Have the critics finally turned on Marvel? Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder (at the time of writing) has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just 66%, the fourth-lowest of any film in the much-vaunted superhero cinematic universe. This apparently makes it worse than 2008’s The Incredible Hulk (67%), which is saying something. It is not quite so bad as Chloé Zhao’s deeply middling Eternals, from last year, which boasted a rating of just 47% “fresh”.
Does any of this stuff matter? If you enjoy the movie you enjoy the movie. And Love and Thunder, once it actually gets going, has just as much rip-roaring cosmic nuttiness as one might expect from a movie bringing together Thor, Waititi (who almost singlehandedly reinvented Chris Hemsworth’s Norse god as a comedy giant in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok) and the Guardians of the Galaxy. But did they try to squeeze just a little bit too much into the movie’s two-hour run time, was Natalie Portman’s return to the role of Jane Foster (now the Mighty Thor) really worth it? And where does Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher stand in the pantheon of Marvel supervillains? Was the movie, as Waititi had suggested, really “super-gay”? Let’s dip our fingers in the intergalactic popcorn to find out.
