Thor: Love and Thunder - Taika's Still Bloody Got It.

 **NO SPOILERS FOR LOVE AND THUNDER, BUT SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS THOR AND AVENGERS MOVIES ABOUND WITHIN. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.***

Sounds like Marvel fatigue is setting in for a fair few fans, to the point where even when the apotheotic maestro of Ragnarok, Taika Waititi, returns with his latest Asgardian adventure, it's become a little too popular to rag on the movie just to rag on it.

I have to say, to the fans who've been dumping on this movie, kindly go eat a hammer. Taika Waititi's back and better than ever, and I'd like to say that his newest movie actually improves on Ragnarok in a few key respects.

Maybe it's not a perfect improvement. Maybe it does have its flaws.

But for Thor 4: More Thor (great, thanks for making me quote Gina Bloody Peretti), Love and Thunder is an unabashed cosmic rock-n-roll adventure with some genuine heart, and this time, Waititi even does a better job of sticking the balance between comedy and tragedy.

Taika's got another alien rainbow for you to taste...

So it's hardly the first time that Marvel's given us a movie filmed in the pandemic era, which might explain why almost the entire environment of the movie looks as CG as it gets. But this is the first one that gets to use the ILM Volume digital backdrops which Lucasfilm pioneered with The Mandalorian and all the subsequent Star Wars series on Disney+. That, plus the fact that they filmed in Australia, I think might help explain why the characters feel like they're so much more present with each other in individual shots than in, say, Spider-Man: No Way Home. Stronger quarantine regulations, I guess.

But on these computer-generated sets in Aus, Taika Waititi and the whole cast and crew give us a stellar story or two or three. This time, we get a pretty personal focus on Thor himself, in part because he has no more of his blood family left. No more Freya, no more Odin, no more Loki, they're all dead. (Well, don't tell Thor about the TVA - God, has it been a year since Loki the series was first streaming on Disney+? I remember watching some of that with Koda and Jesse in the attic on a blazing hot summer night or two when Oregon totally roasted.) So this time, Chris Hemsworth gets to act out not only the joyful but sensitive Thor we got in Ragnarok, but also a Thor still recovering from all his Infinity War and Endgame trauma. As Korg (still as gentle a giant as ever, especially with Waititi's bouncer-inspired voice) relates Thor's backstory in the movie's first act, I feel like Waititi was deliberately addressing a few complaints about Thor's character arc in Endgame especially. People thought that Thor's massive weight gain was a fatphobic joke, but Waititi makes it clear how much Thor was using his new "dad bod" as a shield to protect his heart (broken many times over) and his soul, wherein he struggles so hard inside to determine who he truly is.

Not a Guardian of the Galaxy, that's for sure. As much fun as he's had with those guys since Endgame, there's a reason he goes his separate ways from them within the first ten minutes or so.

Definitely an Asgardian, and a god.

And both identities will need him to step up on the defense against the incoming terror of Gorr the God Butcher.

Marvel can be pretty hit or miss with their villains a lot of the time, and this time, Christian Bale as Gorr manages to be both, but definitely more towards a hit. I'd only consider him a miss because of how much his performance, while still recognizably Bale, manages to call Pennywise to mind a few too many times with his rather clownish attitude in a few key scenes. Not to mention, as much as they tried to avert it, the character still bears a strong and disturbing resemblance to Voldemort. 

But unlike the cosmic horror of Pennywise or Voldemort the utter sociopath, Gorr is a strongly motivated villain to the point of being even an anti-villain in the prologue, where his backstory is revealed. His daughter dies in his arms, starving and thirsty as they both lie in an endless desert, the last survivors of their people after an unspecified apocalypse. Enter an oasis populated by a few gods, including the sun god to whom he and his daughter were devoted, laughing at him and refusing to allow him even a taste of fruit. Enter the dreaded Necro Sword, capable of summoning shadow monsters and killing gods, and corrupting the minds of those who wield it. The sword disappears and reappears in Gorr's hands, and thus a God Butcher is born. It actually makes sense coming from Waititi's mind, the same mind that make Ragnarok hella anti-imperalist and anti-colonialist, because it makes Gorr read as an ex-Christian of sorts. I mean, while his god wasn't exactly of the Abrahamic persuasion, let's not forget that a lot of Christian elements we know today, particularly in Catholicism, were themselves lifted wholesale from Egyptian, Persian, etc. sun gods and the like.

By the time the movie really begins in earnest, Gorr's gone around and killed quite a few "lesser" gods, with Asgard being next. Therefore, Thor needs to return home and reconnect with his old friends - namely Tessa Thompson's regal badass Valkyrie, the new King of Asgard (openly bisexual in this movie, as opposed to her appearance in Ragnarok where the scene of her having another woman in bed was deleted, though unfortunately she still hasn't found the queen she deserves). And, of course, we could use another Thor, one that we know about from the trailers: Natalie Portman, finally returning as Dr. Jane Foster. That said, though...I cannot spoil here the exact circumstances that lead to her becoming the Mighty Thor and wielding Mjolnir. I kinda suspected something was up when we first see Jane, something digging itself out of my faintest memory of comic book history. Naturally, that first scene made me predict the course of the movie pretty well, but it still doesn't make the emotional beats along the way hit any less hard. Hell, while Taika had a tendency to milk the jokes too long even during tense or sad moments in Ragnarok, this time, the tears flow just as freely as the laughs do. The balance is struck so much better, and it makes the movie flow so much more freely as a result.

To Love and Thunder, I give an A grade, and hope that Russell Crowe does a better job with that Greek accent the next time around, because let's be honest, his Zeus kept crossing the map from Italy to Russia and back again and was hella bloody annoying.

Till next time, Pinecones...

#FeedTheRightWolf

Remember: Denis Leary is always watching. Always.