Thor: Love & Thunder is, it turns out, a surprisingly divisive film. ScreenRex EiC, for one, was not a fan. The film boasts one of the MCU’s lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores — though many of the series’ best films (Iron Man Three, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, The Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) also have lower-than-average scores. Weirdly, the more a Marvel movie tries to be about something, the more audiences reject it.
And make no mistake, Thor: Love & Thunder is very much trying to be about something. It isn’t always succeeding, but boy is it trying.
“Let me tell you the story of the space viking, Thor Odinson.”
Gorr (Christian Bale) is a faithful man. The last of a tribe of people who worshiped a sun-god on a heat-blasted planet, Gorr and his daughter are dying. Still, he prays. Every night, Gorr prays for salvation for his daughter. There’s no answer. Sometime after his daughter dies, Gorr wanders into a utopian oasis. There, he drinks and eats — and meets his god, an uncaring deity without a concern in the world. Thankfully, he has in his possession a weapon that can kill a god: The Necrosword. Gorr uses it to kill his god, and then to take revenge on the uncaring forces that oversee the universe.
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is not one of those uncaring forces. Sure, Thor is lost. He’s confused and lonely, even as he travels with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Thor seeks meaning. He gets it, in the form of a series of distress signals from planets whose gods have been killed. Investigating, he learns that Asgard is next on Gor’s list.
This is news to Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), who has turned Asgard into a tourist trap to keep her people safe. And it’s news to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who recently traveled to New Asgard seeking a mystical cure for the Stage 4 cancer ravaging her body, only to find herself recruited by Mjolnir to be the new Thor. When Gorr arrives and kidnaps all the children of New Asgard, Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane must team up to travel the galaxy to save them and stop Gorr’s god-butchery.
“He was no ordinary man.”
So, okay, look: Thor: Love & Thunder has a lot of problems. The comedy is hackneyed, dull, and overwrought. Some of the effects look surprisingly terrible. The pacing is slack. To a degree, these are problems common with the late-period MCU movies generally, but Love & Thunder certainly doesn’t improve on any of those issues.
And yet, overall, I finished the film mostly positive on it. Now, I’m an MCU contrarian, so this may be expected? Iron Man? No thank you. Iron Man Three? That’s my shit. The Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Thor — these are my favorite MCU films. I think this is largely because they are sloppy, but they are distinctive. They’re interesting. There is something to hold onto and talk about there. What am I going to say about Captain America: Civil War or Avengers: Endgame? There are some neat fights, but beyond that, on a thematic level, I don’t have a lot to hold on to.
Thor: Love & Thunder, for all its many problems, does offer plenty to hold onto. It’s interesting. Let’s dig into why.
“He was a god.”
If we look at the plot synopsis, there’s an element that feels out of place to me: Jane’s cancer. This is a heavy plot for an action-comedy. The MCU has wrestled with cancer before, but never with one of its main characters. And while Jane has more agency than she did in Thor: The Dark World, at least, she’s still not Love & Thunder’s main character. It feels like it would be challenging to do a story like this justice.
But what if the entire movie was about cancer? Not about Jane specifically, but more broadly about losing a loved one to cancer?
Jane’s part in this is obvious: She has cancer. Like many people with cancer, Jane starts out hoping for science to cure her. When that doesn’t work, she hopes for a… non-traditional cure. She travels to New Asgard, where Mjolnir, Thor’s broken hammer, chooses her as worthy. This gives her immense physical power — but doesn’t cure her. Indeed, taking up Mjolnir worsens her illness in the long run. Jane found a comfort, but not a solution.
Gorr, on the other hand, does not have cancer. He is just pale and hairless, bearing a sword that is slowly corrupting his body and killing him. Oh. Wait. Do you think there’s something there? Unlike Jane, Gorr has given up on any thought of healing. He prayed for salvation. None came. Gorr got the message, and it turned him bitter. Beyond that, his look was changed from the comics, making him look more like a sickly human than his more alien appearance in the comics.
The film is riddled with imagery contrasting health and sickness. Gorr hides in the Shadow Realm, a black-and-white mini-planet that holds no life. Meanwhile, the gods hide in Omnipotence City, a giant, colorful place where death cannot touch them — and where they refuse to help anyone plagued by Gorr. The healthy revel with vitality — feasts and orgies abound! The sick search desperately for a miracle they know isn’t coming. Even Sif (Jamie Alexander) loses an arm, hoping to die and go to Valhalla rather than live disabled and in pain — until she realizes that she has to continue on, to learn to live and fight with one arm.
Even the film’s final conflict plays into this. Jane has to face the fact that wielding Mjolnir isn’t actually making her any better. Indeed, ignoring her treatments in favor of a mystical solution has brought her to the brink of death. Thor asks her to sit out the final confrontation with Gorr, to focus on healing. She ignores him, however. Not in a desperate bid to save herself, but in an attempt to help someone else. Jane chooses death.
This, it turns out, is the key to defeating Gorr. Not punching him hard, but Thor realizing Jane’s sacrifice and convincing Gorr that he can make the same one. The same power that would let him get revenge on an uncaring world would also allow him to bring his own love back. In a way, like Jane used her energy to support Thor, Gorr uses his to mend his daughter, to give her another, better chance at life after he passes.
“After saving planet Earth for the 500th time, Thor set off on a new journey.”
Okay, so, all that said: Thor: Love & Thunder has a lot of problems. Like a lot of Phase 4 Marvel movies, which range from the abysmal (Shang Chi) to the sublime (The Eternals), it’s a mess of a film. The film’s overt comedy almost universally flops. Taika Waititi is a funny person, but this is not strong comic writing and direction for him. And it’s visually quite boring! Outside of the Shadow Realm, a film high-point, most of the film has the standard Marvel washed-out color palette.
That said, I don’t actually think Phase 4 has been worse than any other. I think there really is a degree of exhaustion set in. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame trained audiences to expect bigger and better, more and stronger. So a series of standalone movies with diverse themes was met with frustration and indifference. Who is the next big bad? What is the next big team up? And, on the other side: Why are we still letting Disney monopolize so much time and talent? How are people okay with how bad these movies look, and how abusive they are to VFX artists?
One tweet I’ve seen a few people make is about how, after The Eternals left a giant god half-formed in an ocean somewhere, no other movies have talked about this. They said it as a negative, but… good? That’s a good thing, right? I don’t actually like these movies when they’re interconnected. My favorite comics are barely connected to wider continuity. My favorite films aren’t dependent on intertextuality with a dozen other films. They just tell a story that looks good, or has interesting themes, or great characters.
Thor: Love & Thunder doesn’t look good. And its characters are… fine. Overly cutesy, perhaps. Too attached to Taika’s self-insert character, Korg, for their own good. But I did find the film interesting, which is more than I can say for a good half the MCU movies. I liked the way it tried to boil a big fantasy epic down into an intimate story about watching a loved one die of cancer. This is the kind of thing that I want the MCU to be doing.
Though, to be fair, I wouldn’t complain if they started to look better doing it, too.