‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ movie review: Taika Waititi, Chris Hemsworth deliver another thunderous trip

Feeling something, even if it’s a devastating heartbreak or facing the worsts of nightmares, is still better than feeling the numbing nothingness. A celestial-human tells this to a living God, hoping that it adds some profoundness to the latter’s life. Meanwhile, a betrayed disciple grieves the loss of his daughter, and a cancer patient clings to a magical power that she knows is only killing her faster. Yes, we are still talking about Thor: Love and Thunder, which is a tragedy at the heart of it all. However, this is a Taika Waititi film, which means that a giant screaming goat might pop up at random intervals to leave you in splits.

Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, the fan-favourite goofball god, is back. Following the events of Avengers: Endgame, he has been serving as a celestial peace-loving saviour, along with the Guardians of the Galaxy, and his rodeo comes to an end with the arrival of a new threat: Gorr, the God Butcher (Christian Bale), an alien wielding a God-killing sword called Necrosword, who goes on a God-killing spree for avenging his daughter’s death. Realising the threat Gorr poses, Thor parts ways with the Guardians and returns to New Asgard (which now looks like a mythical fishing village), only to be gobsmacked by Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), his long-lost love, who is now wielding his broken hammer Mjolnir and calling herself ‘Mighty Thor’. Through his battle with Gorr and rekindled love for this new Thor, our hero finds a renewed meaning in life.

The avid MCU audience knows how Waititi redefined a gloomy, sulking version of Thor into the goofy character that we now know him for. In his second outing with the character, he goes to the audacious extent of redefining even the first two Thor movies through dark humour. He does this through a cracker of a montage that has Korg (voiced by Waititi himself) narrating Thor’s life with ridiculous, wacky descriptions, while Enya’s ‘ Only Time’ plays in the background. Similarly, Watiti uses a short flashback montage, spanning less than two minutes, to answer the mystery of what happened to Jane after the events of Thor: The Dark World. Again, even here, the gloom of the situation is subdued with a humorous treatment and it works wonders. In fact, Watiti goes so meta that at one point, he even gets Korg to ridicule the way the story is moving.

Yes, such a whimsical approach is obvious when it comes to Waititi. However, in Love and Thunder, Waititi amps it to the extent that he uses every available character in Thor’s world to pull out one gag after another at unexpected moments. Even Stormbreaker, Thor’s axe, gets a full character arc, with Thor having to pacify its insecurity with the presence of Mjolnir.

Thor needs to be Thor and so the film’s heroic moments are well-written and set up. For one instance, the film brings together Thor and Zeus in a scene, with the Nordic God of Thunder introducing himself as a fan-boy to the Greek God of Lightning. The scene takes its time and we get our dose of hilarity as well, however, the entire scene is a set-up to a moment that makes one go: What just happened? These moments indeed are placed like a formula, but in a movie like this that has so much going on, it doesn’t matter much.

Like in Rangnarok, this film too balances its emotional beats quite well. Writers Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Waititi weave moving subplots, particularly for Gorr and Jane. It’s really heartwarming to see how Thor calls back to the first film and says that it is Jane who made him worthy. In moving sequences, Portman and Bale perform like a cakewalk. In fact, Bale almost steals the thunder from Hemsworth with his creepy portrayal of Gorr.

A Marvel movie without surprise cameos seems impossible now, and Love and Thunder has quite a few goodies for fans. Major credits for Marvel for consistently representing different sexual spectrums on screen with every new project. The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t been that lucky with the progress of its newest Phase 4, and bankable projects like Thor and Spiderman might just salvage all the dips in the newer experiments. Thor, particularly, has had one of the greatest comeback stories in film history, from being one of the less likeable superheroes to becoming the Marvel superhero with the most standalone films. Thor: Love and Thunder is only adding more colour to this arc, and may we all hail Asgard.