Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) July 10th, 2022

Unfortunately for Director Taika Waititi great falls come from great heights. The expectations that his newest movie Thor: Love and Thunder would be good came from experience. He starred in and directed the hilarious What We Do In The Shadows, the righteously epic Thor: Ragnarok, and the storybook whimsy of nazi youth depicted in Jojo Rabbit. These triumphs created a tall but fragile pedestal, crumbling under the weight of his own ego.

I don’t know what happened behind the scenes at Disney but as ancient humans once made sense of lightning with stories of Thor and Zeus so too must I create an explanation for why Thor: Love and Thunder is such hot garbage. This is post Avengers: Endgame so Kevin Feige is probably taking a 10 year overdue vacation and isn’t keeping his house in order as best he can. But why should he? Taika’s in charge, and with his pedigree we can rest assured we’re in good hands.

Taika’s tasked with writing Thor: Love and Thunder but why should he? He knows he’s just going to ad-lib all the pesky dialogue on the day so maybe just a rough outline’ll do. Sketch out the main plot points and wait for the art director, costume designer, and visual artists to deliver their preproduction work to him for approval. Every day they ask about the script and Taika charms them like Joseph Smith into believing the script exists but in order to keep the script safe from leaking he can’t show it to anyone before filming.

Shooting days come and its Taika’s dream, no one has a script which means no one can fuck up their lines! Brilliant! Just riff man, we’re all having a good time here on set, can you believe it? We’re making another Thor movie and we’re all getting paid on the backend so the cash is going to FLOW. Don’t even worry, we can shoot all day because it’s all digital now and we’ve got fields of hard drives to store a day’s worth of dick jokes and whatever other rancid bullshit flies out of our mouths while everyone else on set are shaking their heads, too sheepish to speak truth to the powerful guy who insisted on including screaming goats in his blockbuster. Don’t you remember the screaming goats YouTube videos from like… 5 years ago? Well Taika just saw them and he thinks they’re hilarious, why not put them in the Thor movie? That’s brilliant and relatively topical!

What’s the next scene? Guardians of the Galaxy sequences? Who cares? Just have Thor do and say a bunch of dumb shit and then we’ll kick those guys out of the movie. We certainly wouldn’t want to see an epic space adventure where those characters team up, nah we need to make more room to mishandle Natalie Portman’s ham-fisted cancer arc. Ok, next scene! Thor makes a phone call to kidnapped children… uhhhh ok Chris just say something arrogant and silly that’ll kill some time till the next scene. Oh cool! Next up is everyone sitting in a room talking, put that one in the can. PRINT! Next, oh great ANOTHER SCENE WHERE OUR ACTION HEROES STAND AROUND QUIPPING AD NAUSEAM. FANTASTIC.

Ok, that’s enough fantasy griping. Now for the real griping.

If a movie is going to be an ad-lib masterpiece like A Mighty Wind or What We Do In The Shadows the producers should be upfront about it. We shouldn’t have to tolerate an incomplete script because Disney covers up their inept screenwriter’s shortcomings by slapping the Marvel logo above his name. I imagine there was much more creative oversight on Thor: Ragnarok accounting for the dramatic drop off in quality between the two Thor films. Likewise Waititi probably doesn’t deserve full credit for how well written Jojo Rabbit is because it’s a pretty straightforward adaptation.

I’m crestfallen by how inexplicably bad Thor: Love and Thunder was. It’s so dramatically and uniquely shitty. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but brand help us identify entertainment we can count on to help release some of the stress of daily life. When a brand like Disney and Marvel drops the ball as badly as they did with Thor: Love and Thunder then it makes me, a consumer, resent them.

Let’s normalize asking for a refund from theater managers when movies are this shitty. We’ve got to start thinking about our entertainment like dining out. If you order a steak and it comes out caked in dust and rat poison you’re not going to eat it and complain on the drive home, you’re going to send it back. This is how we should treat our entertainment diet. If Disney can’t be bothered to make their $350 million dollars movie worth watching then they shouldn’t be raking in three times its budget in profits. Dude, you’re eating a dusty poison steak!

The only person I would recommend this movie to are nihilists and masochists. If you want to feel nothing and you want it to hurt go see Thor: Love and Thunder. Hell if that’s not enough dimensions of torment see it in 3D, the enhanced visual depth really brings out the emptiness everywhere else. I’m not tolerating this shit anymore, if I spend my time driving to a movie and it’s obvious I’m getting conned by the studio I’m getting my money back, or at least a comped ticket. Someones paying for this shit but it ain’t me.