she needed to give up being Thor in order for the chemotherapy to work. Thor was dead or MIA or something for a while, if I recall, and Jane was the star of the Thor comics for a couple of years, but then the writer changed again and they killed her off very dramatically - but of course she came back as Valkyrie, because why not, and I think she and Thor are both serving on the Avengers right now. Must be awkward.
If you weave those two plotlines together with the after-math of "Avengers: Endgame", you end up with "Love and Thunder". Thor got back in shape after his time as "Fat Thor" after killing Thanos and temporarily retiring, and has been hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, as the portmanteau-inspired "Asgardians of the Galaxy". (There was also a comic book with this title, a few years back...). But the alliance isn't really working well, because Thor's acting like a real hotdog, showing up at the last minute to defeat the evil power and take all the credit, all the while calling every battle a "team effort" when it clearly isn't. This leads to a break-up which is tough on Thor, but one the other Guardians have been dreaming about - Thor heads out on his own and finds Sif, from the previous "Thor" movies, who had tracked down Gorr, who's headed for New Asgard to kill whatever gods he finds there.
Also headed for New Asgard is Jane Foster, who heard the call of Mjolnir and believes that it might help heal her cancer, and due to an enchantment that Thor had (conveniently) placed on his hammer years before, the broken hammer's pieces come back together and give Jane the same powers as Thor, plus a similar costume. Thor teams up with, umm, Lady Thor, plus Korg and Valkyrie to fight Gorr, who escapes after kidnapping some Asgardian children. (The kids are what, exactly? Not gods, are they demi-gods or aliens or just kids? This is very unclear.)
Thor's team travels to Omnipotence City (which is, where, exactly?) which is some kind of home for all the gods, and this is where there's a weird little quirk about the Marvel Universe revealed - the comics have told stories about all kinds of gods over the years, like the Greek gods are a thing in the Marvel Comics, but so are the Egyptian gods (Moon Knight) and Native American gods and Asian gods and Hawaiian gods, in addition to the Asgardian ones, and then in the MCU there are a whole host of gods from other planets, I guess? Why so many different gods, Marvel? But no Yahweh or Allah, hmmm? And every set of gods claims they created the Earth and mankind, so they can't all be right, can they? What's the deal here, did the gods create man or did man's belief create the gods, hmmm again?
Anyway, the big cheese god, bigger than Odin even, seems to be Zeus here, and he doesn't consider Gorr much of a threat, and then wants to keep Thor's team captive so they won't reveal the location of the city where the other gods all live. Really, this is how it all works, and you're sticking with that? It's just odd - weirder even than the "love triangle" between Thor, his ex-hammer and his newer axe, Stormbreaker. Though I guess it's more of a quadrangle since Jane Foster's also involved in the mix. Must be awkward. The Asgardian god then has to defeat the Greek god and take what he needs to go fight Gorr in the Shadow Realm.
Then the whole thing gets even more contrived, because Gorr sort of gets off the god-killing path (aww, and he was doing so well!) and instead focuses on using his Necrosword to open a gate to the realm of Eternity, the personification of the universe, and it seems anybody who gets that close to Eternity gets granted one wish, and Gorr's going to use that wish to kill all the gods? It's also very unclear who set up all these rules about how the universe works, and then also how the word spread about how to accomplish all of this. So, Eternity's just some giant equivalent of a genie? That seems like a big waste of a character who is somehow everything and everyone all at once, omnipotent and omnipresent.
I have to commend the MCU here, because when they kill off a character, that character stays dead, at least so far. (I'm not counting all the heroes and people Thanos snapped out of existence, who all came back.). It's the other heroes who have died and stayed dead (again, so far) that impresses me. Like they kill the heroes off in the comic books all the time, but then bring them right back. Black Widow died a couple years ago, her neck was broken, but another writer found a way to bring her back a month (our time) later. Captain America died several times, I've seen each member of the Fantastic Four die twice since I started reading the book, and Iron Man's died at least three times I can remember. Odin died recently in the Thor comics, but I'm just not buying it, especially since his spirit's taken up residence inside Thor's hammer. Must be awkward.
I won't say here how everything ends, but nothing really ends with these characters, does it? Things just keep changing and the story keeps moving forward, as long as the movies keep bringing in cash. I just don't know if I agree with where the characters are when this story ends, it just doesn't really fit with the Thor that I know for him to end up this way. Maybe this film will grow on me over time, but I'm just not sure yet. Definitely better than "Thor: The Dark World" but that's not really saying much. And the nods to the LGBTQ audience feel a bit tacked-on, honestly making one minor character gay and a slightly more major character bi doesn't really accomplish much, until there's a gay headliner in the MCU I think it's just so much lip-service. Get a relationship going between female Hawkeye and White Widow, or Hercules and Drax, and then maybe you've got something.
Also starring Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Natalie Portman (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Christian Bale (last seen in "Spielberg"), Tessa Thompson (last seen in "Passing"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "The Man With the Iron Fists"), Jaimie Alexander (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Karen Gillan (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Pom Klementieff (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Sean Gunn (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Carly Rees, Stephen Curry, Bobby Holland Hanton, Daley Pearson, Kieron L. Dyer, Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Manny Spero, Jonny Brugh, Chanique Greyling, Elsa Pataky, Zia Kelly, Chloé Gouneau, Ava Caryofyllis, Brett Goldstein, Akosia Sabet, India Hemsworth
with the voices of Taika Waititi (last seen in "Free Guy"), Vin Diesel (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Bradley Cooper (last seen in "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain")
and cameos from Matt Damon (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Luke Hemsworth (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Thunder Force"), Ben Falcone (ditto), Kat Dennings (last seen in "Shorts"), Stellan Skarsgard (also last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Idris Elba (last seen in "The Harder They Fall").
RATING: 7 out of 10 flashbacks of Thor's hook-ups
No comments:
Post a Comment