I Like to Watch | Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
I was never a fan of the 1960's campfest that was the Adam West Batman series.
Far more a Marvel fan than DC, I still read across corporations as I grew up. Like the kids who take gender fluidity and the message that Thomas Jefferson was first and foremost an enslaver so seriously, I took the stories of grown people with super powers uniformed in the clothing choices of gay strippers as full of gravitas. Goofy shit like the Spider Pig and Superman's improbable Kryptonian dog left me cold. These tales of heroism were a bit of the bedrock of my upbringing so having the characters as instruments to mock their very stories was like eating meatloaf with M&Ms in it. Just gross.
In the late seventies, I loved Christopher Reeves as Superman. Richard Donner did the unthinkable—he took the character semi-seriously. Sure, I wished Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor was more Evil Genius than Greedy Buffoon but it was more in keeping with my desire to see the comic book come to life. I then ended up hating the third and fourth follow-up films because they made mockery of the very thing I loved about the first. Richard Pryor? Really?
Then came Tim Burton and Michael Keaton. 1989's Batman was lush and bizarre but it took the characters as written rather than with a comedy-spin. Batman Returns was even better as the villains were full of gravity and horror. Then Joel Schumacher came along and gave us bat-nipples and Jim Carrey. FUCK!
In 2003, there was the beauty and wonder of Jon Favreau. Balancing the gravity of the superhero stories with a sense of wisecracking fun without highlighting either the inherent silliness of grown people dressing up in costumes to fight other grown people in costumes or the quasi-fascist message of justifiable vigilantism, he found the sweet spot. It worked. It worked so well that Iron Man spawned two dozen films and an interlocking universe of stories that mostly managed that balance.
That razor's edge between too much fealty and too much tongue-in-cheek mockery was tested by the grim, humorless DCEU films of Zack Snyder. No, the MCU had found the perfect mix. No Bat-credit cards or Mr. Freeze catchphrases and no washed out murderous Superman glumly being trolled by Congress.
Thor was a bit of an issue in this perfect mix. The first film took the Shakespearean qualities of self proclaimed gods (positioned as nearly omnipotent beings who claimed they were gods but weren't exactly gods… maybe?) and skirted the line of too much self-seriousness. Thor isn't a science-based warrior. He isn't a regular human imbued super powers by a super-soldier serum, gamma radiation, or a radioactive spider. The Asgardians are magical creatures so pulling Thor into the mix of the Avengers was an odd choice. Joss Whedon threw in plenty of wise cracks but few gags and Thor was seen as the outlier among a group of outliers. It worked.
The Dark World was a messy sequel and included space elves. Still overly serious and too plot heavy and complicated. Marvel appeared to be uncertain how to deal with this character but the commitment to a third movie was baked into the formula.
They hired crazy, funny director Taika Waititi. Known for his New Zealand hit What We Do in the Shadows—effectively The Office for vampires—Waititi had a more comic vision for Thor. Thor: Ragnarok was more in line with James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy than the previous two films. It was fun. It had Jeff Goldblum. It had the Hulk. Kooky alien sidekicks. Lots of gags. Hemsworth got to have some more fun. Because the shackles of straight-faced adherence to the pomposity of the god-thing had been removed, Waititi created a new playground for the character with potential for real development.
Via Infinity Wars and Endgame, Thor finally got to have some genuine blowback from his many losses. He decided to give up his throne to Valkyrie, decided to fly off with Starlord and crew, and went to go find his purpose in the universe.
Tee up Thor: Love and Thunder.
While the world may be oversaturated with too much MCU, I'm not. I am, however, thinking Waititi might need a break. He is almost the MCU Joel Schumacher. I was looking forward to this fourth Thor film but not quite as enthusiastically as I have been in the past. This has less to do with Taika or too much Marvel and more to do with why I love this universe in the first place.
I love the MCU because I learned to read with Marvel comics. I read them all with The Fantastic Four being my all-time favorite. At some point as I went from latchkey kid hoarding pulp magazines to the new kid who carried around copies of Moby Dick and I, Robot, I stopped reading comics. The switch came as Marvel expanded things and moved further from those superheroes who could be me if I was saturated by some radiation or born with a mutation to magical heroes and aliens. In the post-Endgame, Phase 4 MCU, I prefer Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye over Wandavision and Loki for that very reason. Thor was never gonna be my go-to.
Thor: Love and Thunder made me laugh throughout; it also left me a bit sad. Waititi is crossing over from that beautiful balance into outright nose-thumbing at the more serious side of the stories. Sure, he introduces Jane Foster having Stage 4 cancer but it feels low-stakes. No one—NO ONE—with Stage 4 cancer looks like a slightly sleep-deprived Natalie Portman. The butt of so many of the gags is that, rather than Thor evolving from his earlier pain and incredible loss, apparently he's just stupid. A buffoon like Drax rather than, you know, Thor. Korg has gone from funny side character who is oblivious and cute to insufferable.
I recognize that watching people in LARPing costumes is sort of silly but previous films and streaming shows use color saturation in such a way to de-emphasize the fakeness of the uniforms. Taika films it so that Thor looks like he's wearing an obviously plastic breastplate with a velour cape purchased from a Halloween store. No Thor-nipples on the costume yet but I can see them coming.
A quick side note directed at those who find the latest MCU offerings as being too woke and ideologically offensive.
I started to watch Ms. Marvel, made it fifteen minutes in, and decided it wasn't for me. Not because she's a brown girl. Not because she is a Muslim character. Because it felt like the MCU Hannah Montana and was not a show created for me. I throw no shade at the show because I chose not to watch it. My issues with Thor: Love and Thunder have nothing to do with the queer characters or feminist leanings. In fact, I love that stuff but that's my choice, my subjective opinion. Along those lines, if your subjective opinion is that you don't like the movie because of these additions, my subjective opinion is that you're kind of an idiot. No one is requiring your attendance so go find other stuff to watch and piss off.
In Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi adds a hysterical moment with a theatrical troupe spoofing theatrical troupes and playing out the glorification of Loki. It's a short bit, it's pretty funny, and it forwards the story by underscoring the fact that Loki fucked over Odin and replaced him and Thor needs to make that right. In Thor: Love and Thunder the same troupe, the same gag, gets three times the screen time to do nothing for the plot except to mock the serious moments in the previous film.
That's why this movie left me a little less thrilled, a little less entertained, a little less. It felt lazy and self-congratulatory rather than an earnest approach to the characters. It felt like Joel Schumacher came in and said "Hey. I know the stuff Burton did was good but I really have zero respect for any of that shit. Let's get funny! Let's get a fat Zeus who speaks in broken English and take the opportunity to show Hemsworth's naked ass. Right? That shit is hysterical!"
