Review of the movie Thor: Love and Thunder: gimmicky simplicity

“A bit of the usual, that is, fine, but no more,” I say to everyone who asks me about ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, which hits theaters this Friday. There was interest in seeing the fourth installment of the god of thunder, played so gracefully by the likeable Chris Hemsworth. Interest because the tape meant the return to the franchise of Natalie Portman, away from the Marvel universe since in 2013 she gave life to Jane Foster for the last time in ‘Thor: the dark world’. The ‘Black Swan’ actress did not appear in ‘Thor: Ragnarok’, something that she attributed in her day to the fact that the third part of the saga did not take place on Earth, but it was not the only reason.

‘The Hollywood Reporter’ explained in an article published in 2011 that Portman, who wanted to take a break because she had just given birth to her son, agreed to be part of the cast of ‘Thor: The Dark World’ because Patty Jenkins was going to direct it. . The filmmaker was going to become one of the first women to sign a superhero movie with a budget of more than one hundred million dollars, something that she finally achieved a few years later with ‘Wonder Woman’. When a few months later, Jenkins left the project -it was said that she had been fired, although the official version is that she and Marvel reached an amicable agreement and broke their contracts due to creative differences-, to Portman the change of Jenkins by Alan Taylor it didn’t sit well with him.

A few lines of script in ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ were enough to explain that Foster and Thor were no longer a couple, but Portman’s character had not said his last word. His resurrection has been taken care of by Taika Waititi, who already gave the god of thunder a facelift in ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ and who for this fourth installment imagined a Jane Foster in other coordinates, turned into Mighty Thor, a superhero capable of wielding Thor’s mighty hammer and has very similar powers. The truth is that it is a success and one of the most interesting novelties of a simplistic but effective film, which moves away from the epicity of similar proposals.

And that the starting point smells like the opposite. After a spectacular drought, the daughter of Goor, the Butcher God, dies. Wandering through the desert he runs into the God Ra, to whom his and his daughter had been praying for years in search of water and rain, but he laughs at his whimpering. Surprisingly, Goor manages to kill him with a cursed sword and from there he begins a journey to destroy all the gods in the universe. The problems for the villain, who is played by a great and sometimes terrifying Christian Bale -his makeup, full of scars and tattoos, is spectacular-, begin when he goes to New Asgard and ends up kidnapping the local children. fishery. Thor will be forced to recruit Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), Korg (Waititi himself) and Jane Foster (Portman) to try to stop the villain.

With the trademark humor of the house, between silly, cynical and intelligent, fiction is an entertaining diversion that, however, does not stand out at almost any time. It is of little use that the staff of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ has something more than a cameo at the beginning of the film, although it does set the tone of the film a bit -not like the initial prologue, which we have already talked about-, with the vibrant colors and the music of the Gun’s & Roses at full blast. Nor is the first encounter between Foster and Thor as exciting as it should be, although Waititi manages, based on flashbacks that provide context to the breakup and more dramatic sequences, to provide humanity and depth to a relationship that once came to seem forced and unreal.

On the other hand, other elements are truly funny, such as the relationship of jealousy that is established between Thor’s ax and his old hammer, Mjolnir, or the nice congress of the gods where Russell Crowe starts some of the loudest laughs in the film. But although Waititi takes some risks – putting part of the footage in black and white is perhaps the most surprising thing – and poses his good action sequences, the result does not quite have an impact as it should despite dealing with issues as eternal as the drama of the mortality of the human being or love.