by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I went with a group from Bears San Diego to see Thor: Love and Thunder, fourth in the sequence of Marvel comic-book movies based on their 1960’s adaptation of the legendary Norse god into a superhero character. The first Thor movie in the current cycle (before that there was a rather creepy and terrible one from an Italian producer in the early 1960’s called Thor and the Amazon Women) was made in 2011 as a co-production of Marvel Studios and Paramount. It starred drop-dead gorgeous Chris Hemsworth as Thor and it was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who brought the same over-the-top sensibility to it that he had to his Shakespearean adaptations of Henry V and Hamlet. The second movie, Thor: The Dark World was made two years later, after the Walt Disney Corporation (Walt Disney the person is dead, but Disney the company is seemingly immortal!) bought Marvel and thereby acquired the property. In the meantime Thor also appeared in the Avengers film cycle (none of which I’ve actually seen), and one of the Guardians of the Galaxy characters (also from a film cycle I’ve never seen, though I got the CD soundtrack of the second because it was a good compilation of 1980’s pop-rock), the Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), also makes a guest appearance in Thor: Love and Thunder. A post by Daniel Villareal on the Gay Web site Queerty.com (
https://www.queerty.com/4-moments-prove-thor-love-thunder-gayest-marvel-movie-yet-20220709?utm_source=Queerty+Subscribers&utm_campaign=aa222d7468-20220709_Queerty_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_221c27272a-aa222d7468-430235561) gave me valuable infromation on what happened to Thor in both the Avengers films and the third installment of his self-named cycle, Thor: Ragnarok, which I haven’t seen.
As Villareal explained, “One of the film’s running gags is his weird relationship to his first hammer, the mythic lightning-striking Mjölnir. After Thor’s evil sister Hela (Cate Blanchett) breaks Mjölnir in the third Thor movie, Thor goes on to fashion a new ax-hammer hybrid named Stormbreaker in The Avengers: Infinity War. Thor begins Love and Thunder with Stormbreaker at his side. But when he sees his ex, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), wielding Mjölnir as the female incarnation of Mighty Thor, it becomes apparent that the god of lightning feels weird and jealous about it. As the film continues, he tests whether he can still summon the hammer from Foster’s grasp, and he talks to the hammer affectionately and secretively as if it’s a beloved former male companion.” In fact, director and co-writer Taika Waititi and his scripting collaborator, Jennifer Kaytan Robinson, did such a good job anthropomorphizing Thoris two weapons they actually seem jealous of each other. The film opens with a bizarre sequence in which a bald, white-clad man is stranded on a desert island and he meets a group of humanoids who claim to be gods, only he quickly and easily vanquishes them. The sequence is quite clearly played to make it look like the white-clad man is a good guy and the “gods” a bunch of crreepily evil creatures, but the opposite is true: the white-clad bald guy with the facial scars is Gorr (Christian Bale), known as the “God-Butcher” because he wants to kill whatever gods he can find. In order to do this, he needs to find a magical weapon called the “Necrosword” that can kill any god, even ones who are otherwise immortal.
Thor also finds out that his former girlfriend Jane Foster is now in possession of his magic hammer Mjölnir and wears a costume that makes her look like a female version of himself – and when she’s not doing that, she’s a physics professor and a best-selling author of books about science. Alas, she’s also been diagnosed with stage IV cancer, the terminal kind. The plot has Gorr kidnap several children of so-called “New Asgard,” which among other clevernesses in the Waititi-Robinson script is actually a Norse-myth theme park, and Thor and his team, including a woman named King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) – and no, it’s never explained why she’s called “King” instead of “Queen” – and a rock person named Korg (played by director Waititi), commandeer a flying boat drawn by rams (well, they had to get something from the original myths right!) to rescue the kids from the Shadow Kingdom where Gorr has taken them. They travel to a community called “Omnipotence City” in which gods from various mythologies live together in a community presided over by Zeus (Russell Crowe), but Zeus doesn’t want anything to do with them and refuses their request for help. There’s a big fight in which Korg’s body crumbles into a pile of boulders, though his head remains alive and continues to talk, and Thor manages to steal Zeus’s magical thunderbolt and impale him with it, thereby at least temporarily killing him. In yet another clever touch in a movie that abounds in them, when Thor and his team enter the Shadow Kingdom the film becomes black-and-white, and though it regains flashes of color periodically as the good guys briefly get the upper hand over Gorr, it doesn’t return to full color until they have vanquished the Shadow Kingdom and rescued the kids. Gorr unexpectedly becomes a figure of pathos as he dies, and Thor loses Jane Foster definitively but ends up as foster-father to Gorr’s young daughter.
I don’t think Thor: Love and Thunder is the greatest Marvel movie of all time (Black Panther takes that honor, hands down; as I’ve said before, Black Panther transcends all other comic-book superhero movies the way Citizen Kane transcended all the other movies Hollywood was then making about newspapers), but it’s well above average. Despite the usual ponderous action scenes that are the whole point of a movie like this, Waititi and Robinson deserve credit for making the film at least intermittently campy and fun. Though they hardly take the humor to the extremes of the 1960’s Batman TV series and movie, they never forget the fundamental silliness of the superhero movie as a genre and make light of it instead of taking it all too seriously. (Black Panther didn’t have laughs, but it was a serious drama disguised as a comic-book movie and it dealt with important themes instead of just cheap thrills – or not-so-cheap thrills, given how much it costs to do all that CGI.) The music for Thor: Love and Thunder is by Michael Giacchino (whom I’ve heard of before) and Nami Melumad (whom I haven’t), and while it’s hardly at Wagner’s level it’s serviceable and works well for the film.,
There’s also an odd in-joke in which Astrid (Keiron L. Dyer), the child of Heimdll (Idris Elba), the guard of Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge connecting Asgard to Earth who was killed in the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War by Thanos, the lead super-villain of the Avengers series. But they insist on being called not “Astrid” but “Axel,” saying they got the name from Guns N’ Roses front-man W. Axl Rose (four of whose songs – “Sweet Child O’Mine,” “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City” and “November Rain” – are heard in the film) and leading Daniel Villareal to suggest that Axel might be female-to-male Transgender.: “While there’s nothing else in the film [besides their insistence on using a masculine instead of a feminine name] to suggest that Axel is Transgender, it’s still a notable moment seeing as Astrid is commonly a girl’s name,” Villareal concedes. “Perhaps Heimdall mistakenly thought his child would be a girl, or maybe Axel was assigned female at birth. We may never know, but the child actor who plays Axel, Kieron L. Dyer, does a great job playing the self-respecting young hero regardless.” Chris Hemsworth is still quite attractive, but 11 years have passed since the first Thor and he had to bulk up every time he’s played the role – and the years are starting to show. He does get a nude scene in Omnipotence City, but this being an American movie his dick is blurred out (though we get the impression from the way the women in Zeus’s entourage react to it that he’s well-hung). Overall, I quite liked Thor: Love and Thunder and I especially enjoyed the light touch Waititi and Robinson brought to it instead of the gloomy seriousness all too many recent superhero films have been saddled with lately (that means you, X-Men franchise!).1
