Thor: Love & Thunder Turns The MCU's Most Layered Character Into A Joke
Reception to Thor: Love & Thunder hasn’t exactly been glowing. After the deserved praise for how Ragnarok rebooted Thor’s character into a funnier, more sympathetic lead and subverted the MCU formula, we all assumed that Taiki Waititi would pull off the same trick twice. Spoilers: he didn’t. But also, actual spoilers.
The film is a stylish and often hilarious adventure, but it’s also riddled with tonal inconsistencies, rushed storytelling, and a betrayal of characters we’ve spent years watching grow into some of the MCU’s finest superheroes. Waititi takes his jovial self-aware tone too far this time around, with dialogue so obsessed with cracking jokes and making needless little observations that the powerful moments fall apart or feel out of place. Love & Thunder wants to be both an emotional blockbuster and a parody of the very universe it inhabits.
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Love & Thunder’s worst sin however is Thor himself. Following the events of Infinity War this once illustrious god is reduced to a broken man because of everything he’s been through. This development made us root for him, sympathising with him despite our frustration that he wasn’t willing to work through his own trauma to save his friends and bring balance back to the universe. He killed Thanos, but that victory was never going to revive the people he’d lost. He still had to live with that failure.
I was hoping that Love & Thunder might return to that well, examining how he rose from the ashes to build a life for himself now the world was adjusting to this new normal. New Asgard is thriving and his friends are alive and well, but personal trauma doesn’t fade away the second its root cause has been eradicated. It tends
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