Thor Love and Thunder - Shockingly Disappointing

Thor’s fourth film is one of the worst MCU projects to date.

I am not as excited as I once was about each new MCU project. After Endgame it feels as though Marvel has been struggling to find its footing by highlighting off the wall side characters with shows and films. With critics bashing the majority of phase 4 projects with resounding “meh” reviews, Thor: Love and Thunder was one of the last connections to an era long gone, to a time where Marvel movies were, although still somewhat formulaic, made with passion for the characters and an expectation of greatness. Meaning, I wanted the fourth Thor film to be good, good enough to convince me to stay, to pull me back into a franchise I once obsessed over. Sadly, it only did the opposite, leaving me feeling like I may never feel the need to keep up with Marvel again. I didn’t just find Love and Thunder bad, but boring, uninteresting, so much so I can say the only time I was shocked during the film was by how lackluster so many of its elements were. Thor: Love and Thunder is easily one of the worst MCU movies ever made, and while it may please the die hard Marvel fans, I can safely say this film will not convince any ex-Marvel viewers teetering on the edge of moving on to stay in the fray.

During the film’s runtime there was a moment where I thought “wow, this is…pretty rough” for nearly every aspect of filmmaking. I want to break these elements down, not to simply tear the movie to shreds, but because I think there is value in watching bad movies as it allows me to see if I really know what makes a good movie by noticing what’s missing. Yes, this is pretentious as hell, but Thor: Love and Thunder is great because it allows me to recognize what makes a bad movie bad and a great movie, well, not Thor: Love and Thunder.

We can begin with the most glaring issue: the story. There are a multitude of reasons this story fails to garner any emotional engagement from the audience, but the two most important are the characters and narrative development. The characters in this film feel more like caricature’s of past movies. Not only do they take a step backward in their character development for seemingly no reason, but they are defined by a singular trait without any effort put into adding depth or creating interesting development. This comes as a result of the actual events of the plot having little to do with the characters and their beliefs. Well developed characters and stories work in tandem, with the narrative events challenging the characters initial beliefs until they’re forced to change. In this film, Thor travels the universe without any reason to change his beliefs, or at least beliefs that are framed as being important to his character development. The same goes for Jane, who is representative of another issue in the film: Things just happen. It’s difficult to explain why a film’s story doesn’t work without spoiling it, so I will just say that one of the main draws of this film for me was to see how Jane would be implemented. Simply put, she was forced. Being introduced for seemingly no reason to later be explained through a joke montage, she seems unnecessary in this story as she doesn’t meaningfully challenge Thor’s character or effect the MCU as a whole. In fact, this entire film seems unnecessary. Thor ends the film almost exactly where he begins and everything ties itself together by the end for a completely contained story where everything it contains is stagnant. With little development, incredibly rushed pacing, narrative events that don’t relate to the protagonists and weak explanations for those seemingly random events, this story is a complete nonsensical bore.

Then there’s the dialogue, which is the final straw for an already broken plot. The film begins by framing the story with Korg’s narration, which presents the story initially as a goofy fairy tale. However, the dialogue follows suit for the entire film without the reoccurrence of Korg’s narration, so the movie acts like an archetypal folktale while presenting itself as a movie. This disconnect weakness the movie to no end, as nearly every scene is completely void of subtext and filled to the brim with cliches. Having Thor say “Your arm is missing” to a character whose arm is cut off or a character proclaiming “I’m dying” with complete seriousness is only a fraction of the soulless, eye rolling dialogue that makes one wishing they could flip channels in a movie theatre. Then there’s the jokes, which quite literally silenced my theatre. To think in 2022 a film could reuse the same tired tropes and memes from a decade ago is more sad than anything else. Parts of the movie are down right cringe inducing, forcing me to avert my eyes from sheer embarrassment of watching the movie. I would say there are a few “so bad it’s good moments,” but even those are so few and far between that it’s not worth watching for being so bad.

What’s even worse is that the silly dialogue makes ill timed jokes out of the film itself that end up being ironic for how accurate they are. Minor spoilers ahead, but as stated previously the film opens with Korg’s narration of past Thor adventures, to which the movie makes fun of itself and the franchise as a whole by saying dead characters in other movies are forgettable, acknowledging that the audience clearly doesn’t remember or care about them. However, just because a film makes a joke out of a narrative weakness doesn’t make it ok when it rears its ugly head in your own movie, as the rest of Thor: Love and Thunder makes those same mistakes times ten. As previously mentioned, nearly every character is flat and forgettable, so the fact that the film is aware of the previous film’s falters and executes them to an even worse degree makes the viewing experience that much more painful.

Speaking of traditional MCU strengths that fail this time around, even the fight scenes are uninspired. I will admit, one fight scene near the end of the film was actually innovative from visuals alone, but every other action scene feels overly goofy, wether intentional or not, or stale. A fight scene early on left me completely uninterested because the main characters felt stagnant with weak and stiff choreography. It doesn’t help that the CGI is noticeably bad, with the opening scene specifically setting an unusual precedent of mediocrity for an MCU blockbuster.

To end this review I have to point out how jarring the editing is as well. Yes, not only do the cinematography, the fight scenes, the CGI, the story and the characters all range from mediocre to atrocious, but the editing capitalizes on all of this by being equally terrible. There are an absurd amount of cuts for the most simple scenes, which adds to the rushed feeling of the film that much more. Dialogue scenes are unnecessarily shot with multiple angles that make the conversation itself hard to follow, scenes cut from one to another at a breakneck pace, and dialogue is squished into short sequences that end up being needlessly distracting and confusing as a result. The editing highlights the rest of the films mistakes, making this one of the most explicitly terrible MCU films made.

All in all, Thor: Love and Thunder is strangely, shockingly terrible. The entire film was boring, rushed, confusing and ultimately meaningless for Thor and the MCU as a whole. In the sea of mediocrity that is phase 4, Thor: Love and Thunder may be my personal nail in the coffin for the MCU. In other words, this movie had to be exactly the opposite of what it is: a reason to stay committed to Marvel.