Awards Season Ramblings, Part I: All Quiet on the Western Front

 directed by Edward Berger

written by Ian Stokell, Edward Berger and Lesley Paterson

As 2022 draws to a close, movie viewers and critics alike start to assess what their favorite movies of the year were.  I intend to vlog about some of my favorite entries, but while my editor works on my backlog, I've decided to jot down my ruminations on some of the gems I've caught on Netflix, Apple TV and other streamers in the last couple of months.

The first serious awards contender I'd like to talk about is the German-language remake of one of the most acclaimed anti-war movies ever made, All Quiet on the Western Front.  As reimagined by German filmmaker Edward Berger, the film marks the first-ever German adaptation of the 1929 German-language  novel by World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque, the previous two adaptations in 1930 and 1979 being in the English language.

All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story a group of young German men who, caught up in nationalistic fervor stoked by their schoolteacher, join the Imperial German Army in 1917, in the final months of the Great War, only to find that it's not at all what they expected it to be. Youngsters Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his friends Albert (Aaron Hilmer), Franz (Moritz Klaus) and Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald) find themselves in the thick of things as they are marched to the frontlines straightaway, and though they make new friends along the way like Kat (Albrecht Schuch) and Tjaden (Edin Hasanovic), nothing can prepare them for the hell on earth that war inevitably is. Meanwhile, far from the frontlines, diplomat Mathias Erzberger (Daniel Bruhl) sues for peace with the Allied High Command to stop the senseless slaughter that continues to claim thousands of lives, while Imperial Army General Friedrichs (Devid Streisow), still grappling with his country's impending surrender, wants to end his campaign with one last hurrah, which means throwing even more young Germans to the meat grinder.  The lives of Paul and his friends and many others, lie in the hands of people like Erzberger and Friedrichs. 

I've seen my fair share of films set in wartime, but I can honestly say that this is the first truly anti-war film that I have seen in many years.  Not since Oliver Stone's Platoon have I seen a movie that has  more effectively highlighted the complete and utter pointlessness of war. There is no heroic sacrifice here, no redemptive character arc, nobody laying down their lives for a greater good. There is only gut-wrenching violence and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness in the face of forces beyond one's control. Curiously, as movies about war go, it's not even the most violent; films like Saving Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge had higher body counts and far more gratuitous depictions of gore and dismemberment.  What this movie has in spades over them both is its unrelenting bleakness.

Director Berger uses every single narrative tool at his disposal to startling effect. The very first scene, which depicts a young German soldier getting mowed down in combat, only to be stripped of his uniform, which is then stitched up and handed off to the next unsuspecting recruit, tells the audience exactly what to expect from this movie, which then proceeds to deliver on its truly grim promise.    

The craft at work here is awe-inspiring. In particular I was struck by the young Kammerer, whose transformation from fanatical youth willing to lie about his age to enlist into a thoroughly broken man who has stopped caring about anything at all is as heartbreaking as it is harrowing. Schuch, as the jaded, working-class soldier Kat is the perfect foil to Paul's exuberant aristocrat, and their camaraderie is the beating heart of the film. It's what makes the fates of these characters matter to me as the viewer, and it manages to do so in a way that isn't cloying or treacly, which brings me to the second part of the film that really stuck with me: the music. 

I was gobsmacked by the music score that, while at first blush seemingly anachronistic, is unlike anything I've ever heard in a film like this.  Instead of leaning on sentimentality by using more traditional instruments like brass or swelling strings,  Volker Bertelmann, the film's composer goes for something else altogether; an electronically-amplified harmonium, a choice as unconventional as it is unsettling.   As exemplary as the other aspects of the production are, it's this unique choice of music that really stood out to me.

Everything else about the production, from the art direction to the sound design to the color grading and the cinematography all work in striking unison to convey exactly what Berger wants to tell us. He really has brought us something extraordinary, and kudos to Daniel Bruhl and his production company for bringing us this tour de force, and also thanks to Bruhl for providing a memorable if brief appearance as real-life politician Erzberger.

As much as I like to trumpet the return of the theatergoing experience, I think this movie validates the role of streamers in keeping certain types of movies alive. This is not a movie that would get a wide theatrical release with its bleak tone, but it is a movie that definitely needs to be seen by as many people as possible.

At a time when certain people still think it's a good idea to invade another sovereign nation, this film is arguably more important than anything else showing right now.   It's obviously not suitable for children (though the novel is required reading in German schools) but if you have a Netflix subscription, please check it out. 

10/10  

Big Jim is BACK...Sort of: A Review of Avatar: The Way of Water

 directed by James Cameron

written by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno

Here's a fun fact: famed auteur Quentin Tarantino, who auspiciously burst onto the filmmaking scene in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs, and who is quite well-known for taking his sweet time in making films, so much so that in thirty years he has only made ten feature films (nine if one counts Kill Bill as one movie), has actually made just as many movies as film titan James Cameron, who had a ten-year head start on him, having made his first movie in 1982.  To me, it is such a strange thing to consider that the quirky arthouse darling has made just as many films as one of the most commercially successful filmmakers of all time.  

