Movie Thoughts: Thor- Love and Thunder

The MCU was fun once but it’s worn out its welcome. Endgame was the peak and everyone knows it.

This movie is oversaturated with dumb, brightly colored CGI shit. I felt shitty watching this movie the same way I felt shitty eating the popcorn and the fountain coke and mini-kit kats I got at the concession stand. Three pounds of processed calories, no actual nourishment whatsoever.

The movie’s humor feels somehow mean-spirited, almost like Waititi is sneering at us plebeians too stupid to understand we’re being sneered at. Almost none of the jokes land but the movie is too up its own ass to notice or care. The plot is wtf. The ending made no sense to me. Absolute mess. You can’t just have Thor fight to Guns n’ Roses and make some self-aware quips and get your paycheck. Fuck you.

Chris Hemsworth absolutely loves playing Thor and it keeps the movie from being totally unwatchable. I never thought I’d say this about Natalie Portman but she’s in over her head here, unable to find a balance between the meta-absurdity and deadly-seriousness of her character’s predicament. Not her fault, I lay that at the feet of Waititi, who is a filmmaker too high on his own farts to be capable of the introspection such gravitas would require. He voices his stupid rock guy Korg who has never been funny. Christian Bale shows flashes of what could’ve been a great villain if only he’d had better material. Russell Crowe uses some sort of unplaceable accent as Zeus and he seems to be enjoying himself almost as much as Hemsworth (Russell Crowe being playful, yes, too bad it didn’t happen in a better movie). I generally like Tessa Thompson as an actress and I feel like there’s still some career-defining role out there for her, but I can’t stand Valkyrie, who’s like corporate diversity distilled into one character — the bullshit, paper-thin pandering to queerness, the 2-dimensional strong woman shit that is insulting to any woman who is actually strong, the constant smirk that says “I’m too smart for any of this without any concrete demonstration that I actually am smarter than any of this”. The Guardians of the Galaxy are here for a split second, and they aren’t funny, either, but they get the hell out while the getting is good.

I say it again — let the MCU die and let superhero movies go the way of the Western. Let them be a signifier of the 2nd Gilded Age, which will also hopefully end soon.

It’s time. It was fun. But let’s move on. If Thor can’t rescue it, no one can. I know they won’t, I know the series will limp on for another decade, but there we are.