Thor: Love And Thunder (July 8, 2022) Movie • Page 30

So low-key you’re over Loki?

 

Could've been gayer. Valkyrie has a dead girlfriend, wowwww what a win for representation

 

This took me way longer to catch than I’d like to admit

 

Making Of is up!

 

Watched it for the Bale and Portman BTS, but ended up loving all of the Hemsworth BTS. Guy is a treasure for the MCU.

 

We watched this over the weekend and I think I agree with mostly what everyone else has said. This is okay, has some funny moments, but at some points feels TOO weird and jokey, and feels like they really underused Bale as Gorr and Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson.

Ragnarok at least still had "Serious" Thor more often and didn't feel like Thor wasn't taking anything seriously and etc. The best part of the movie was probably that ending where Thor is having a serious moment with Gorr about making his wish.

Ragnarok is still the apex of Thor and possibly the entire MCU, so this as a follow up was kind of a let down. But it's still decent enough.

 

Oh and maybe I missed it, but I guess Stormbreaker can be lifted by anyone? Is that just because it doesn't have the same runes/spell on it that Mjolnir does?

 

Correct

 

Extremely late to finally watch this, and my main takeaway is that I am dying to know if any of the earlier crazy rumours about Taika Waititi being coked out of his mind during production and then locked out of the editing process were found to have any truth to them...???

I didn't hate this, but it wasn't very good either, and between the movie itself and the way Taika Waititi mainly but also the actors like Bale promoted this, taken together sure seems to point to something like that happening.

The other thought I had when watching it was that, the same way they clearly went crazy with the improv for the comedy, I kinda got the feeling that they went crazy with the Gorr butchering / darkness & violence and eventually had to cut it waaaay back to get the MCU-friendly PG-13 rating.

This really felt like a Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy situation where the director had access to absolutely amazing A+ level talent across the board in every dept, as well as several hundred million dollars, but only the vaguest idea of what story they were telling and what movie they were making so they just threw ungodly amounts of shit at the wall to see what stuck and hoped to save everything in the editing bay.

Also, it absolutely needed a couple more scenes of Gorr actually doing some God butchering, even if only in a quick montage type thing. Korg was awful in this.

 

The entire sequence that takes place on the little moon looking planet where the film switches to black & white is completely visually stunning and absolutely A+ level filmmaking across the board, from the truly unsettling and frightening horror-feel of the captivity part to the actually unique and creative fight against the shadow monsters amongst the space dust & floating debris backlit by the rapidly circling overheard light source. That fight was honestly right up there with the naked sword fight at the end of The Northman in that it took something we've seen a thousand times and used a lot of the latest film technologies to present it in a truly unique and stunning way.

That moon sequence being so awesome and looking so damn good is really in stark contrast to a huge chunk of the rest of the movie though, and really makes a lot of rest of the movie look and feel super rushed and almost unfinished from a visual standpoint.

I do understand that even with all of the money in the world and teams of the absolute best visual effects people in the industry, quality work takes time, and even if there weren't contentious fights during post-production I think the combination of Marvel's way of doing business when it comes to VFX & Taika Waititi's loose approach to story and structure created a perfect storm type situation where things really came to a head.

That video of him shitting on some of the VFX in the film and laughing about it is extremely fucking shitty though and actually pretty cruel in a very public way to very hard working people who make a hell of a lot less money than him and work just as hard if not arguably harder.

 

This is an incredibly tortured analogy but it reminds me a lot of Age of Ultron.

Age of Ultron wants to be two different films. One is a darker and edgier exploration of the Avengers, both as characters and as concept, the impact of their actions on the world, their insecurities and how they affect them (most notably Tony). The other is Avengers 2: We Liked Making All The Money So Can We Do It Again Please. The most obvious tension is the Thor fanservice in a cave scene (which halts the pacing of the film to provide fan service, and was apparently a studio mandate) but again, there are a lot of comedic moments (the much-criticised quips) that feel like they're in the film not to balance out the darker elements but out of insecurity, or frustration at studio interference, and the film never quite goes as far as it could have done on the stuff it sets up in the first half (the plot threads that are then picked up in Civil War).

Love & Thunder is kind of the same. Is it a deeper exploration of Thor's character, how he uses comedy to mask his guilt at letting his loved ones die and insecurity over failing to be the ruler of Asgard, or is it just Ragnarok 2, a mostly improvised comedy where occasionally a Thor movie breaks out in the background? The fact that the strongest stuff in the film is the Jane and Gorr bits, which are heavily scripted and only tangentially intersect with Hemsworth's improv (which is probably about as strong a performance as it was in Ragnarok, but plays far worse for the lack of a straight man like Ruffalo), probably doesn't say much for the direction. And, like Age of Ultron, the comedy is very front-loaded, like they were scared the audience would leave early.

And in both cases the film is fine, but can't help but think of the squandered potential. Plus what Brother Beck says about the visual effects (one of which was "corrected" for the Disney+ release implying it was literally unfinished when the film was in cinemas!) is 100% spot on.