After posting spoiler-free reviews for tentpole movies, specifically Marvel ones, I usually follow up with a deep dive into the fun stuff like cameos and plot twists, which inevitably involves heavy spoilers.
For Thor: Love and Thunder I'd like to do something similar but nonetheless a little different given the subject matter.
FINAL WARNING: HEAVY SPOILERS
Though the movie itself was conspicuously flawed in a number of ways, I'd like to applaud Marvel for choosing to tell the story of a hero with stage-four cancer.
I can't help but feel that Natalie Portman was enticed to return to the role of Jane Foster, who was basically just window dressing in the first couple of Thor movies before staying out of the third one altogether, by the prospect not only of donning the superhero tights but by the prospect of finally giving Jane her own, compelling story, especially since hers is basically the only compelling story in the whole movie.
Her severely-ill Jane Foster is basically the perfect counterpoint to Christian Bale's Gorr the God Butcher. Both of them are empowered by their magical weapons and both of them are actually dying as a direct result. The Necrosword which empowers Gorr is slowly poisoning him, while Mjolnir, which empowers Jane, is actually draining her of the energy she needs to fight the stage-four cancer ravaging her body. Gorr points this out to her late in the film, and she is thus confronted with the choice to sit out the final battle and recuperate or stop Gorr once and for all at the cost of her own life. Jane, of course, chooses the latter. It's not the first time a Marvel hero has laid their life down to save the world, but Portman really sells the moment and her sacrifice at the end really does resonate as a result.
Jane's journey, drawn in large part from the comics written by Jason Aaron and drawn by Esad Ribic and Russell Dauterman, is about the only part of the film that has any real narrative heft or emotional resonance, and it can be genuinely annoying to see Waititi constantly undercutting these emotional beats with forced jokes before he finally lets the story breathe a little bit towards the end of the film.
I've said before that terminal illness, or in particular cancer, can fit into a superhero narrative effectively; James Gunn did it to superb effect in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and had TLAT not been so obsessed with referencing 80s songs and making fun of itself, it could have been even more on point here.
More to the point, though, the folks at Marvel could have taken this opportunity to salute one of their own heroes whom they lost in real life to colon cancer, Chadwick Boseman. The joke-a-minute storytelling, unfortunately severely diluted this, as did the bad CGI, the lazy music scoring, and Russell Crowe's weird Mediterranean accent (though I confess it has a guilty pleasure quality to it). I know that the movie could not have spent its entire running time grappling with a topic as depressing as terminal illness--that would have made for an even worse story--but telling a story like this needed a delicate sense of balance which Waititi unfortunately did not strike and which, quite frankly, he didn't even attempt.
Still, the fact that Marvel was willing to tell the story of someone who was basically doomed to die tells me something interesting about where they may be willing to go in the future...but that's a topic for another day.
No comments:
Post a Comment