Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale

Directed by Taika Waititi

Disney, out now

Let us hear tales of the Norse Gods!

Thor: Love and Thunder is glorious. It is full of colour, ideas, character and heart. The action ties the story together rather than appearing as set pieces between other scenes, and the focus on multiple main characters largely works.

This is Taika Waititi’s second outing as a Marvel director and I felt he had been given a much freer rein this time around than for Ragnarok. I think this gives us a very different style as a result and it’s one that I, personally, really liked. Ragnarok was very much a hero’s journey in the vein of so many we’ve seen before. It had flourishes of Waititi’s humour and sensibility but it was, in the end, a Marvel film about a hero whose main choice is how to hit other powerful beings.

Love and Thunder is something different and I think we can see that in a number of ways.

It is full of joy and, perhaps, surprisingly brave with its choices. In a world in which everyone tends to be untouchable, Love and Thunder is confident enough to make its own decisions and make them stick. We don’t talk enough about how joy is a good thing. There’s a lot of bleakness out there and many voices talk about how they love grit and grim and darkness. It’s often said that something is ‘dark’ as a compliment.

As if making something light and full of joy is easy. It isn’t. Oh, you can play for laughs and avoid issues and, as is so often the case with the kitsch fest of superhero movies – avoid any substance in favour of a consistent aesthetic.

But joy. Joy is hard. Too much and it’s saccharine and unpalatable. Too little and we’re back to bleak. When done right, joy gives us hope and love and fun and colour.

There’s no accident in the fact that Gor the God Butcher’s realm is a place that leeches all colour from the world.

Much has been made of the way in which the MCU is exploring different genres in its stories – from Ms Marvel playing with Bollywood conventions to WandaVision traipsing through fifty years of US sitcoms.

Thor’s latest outing is a romcom.

Before you run for the hills this isn’t a romcom where the poster should have the two love interests leaning back to back. This isn’t about meet cutes and last minute dashes to the airport/railway station/port to publicly announce one’s love.

It’s a romantic comedy which revisits Thor’s relationship with Jane Foster. It is committed to exploring the sense of their failings as a couple and how they, possibly, can work through that.

Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster gets a super amount of screen time. This is how to give a character agency. This is how to give her an arc that focuses on love but isn’t subsumed by sentimental ideas of what that means in a relationship.

Jane’s turn as Mighty Thor is fantastic and she gets to make the role her own. Jane has motives, aims and hopes that make sense and are multi-layered. The film also does a really good job of ensuring that if you haven’t watched every single piece of MCU content you can still understand how we get to this place and where we go from here.

It’s the kind of arc and structure that was entirely missing from Wanda in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

As for Chris Hemsworth’s Thor? Two things. The first is negative. Thor was the subject of fat shaming in Endgame and the film deals with this, but the initial failure can’t really be recovered from in my opinion.

Mercifully it’s handled quickly and then we’re off into what is Thor’s mid-life crisis.

Thor is lost and his journey is one of finding himself (which sounds terrible but the resolution here is absolutely not what you’d expect). He doesn’t quite buy a shiny new red hammer but the other clichés of a man of a certain age discovering nothing about his life adds up to what he expected are there. It’s a really interesting design choice because Thor’s journey through his loss and aimlessness is more powerful emotionally than you’d anticipate.

The resolution here addresses ideas about toxic masculinity, loss, emotional literacy and who we look to as role models. Suffice to say that Thor’s resolution is not one in which he finds strength within.

Add to this decent time for Valkyrie and Korg and one spectacular joke for Miek and it feels like a well fleshed out community facing adversity together. We could really do with more of this.

Finally. This film is funny. I haven’t laughed this hard at a comedy in quite some time. It is absurd and farcical and self-referential and it relishes every opportunity to insert a gag or visual moment.

If the above hasn’t already indicated, the film is busy. Could it have been pared back? Undoubtedly. However, I think it needs this level of busyness to be what it wants to be – which is focussed on several characters and serious about creating motivations for each of them. We should not mistake being dense with being a mess.

Does every element work? Without spoiling them, I think that in their own contexts each little component is great. They don’t necessarily all go together seamlessly but that’s a minor trifle from my perspective because I wouldn’t give any of them up.

There are goats in the trailer and they are a good example I feel we can talk about with spoiling the film. They are incidental, accidental even. They bring nothing to the plot and are, mechanically, entirely unnecessary to the story. You could remove them safely.

Yet their removal would take some of the joy from this film.

And for a story primarily focused on the reality of suffering and how love is its cure that would be a mistake.

Verdict: This is a magnificent story about love and joy. I think there is a risk people will miss the point because they’ll be looking for grittiness, strength of arms and violence to win the day. They want humour to serve as the runway to violence and Love and Thunder looks to humour as its own (healing) reward.

This film foregrounds Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor and is all the better for it.

This isn’t dudebros having fun and it’s not violence as the answer.

That in itself is perhaps the most radical thing the MCU has done to date.

Rating? 9 screaming goats out of 10.

Stewart Hotston