Love and Blunder

So Thor: Love and Thunder is a bit weak. It's been thoroughly covered at this point and the box office drop in its second weekend tells an accurate story. It's disappointing because Thor: Ragnarok was so good and because Love and Thunder has some good qualities. One of those good qualities is not how much its humour resembles Monty Python.

I love Monty Python but the Python movies and Flying Circus are not works of fiction that encourage you to care about the protagonists and their achievements, they're not stories in which we're truly concerned about the welfare of the characters. Life of Brian ends on a joke about everyone suffering slow, painful death. That's not the right tone for a Thor film. At least not an MCU Thor film.

In a Monty Python movie, it wouldn't matter that the plot doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't matter that Thor and his friends have to disguise themselves to enter a convention of the gods even though Thor is a god himself. It wouldn't matter that Jane seems like a completely different character to how she was established in the first film. It wouldn't matter that the characters continue cracking jokes and focusing on their personal lives after all the children in Asgard have been abducted by an army of shadow demons. In a movie where we're supposed to care about the stakes, though, these things are deadly.

So in retrospect it seems even more miraculous that Taika Waititi hit just the right balance in Ragnarok. It's been reported that actors improvised a lot on Love and Thunder and that's how it got such a jokey tone. Improvisation is one of the things that made the first Iron Man work so well but maybe Jon Favreau is just better at harnessing that storm than Waititi is. Possibly Waititi just doesn't have the accrued instincts to sense what's right for more dramatic material. It's a shame because Christian Bale, as the villain, Gor the God Killer, is actually pretty effective. His makeup and performance make him a pretty impressive villain.

And there are some real thought provoking ideas introduced. In an odd moment of serendipity, I'd been talking with my friend, Rizu, with whom I saw Love and Thunder, about Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov and how he refused to believe in a benevolent god because innocent children are exposed to cruelty and suffering. And Love and Thunder begins with the death of Gor's child followed by Gor finding his deity lounging in an oasis, gorging himself on fruit. The theme of imperiled children comes back when Gor kidnaps all the children in Asgard.

I'm starting to wonder if Disney has some kind of mission plan about showing children being warriors since this movie features something like that following on the heels of Leia getting a blaster holster at the end of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It seems an unfortunate choice given the epidemic of school shootings in the U.S. What is Disney thinking? Does someone at Disney think kids need to be encouraged to fight their attackers? It just seems like poor taste. Now, if you had something like Jim Hawkins fighting Israel Hands in Treasure Island, it would make sense. Here's a kid backed into a corner, forced to kill. It's exciting but also terrible and frightening. The kids in Love and Thunder and Obi-Wan Kenobi never seem especially frightened. So it's not really an exploration of a traumatic and violent situation, it's just like they're stroking kids' egos.

Natalie Portman is also a big problem in the film. This isn't quite the worst example of a female character taking over from an established male character. The fact that she assumes the name of "Thor" in the movie is never explained nor does it make any sense. But the role requires Portman to step well outside her limited skillset as an actress. She certainly gives it her best shot and I commend her for putting on some muscle. But the actress who formerly distinguished herself with her beauty and a sort of ethereal aloofness just can't act with . . . I guess I'd call it personality. She just doesn't seem to know what it's like to have a personality.

There were some funny jokes. The stuff with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the beginning was good. I liked the use of Guns N Roses music. But Love and Thunder is one of the weakest MCU films to date.