Interlude: Thor 4 movie review

Our last night at the summer cottage, I went out to the movies with Marie's niece. I suppose I can call her Natasha, maybe because she looks nothing at all like the famous Natasha Fatale, long-time colleague of Boris Badenov. Anyway, no I'm not hitting on Marie's niece. But she wanted to go see "Thor: Love and Thunder", which was just coming out, and she asked "Is anybody here interested in the MCU?" I was the only one who even knew what the initials meant, and I kind of keep up on developments. (Son1 and Son2 were big fans back when they were in middle school and high school, so I've seen many of the movies.) So the next evening I went out with Natasha to see "Thor."

Obviously everything I write here will contain SPOILERS. Consider yourself warned. Also, just so it's clear, I'm back-dating this post to the night it happened, though I'm actually writing it a couple weeks later. 

My basic opinion is that the movie was as loud and colorful as the other movies in the MCU, with a good alternation between adventure and humor. This is a formula that Marvel has learned pretty well at this point. And I'm not sure that I have any single, overall evaluation besides that. But there are a couple of specific topics where I did have things come to mind.

The opening

This is one of the darkest openings I've ever seen in the MCU. We see Gorr, who becomes the villain, desperately lost, carrying his dying daughter across a barren and wasted landscape. And the whole thing is played absolutely straight until after the daughter dies. Then a miracle happens, but I'll discuss that below when I talk about how the gods are portrayed.

Thor's relationship with Jane Foster

I have never been able to believe Thor's relationship with Jane Foster in the movies. Natasha agreed with me that it's often portrayed weakly, but her explanation was just, "They wrote the adventure first and the romance as an afterthought, and they never bothered to integrate the two." And sure, maybe that's it. But more specifically, I could never understand what Thor sees in her. It's obvious what she sees in him: he's handsome, strong, powerful, and a god for Pete's sake. But the reverse? Many times the script calls for Thor to remark on how "special" she is, but the movies never show her doing anything special. (Don't tell us, show us.) She is supposed to be a brilliant astrophysicist, but we never see her doing anything that looks astrophysical, much less that looks brilliant. So I have never been able to find their romance convincing.

That said, in much of this movie their interaction is not romantic. They split up a while ago, and now they come back together as exes ... that is to say, awkwardly. The scenes that are supposed to be awkward work just fine. They really are awkward. Does this mean that the screenwriters are better at writing awkward interactions than romantic ones? Or is it just that when you write a romantic scene badly it comes out awkward? I'm not sure.

There are also scenes where Jane picks up Mjolnir and fights as The Mighty Thor, alongside the original one. These scenes work well too. Marvel long ago figured out how to make fight scenes work. And I am pleased that they let her die in battle and go to Valhalla, partly because she makes a valuable model of heroism at one's own expense (in a scene that is genuinely touching), and partly because it means we won't have any more of this implausible romance in the future. 

Axl or Astrid?

Turns out Heimdall has a son, who calls himself Axl. But there is a bit of an interchange with Thor right at the beginning, because he took the name "Axl" on his own. Turns out his given name was "Astrid" and Thor wants to insist on the given name before giving way after a couple of minutes.

Wait, what? Astrid is a girl's name. Is this character transgender?

There is literally no mention of sex or gender in this discussion. When Thor tries to insist on using Axl's birthname, he makes it an ethnic question instead of breathing a word about sex: "Astrid is a good Scandinavian name." (Too bad, it turns out that so is Axl.) Personally I assume this interchange was added as a wink-and-a-nod to the transgender experience,* without actually introducing a topic that would be way too hot politically for a studio to take on. But it interested me that I found very few reviews willing to discuss the subject. One review which did address it went so far as to castigate the movie for including a "transphobic joke" in which Thor "deadnamed" Axl as Astrid, but honestly the reviewer's vituperation was misplaced. I assume that people who take on new names and identities (for whatever reason) always get the same kind of baffled incomprehension from anyone who knew them before, and therefore know from experience what the movie is talking about. That the movie frames the interchange in such a gentle way, pitching it about Scandinavian ethnicity instead of gender or sex and allowing Thor to give in after a little persuasion, is surely a sign of deliberate kindness.

In other words, I classify the Fandom Wire review as the same kind of faux, posturing outrage I saw in reviews of "Joker," from all the people who righteously insisted "Joker" was a wicked movie for "linking" mental illness with violence. (See my discussion there for more details.)    

Among the gods

There are a lot of gods in this movie: not just Thor, not just the Asgardians, but gods from many other cultures as well. Russell Crowe plays Zeus (and gives him a Greek accent!). I mentioned up above that, after Gorr's daughter dies, Gorr experiences a miracle and comes face-to-face with the god he has worshipped all this time.

With the exception of Thor and the Asgardians, every single god in the movie is portrayed as an asshole. Zeus is initially presented as pompous and clueless, but we later see that these qualities are a deliberate cover, that he is in reality conniving and cowardly. The god that Gorr worshipped so intently at the very beginning of the movie is shown to be actively malicious in a petty, childish way.

Somehow it feels remarkable to me that this script was ever green-lighted. Am I wrong to think that a large number of Americans** still think of themselves as religious and call themselves Christians? And am I wrong to think that people who think of themselves as religious might be put off by the way the gods are portrayed here?***

Apparently the answer is yes, I'd be wrong. I googled "thor love and thunder portrayals of the gods" and right away found myself far away from any of the conventional reviews. (So this is obviously not a hot topic in the first place.) There were a few aggressively Christian sites that criticized the movie for showing "false gods" at all (and for never mentioning the God of the Bible), but that weren't a bit surprised when the "false gods" behaved badly. And there were other sites where reviewers (1) acknowledged that often Real Life goes badly, for the pious and impious alike, but (2) praised the movie for showing that in the face of Things Gone Wrong we can still be heroic and we can still care for each other. And of course I have no objection to that part.

I guess what puzzles me is this. On the one hand, the movie is very careful never to portray (or even mention) the God of Abraham, the god found in the Tanakh, the Gospels, and the Qur'an. I'm sure the screenwriters rightly guessed that to do so would be a bridge too far. But on the other hand, none of the Christian reviewers I have found so far seem to understand that This movie means you too. They are all glad to see the "false gods" mocked. But surely the more that people get in the habit of mocking Those Gods Over There, the easier it will be for them to mock any pretensions to Deity closer to home. Won't it?

Probably not, in reality. To the extent that it's an issue, there is already plenty of that kind of mockery to go around. And the MCU follows cultural trends rather than setting them. That's part of how the movies regularly make so much money. 

Another part is that they are loud and colorful, and this one certainly was.

__________

* I mean specifically the experience of relatives and old acquaintances not understanding how you can possibly want to take on a whole new identity. 

** There is of course an international market as well. But I am sure that no MCU movie would be approved if it were sure to alienate American audiences.

*** The New Yorker review bizarrely calls this a "conspicuously faith-based—and ... implicitly Christian—film." I have no idea what the reviewer was thinking when he wrote this.