Thor: Love & Thunder has a lot on its mind. It’s not a great movie. I feel I should point that out up front—for some reason, sigh, looking at you internet—but it is a fascinating movie. I love it. My mind keeps wandering back to it, or more specifically, the notion that people don’t like it haunts the misbegotten depths of my mind. I can’t let it go, and I am fixated on one possible reason why the movie gets a bad rap even when I never actually hear this as a reason.
It’s a downright subliminal reason.
It’s also probably wrong. I don’t pay enough attention to this stuff. Pop culture is no longer my forte. I’ve drifted out of the zeitgeist. Age and the weary weight of the world have taken their toll upon my psyche, blah blah blah.
Also, I was never really part of the “in crowd,” never really part of the zeitgeisty regions of the world . . . so what do I know about anything, right? Ignore me.
Love & Thunder has a lot on its mind, as I’ve already mentioned, and that’s without even getting into all the damage control it had to do. The movies between Ragnarok and Love & Thunder inflicted more than a few unforced errors upon the character of Thor and the rest of the cast. I mean, Korg and The Valkyrie were retroactively resurrected without any attempt at an explanation between movies.
They’re just . . . there. Surprise! They’re back. No, they didn’t die in the epic space battle they didn’t feel like showing us between the post-credits scene of Ragnarok and the first scene of Infinity War. Don’t think about it too hard. Look! Screaming goats!
I love the shrieking goats, by the way.
So yeah, lots on Love & Thunder’s mind, but I don’t want to wander completely off into the wilderness here . . . like the fact King Valkyrie doesn’t have a name.
She doesn’t have a name. King Valkyrie is not a name. It’s a title. I don’t think we hear anyone mention her name once in two-plus movies. First, they say “Scrapper 142,” then “you’re a Valkyrie,” and finally, “King Valkyrie.”
Ugh . . . yeah sorry, drifting again. I’m pretty sure I had a point.
Slowly drifting back toward the fact I am fascinated by the ending of Love & Thunder. I love the ending.
By that, I mean the outcome of the big blowout between our merry band of mismatched heroes and the bad guy.
They lose.
Thor, Jane, Korg, and King Valkyrie lose. They fail to stop Gorr The God Butcher from getting exactly what he wanted.
He saved his daughter.
I mean—sure—he did some truly horrible things in order to save his daughter. Some things that were so horrible he didn’t want to live any longer. After all, part of his whole plan was to line up someone to look after his daughter once he had saved her, since he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to survive the experience of rescuing her.
But wait—I hear my nonexistent audience cry—wasn’t Gorr’s whole deal to destroy all gods? He was The God Butcher, after all.
Well . . . no, that was never his plan.
He never said it was his plan . . . not once.
Our wonderful band of over-caffeinated, protagonistically-branded main characters assumed Gorr was out to murder all the gods. He was running around murdering and killing all these random gods—sure—but that didn’t necessarily mean his goal was to wipe them out completely.
He was looking for information about this one god with a thing that could open a portal to the place where Eternity hung out. If he could find Eternity, he could make a wish. He could save his daughter, so Gorr was downright understandably trying to do exactly that.
The gods—being gods—were not keen on handing over information about the one with the thing that could open a portal to Eternity’s lair. They wanted to be worshiped. They wanted to be ignored. They were full of contradictions. They were certainly never keen on talking to the guy with the thing that could murder them. It made them less inclined to be kind, and as we saw from the pre-credits scene, gods aren’t really known for their selfless acts of kindness and generosity.
So yeah, the search for the guy with the thing that could open the portal did not look good. It probably did not help that the god-killing weapon was busy trying to flood Gorr’s mind with thoughts of murder, mayhem, violence, destruction, and death. Gorr probably looked more than a little crazed when he approached the various self-absorbed narcissists with questions about the one with the portal gun.
Thor and company jumped to the rather erroneous conclusion that Gorr wanted the portal gun—okay, I know it’s not really a portal gun, but I am currently loving the descriptor—in order to do very naughty and punk things with it like destroy all the gods. They were wrong. They may have had an ounce of reason to jump to the conclusion that they did, but they were still selfishly and self-centeredly wrong.
It’s not like they asked.
So I love the big climatic ending. I love the moment Thor realizes they’ve lost. I love Thor deciding to spend his last moments with the people he cares about rather than going out in some stupid blaze of glory.
So yeah, the movie faints toward the notion that Thor choosing to comfort his loved one’s causes Gorr’s heart to grow three sizes that day, but nope, that’s not what happened. Gorr confirms Thor will care for his daughter once he is gone.
Gorr knows his daughter will be safe, so he lets go. He makes his wish, knowing she will be okay.
So yeah, that’s a wild turn for the movie to take, especially for one of these bombastic superhero moves. The good guys lose. They flat-out lose, and I doubt that the primary audience for these impressively melodramatic melodramas was happy about that.
Even if it didn’t really register on a conscious level, the audience knew that the good guys lost. The day was not saved. The fact the day was never in any danger of needing saving doesn’t enter into it. The good guys lost.
So anyway, that’s the silly little notion that’s been refusing to vacate the deep, dark recesses of my mind. It’s been hanging out, wanting to be voiced for . . . reasons, I guess.
The good guys lost. They flat-out failed to stop the bad guy, and I loved it.