--Gorr, Thor: Love and Thunder
Taika Waititi actually pulled a reverse Jon Favreau--the latter directed the excellent Iron Man and then directed the abysmal sequel Iron Man 2, but Waititi went from directing a generally terrible Thor movie in Ragnarok to helming Love and Thunder, which corrects almost every one of Ragnarok's major problems. As is usual for Marvel movies, the villain gets minimal screentime yet again, but this time the villain has more depth than Cate Blanchett's Hela despite his utterly idiotic worldview, and this time the humor does not smother out the genuinely existential themes and emotional weight. Love and Thunder embodies how comedy does not require the absence of greater substance to be woven into a film. It does not have to clash with themes, characterization, and drama. Sometimes that means keeping dramatic and abstract aspects unpolluted by humor, and sometimes that means simply making sure the humor is not intrusive even if all of these things are present together in the same scene. Love and Thunder does a much better job with this than the entry it follows up. This is even the best Thor movie out of the four.
Production Values
From the first scene with its montage of Thor's life since Endgame to the multiple fights with Gorr, Love and Thunder has a very strong, consistent, and more experimental visual style than most, if not all, other MCU projects. There are many examples that will probably stand out even to casual viewers: opening shots of Thor by a tree, a scene with space dolphins (which is all I will mention about that scene here), or the black and white coloring of the shadow realm Gorr hides have some of the best aesthetic creativity in the entire MCU. In fact, when Gorr comes out of the shadows, he actually would be right at home in some sort of horror film, so stark is the contrast between his orangish eyes and the otherwise greyish coloring of his preferred dimension. Thankfully, the effects and visual style is finally merged with very sincere characterization that is actually not overwhelmed by the humor.
Even Korg's narration has a very distinct emphasis on how Thor has grappled with attachment, loss, and despair across his many years of life. Thor is not relegated to being almost exclusively a simple joke-machine like in Endgame and Ragnarok. The very sincere development of his character starts in the opening and continues all the way to the end. Chris Hemsworth balances the comedy and serious character moments better than ever, and Natalie Portman does the same as The Mighty Thor, whose connection to Mjolnir is tied to devastating life circumstances that get explored very well for the relatively small runtime of the film. Natalie Portman helps anchor the emotional and existential cores of Love and Thunder by doing much more with her character than she ever was able to in the first two Thor movies. Christian Bale has far less time on the sceen as Gorr than either Hemsworth or Portman, which is one of the gravest artistic flaws of the entire film, as Marvel production still ends up sidelining or killing almost every villain. What Bale does with his performance and what the art direction does for his scenes, though, are spectacular and deserved more time.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
An extraterrestrial named Gorr discovers that a pseudo-deity he devoted his life to does not actually care about his species at all except for occasional amusement, and so he wields the Necrosword of a dead being that could use it to kill gods. Gorr vows to end the life of every god he can even if the Necrosword slowly drains him of his own life. As he travels the galaxy slaying "deities" (the only being shown in the MCU who might be a literal god is Arishem in Eternals, and even then he might be a created being and not an uncaused cause), Thor notices a distress call from his friend Lady Sif, who tells him Gorr is coming to destroy New Asgard. When Thor does indeed find Gorr using shadow creatures summoned by the Necrosword to attack his fellow Asgardians, another Thor shows up--his former girlfriend Jane Foster now has his old reconstructed hammer. The contrast between Jane and Gorr brings Thor to decide how to react to the savagery of Gorr and some of the gods this new butcher would seek to kill.
Intellectual Content
Gore's intended antitheism is not actually aimed at any true gods, for none of the Olympian or Asgardian beings he hates or kills are uncaused causes. They are all superhuman but created beings, and ironically, even the being Eternity whom he seeks to grant his wish is at minimum closer to being a true deity than any of the humanoid beings he kills. I cannot know if this was intended to put Gorr's emotionalistic hypocrisy on display, but for him to consult something like Eternity in a killing spree of pseudo-deities is hypocritical. If anything, Eternity seems to have far more power than the Asgardians Gorr hopes to slaughter, and yet Eternity is even less active than them in helping suffering mortals. There are other ways that Love and Thunder ends up refuting or challenging Gorr, even if only incidentally. The second credits scene showing Jane enter Valhalla also would mean that Gorr was, as usual, just assuming things when he believed that there was no afterlife, no possibility of eternal reward for how one lives. There is also the fact that just because one "god" is malicious does not necessarily make other deities or pseudo-deities selfish, apathetic, or malicious, but it also would not mean the even a true uncaused cause is evil for being cruel. Only if the uncaused cause has a moral nature could anything possibly be morally good or evil in the first place, and if God's nature is such that cruelty is good, or even even obligatory, then the perceptions and preferences of all beings, humans included, are irrelevant. Gorr never once gives any indication that he is even thinking about how he has assumed stereotypes and the validity of his conscience in moral epistemology--either that or he does not care to know or live out the truth.
As for Thor's own philosophical errors or assumptions, he oscillates back and forth between priorities as his whims change in the moment with no regard for how logical truths do not change at all with emotions and other circumstances. Contrary to what he says when he finally gets the chance to reunite with Jane for the rest of her lifetime, love is not all that we need or want, and love could not even be possible or knowable if it was not consistent with the logical axioms that govern all things. While Gorr was not motivated by reason, by justice, or by love, it is nonetheless love that at the end of his life made him reconsider what he would spend his one wish on. It suggested by one of the protagonists that upon finding Eternity, he would wish for the death of the MCU's pseudo-gods, and perhaps by extension the nonexistence of the real uncaused cause. How Arishem the Judge would fit into this also has yet to be clarified, though the MCU is becoming more and more theologically inclined in some of its best recent entries, even if what most of the characters mean by the word gods does not refer to an actual deity at all. Even not fully addressing the exact relationship of some of these metaphysical beings like Arishem, Eternity, the Egyptian pseudo-deities of Moon Knight, He Who Remains of Loki, and the likes of Zeus and the others seen at Omnipotence City, however, is superior to avoiding all deep metaphysical and moral issues altogether as Ragnarok practically did.
Conclusion
It is ionic that one of the most serious MCU films thus far and the sequel to one that most reflected the worst of the MCU's comedy, Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder respectively, are some of its best despite being very controversial films set within the already divisive Phase 4, but in their own ways, they are the two most existential entries in the MCU at this time. More than just being a largely great movie in its own right, Love and Thunder has two credits scenes that are not trivial in their worldbuilding or used for unecessary comedy. Both of them are actually used with a serious tone to either introduce new plot threads for future projects or to provide an epilogue for a certain character--it is unclear which of these one of the credits scenes is doing. Very rarely does the same director follow up such a thematically diastrous film like Ragnarok with a sequel that not only outdoes it, but really does avoid many of the pitfalls from before. For this on its own, Love and Thunder is noteworthy, with the very distinctive visuals and the handful of deeper philosophical issues significantly elevating the film.
Content:
1. Violence: Golden blood is spilled from some beings, and and the dismemberment of shadow monsters sometimes involves what could have been fairly graphic imagery if it had the DCEU's aesthetic instead of the MCU's.
2. Profanity: "Shit" is used throughout.
3. Nudity: Thor is briefly seen naked from behind.
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