I thought Dark World was forgettable. I don't need Thor to be "serious" all the time. I thought Ragnarok was great for striking a good balance between the humor and the drama. Ragnarok had humor but remained anchored to a dramatic core of the story about his love for his father, his brother and, ultimately for the Asgardian people. I like that stuff. But in L&T his character lost those moorings entirely as he degenerated into complete farce.
My take on this -- not that I thought this hard about it while watching -- is that Thor's approach reflects how he's closed himself off from...well, everything. He's lost everything he ever cared about. In Ragnarok, he still had Asgard and the Asgardians. That gets taken away from him at the very beginning of Infinity War where his people -- including his brother and his friend -- are slaughtered. It's glossed over with Korg's VO, but Thor suffered immense loss in the course of his various movies. And I think that leads him to exactly where we see him at the start of the film: emotionally cut off and basically an egomaniacal dickbag....kind of like, you know, the rest of the gods we end up seeing (Asgardians not included).
We see him gradually open up over the course of the film, mostly because he acknowledges that he feels lost, and not himself. So, in a sense, the movie lampshades that, yeah, this Thor isn't who we're used to. And the Thor we saw in Endgame is basically the guy he fully steers into: loses himself in combat, focuses on glorious battle, because it's easier than, you know,
feeling all those unpleasant feelings.
Thor has a relationship with Jane in this movie but, it seems like his relationships with, say, Sif and even Valkyrie were more developed and organic - even if they both had less screen time than Jane.
Yeah, I think that gets back to the thing where there's this underlying question of "Yeah, but....why these two?" that's never been well established. Some of this may be a weakness of the source material, inasmuch as the comics never really went beyond positional relationships (by which I mean "These two people are in a relationship because that's what people in these positions do in these kinds of stories."), which was acceptable in comics in the 1960s (where the relationship began), but rings hollow today. The early Thor films just...didn't do much beyond "Hey, here's that relationship from the comics! You can check that box now."
Sif and Valkyrie make sense as having a relationship with him because they're Asgardians. They naturally have more in common with him. Jane doesn't. So, there's always this lingering, nagging sense of "But...why are they together at all? What draws them to each other?" that none of the movies has ever really answered. This film tried to do it via "Tell, don't show" (e.g., Thor's monologue about Jane making him a better person, which...doesn't
really track with the films we saw.), but it still just doesn't quite work because they never did the work on the front end. The film then tries to show us via their relationship montage, but mostly that's just generic domestic bliss sequences that still don't explain "Yeah, but what is it about who each of them is as a person that brings them together?"
The answers could be there (e.g., Jane possesses an inherently selfless, noble spirit; maybe Jane recognizes that Thor's "big dumb blonde" act is an act and he's in fact much more clever than he lets on; or Jane sees the potential within Thor to be the best version of himself; etc., etc.), but none of the movies up til now bothered to do
any of that, so it's hard to sell now.
Gorr's "origin" was just contrived. At the very apex of Gorr's suffering he suddenly encounters both his god, Rapu, who is about to kill him on a whim and a magical weapon that just happens to kill gods.
I see it less as "contrived" and more as "abbreviated." Emotionally, the whole thing makes sense. Gorr loses his daughter after praying to his god to save her. Gorr then meets his god, who turns out to be a self-absorbed a**hole. The god mocks Gorr's pain, and then is about to kill him for his own amusement, when Gorr manages to use the power of the necrosword to slaughter the god, at which point, in his grief and madness, he vows to destroy all gods.
Now, that all makes sense. It tracks internally. It fits together perfectly fine. There's nothing in there that feels forced
other than the very abbreviated timing of it all happening within the span of, oh, 5-10 min. And that gets back to a fundamental problem in the nature of film: you only have 2-ish hours to tell your story. We'd have accepted Gorr's story as one of Korg's VOs. ("Let me tell you the tale of the God-Butcher...") because we'd recognize it as a montage of various events that happened over a long span of time. I actually think that would've worked
better than the version we saw. You could have it be Gorr losing his daughter and then searching for ages for a portal to the gods, hearing of some great power that could find them and take you to them, it turning out to be the necrosword itself, and gradually being corrupted by it (e.g., he told himself that he'd just use it as a portal, then just to threaten them so they'd bring back his daughter, and then when his god laughed at his pain, mocked his daughter's memory, and threatened to kill him, he fully gave into his rage). You do that in the course of a 5-7min montage with Korg's VO, and it ends up working better than "Oh no, my daughter is dead and I'm sad, and hey what's this portal here and oh look, it's my god! Ouch get your hand off my neck, ok death to all gods thanks sword let's do this!" that we got in the film.
I agree that a serious dramatic arc wasn't essential to this movie. I like "fun" Thor, but he stepped too far out of character in L&T. Where in Ragnarok and Endgame Thor had a veneer of charming bravado, in L&T he didn't even give a darn about anybody but himself. e.g. when he destroyed that precious crystal tower thingie as collateral damage in the beginning. They could have even had Thor be charmingly embarrassed, but instead he was just completely oblivious. I didn't think that was funny.
Yeah, I touched on this earlier, but I think that's kind of the point. It may not come through as well because it's played for laughs, but I think it suggests that Thor is cut off from his feelings and as a result, doesn't actually care about anyone or anything besides battle.
And there's nothing heroic about how he got the bolt from Zeus when he initiated the violence by killing some guards. The writers justified this using the same device they used to justify the killing of Rapu i.e. just make Zeus and Rapu both unredeemably egomaniacal one-dimensional characters. It's one of the cheapest and laziest devices in writing.
Again, I think this has to do more with how both gods are played largely for laughs. There's no real air of menace to them. It's implied, but it's never quite realized. That said, I thought Thor initiated the violence because Zeus was threatening to imprison him (well, make him a permanent "guest") and he needed to get out to save the Asgardians. Maybe I'm misremembering.
I didn't like how the movie seemed to dispose of Sif. I think her character deserved better.
Sif's been badly handled by the whole series. But some of that has to do with the actor getting the lead in that Blind Spot show (or whatever it was called) which I think meant that we never really got a proper love triangle between her and Jane, and nobody's character was effectively developed as a result.
Korg stopped being interesting or funny in this movie.
Matt Damon and Luke Hemsworth were funny in Ragnarok. But the joke is entirely about the surprise cameo. Bringing them back here isn't funny anymore. It's as if the writers couldn't think of new jokes and had to recycle bits from Ragnarok to stretch it out.
I could go on ... but, if you liked it, I don't expect to convince you to hate it.
I didn't mind either points, but I think those are all matters of general taste. They didn't bother me and I enjoyed Korg. I agree that the Damon/Hemsworth pairing wasn't as surprising, but I still chuckled at it.
I think you raise some valid points, I just wasn't as bothered by them.
I dunno. I think by and large I'm just more easily entertained by Marvel stuff these days. I just kind of take it as it comes. The styles of stuff that they tend to do is enjoyable overall, so I just roll with it. It's like how I enjoyed the Star Wars TV shows so far. Really, the only Star Wars stuff I haven't liked has been JJ Abrams' films, and I think that's because ultimately I just...see the strings in his work.
