The release of Thor: Love and Thunder marked yet another entry into Marvel's constant onslaught of new content. The much-anticipated film marked director Taika Waititi's second dip into the MCU after the hit that was Thor: Ragnarok. Naturally, because of Waititi's popularity online, most people were incredibly excited for this fourth chapter in Thor's story, especially as the MCU had been drifting away from stories with the original Avengers in them, and a lot of fans were eager to see one of the MCU mainstays back in action.

However, the overall reception to the film was mixed. Some fans really appreciated the bright, goofy tone of the movie in the same way that they loved Ragnarok, while others were more critical of the film and its writing choices. The problem with Thor: Love and Thunder is that while it delivers the fun tone that fans expected, that tone doesn't mesh well with the much more serious subject matter that the movie is attempting to cover, which leaves the whole thing feeling a little disjointed.

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Love and Thunder is not just a successor to Ragnarok in terms of chronology; it actively attempts to recreate the same tone and style that the previous movie employed. This makes sense, of course, as fans absolutely loved Ragnarok and the fresh new feel it brought to the MCU. However, Love and Thunder suffers from trying to emulate Ragnarok a little too much, to its own detriment.

Thor-Love-and-Thunder-Goats Cropped

Love and Thunder tries to explore themes related to things like self-identity and even death, but the goofy tone doesn't really fit in with that. This isn't to say that movies that touch on sensitive topics can't also be funny; Waititi himself has managed to walk that line gracefully in the past with movies like Jojo Rabbit. However, Love and Thunder really just feels like it's trying to be too many things at once because the humor and the more serious elements aren't mixing as well as they should.

The whole storyline around Gorr the God-Butcher, for instance, would work much better in a totally different movie. As it is, the plot line is an interesting idea and Gorr is an engaging character, but he gets so little to do in the movie because his vibe doesn't fit with the rest of what the movie is trying to be. His arc, along with Jane's cancer story, feels like it's treated a little too lightly, or at the very least is being overtaken by the silliness of the rest of the film.

Again, these things should be able to coexist, theoretically, but in practice, it's simply too unbalanced. A lot of the movie in general feels disjointed, like there were too many threads that they wanted to follow and instead of picking a few, they decided to try all of them. For instance, the Guardians of the Galaxy appear for a very brief portion of the film in the beginning, and then aren't heard from again. It seems they were only there to tie up the loose thread of Thor joining them at the end of Avengers: Endgame, but with no real follow-through.

Thor talking to Star-Lord in Thor Love and Thunder

This is one of the problems with switching directors around a lot within the MCU; sometimes one person's creative vision doesn't mesh with another's, but they get stuck with a plot line that was set up in a previous film. It's clear that Waititi didn't really want to tell a joint Guardians/Thor movie, so he had to get rid of them early on, but it just makes their presence in the movie at all feel pointless. While most movies have the main storyline, or A plot, they usually have a few secondary plots as well (a B or even C plot). Love and Thunder feels like it has an alphabet's worth of plots, to the point where none of them have the proper space to fully develop. Most of the plots don't conclude in a super satisfying way because there wasn't enough time to pay attention to them.

Love and Thunder understandably tries to mimic the success of Ragnarok by giving fans what they loved about that previous movie. However, this works to the detriment of the film because Love and Thunder covers such different subject matter. While Ragnarok had its serious moments, it could get away with being sillier because it managed to balance the tones. Love and Thunder plays like a comedy with some of the wackiest moments in the MCU so far, but a lot of the subject matter it's trying to cover (like death or the need for faith/deities in the world) is so far removed from that tone that it feels jarring to switch between them.

gorr gritting his teeth

It feels like Love and Thunder wanted to be too many things at once, and wanted to be even bigger and more absurd than Ragnarok was. The problem is that this means it sacrifices what could have been its own unique identity for in exchange for just being a poor copy of what Ragnarok did so well. There's no strong thread or feeling that unites the movie and makes it cohesive, it just feels like a collection of ideas for three different movies that were thrown together without consideration for whether or not they would actually work together. Unfortunately, it just comes off as the next in a line of Marvel entries that are progressively having less and less thought put into them, just so that the studio can pump out as many as possible.

Thor: Love and Thunder is now streaming on Disney Plus.

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