After a fairly prolific run in the 80s in which he made four films and in the 90s in which he made three, Cameron has made a habit of making his audiences wait for his next movie.  The 13-year-gap between 2009's Avatar and its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, is the longest that Cameron has ever made us wait for a new film from him. Inevitably, we have to ask, it is worth the wait?

Well, the answer is yes, and no.  

An undisclosed number of years after the events of the first film, in which the Na'vi, the native population of the fictional moon Pandora, expelled the marauding humans of the Resource Development Administration (RDA) from their planet, the formerly hero of the first film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has long since discarded his paraplegic human body and is living full-time in his Na'vi/human hybrid avatar, is living in peace with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and their children. He has assumed leadership over the Omaticaya clan of the Na'vi and is living in relative peace and happiness, when the RDA come back, this time with bigger ambitions, and better guns.  They also have a bunch of grunts who died during their first tour of Pandora but whose consciousnesses were "saved" and who are back now, with new Na'vi/human hybrid bodies, and a score to settle. Foremost among these is Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who died at Neytiri's hands in the last film and is now itching for some payback.  

The renewed threat from the RDA is no laughing matter and in a little over a year, they have Jake, whom they have identified as the leader of the Na'vi resistance, and his family on the run. They end up taking refuge among the Metkayina, a tribe of Na'vi who live along the ocean led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), many kilometers away from the forest that Jake and his family have had to flee to keep the RDA from laying waste to the Omaticaya.  Will they be safe there, or will the RDA find Jake and destroy everything he holds dear?   

To get straight to the point: I enjoyed myself.  I must qualify, though, that I think a large part of this was down to the conscious management of my expectations from the film. The first film has often been derided, (and not entirely incorrectly) as a high-tech version of the Australian-American cartoon "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest," so the decidedly derivative story was never the main draw of the first film. It was always about the visuals, and Cameron's remarkable world-building, which he kicked off in spectacular fashion back with the first film and actually manages to continue this time around.  The movie is truly a visual masterpiece, with just enough story to string the gorgeous imagery together. Presented in IMAX 3-D, the movie is astonishing to behold, and reminded me of what the format is really capable of. As much as I have enjoyed most of the offerings of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I must readily admit that they rarely ever came up with movies that justified the hefty IMAX 3-D premium. This, however, is not the case with Avatar: The Way of Water; it takes full advantage of the format and then some.   

Unfortunately, that really is all the movie has  going for it, as the film's characters are mostly flat and forgettable, with nearly no discernible arcs, and the story just trots out one trope after another. The ham-handed "save the whales" message near the end feels like it was shoved in with a crowbar. It was just fortunate that it was fun to behold. I will say, though that anyone who praises the storytelling here while putting down all Marvel movies as empty spectacle needs to have their head examined. And yes, the film was considerably too long.

Ironically, the one character in the entire film who displays anything even approaching some form of development is the antagonist, Miles Quaritch, who has to come to terms with the fact that he's basically a copy of his former self and the fact that when he died, his son was left on Pandora and has grown up fatherless. He is initially indifferent to his son Spider (Jake Champion) who has  grown up feral and actually more fond of the Na'vi than his own species, but this changes as the narrative progresses.  Quaritch actually gets to make the beginnings of a transition from one-dimensional cliche to nuanced character, which is more than one can say about any of the other characters in the story.

Another quibble I have is actually with the presentation of the film, which for reasons I truly cannot understand jumps from one frame rate to the other repeatedly throughout the film.   In other words, without any discernible transition or narrative reason, the film jumps between the normal frame rate of 30 frames per second rate that film's are shown in and the 60 frames per second.  It was extremely jarring and felt distinctly out of character for Cameron, who is normally on top of this kind of thing.

 In the end, I don't have any regrets. This was a good time at the movies, and really demonstrates quite emphatically why streaming is simply no substitute for the theatrical movie experience, but it definitely isn't the masterpiece that its promoters are insisting it is. 

7/10

Quo Vadis, MCU? (Spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)

 SPOILER WARNING!

In the inevitable mid-credits stinger for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Letitia Wright's Shuri, who has assumed the mantle of the Black Panther but has handed the opportunity to serve as Ruler of Wakanda to the tribes to sort out among themselves, pays Lupita N'yongo's Nakia a visit in her adopted home of Haiti, only to find that Nakia and her late brother have had a son whom she has also named T'Challa.

And so the question of how to keep T'Challa's story going without recasting the role has been answered. Personally, I didn't care for this approach, but I guess it beats having a multiversal variant of T'Challa hop into universe 616 through an errant Doctor Strange portal. 

Crucially, though, even though there was an obligatory "Black Panther will return" text in the final credits crawl, the generally somber mood of the film and the absence of an end-credits teaser kind of had me wondering...exactly when will that be, and who will be wearing the mantle then?

Yes, I know the film ended with Shuri taking her synthetic heart-shaped herb and donning the Black Panther suit, but her doing so felt less like a passing of the torch and more like designating her as a placeholder until the new T'Challa is old enough to assume the identity, something which, barring an Avengers: Endgame style time-jump, won't happen for a very long time.  Shuri didn't hold the Black Panther mantle for very long in the comics either, after all. Maybe after telling this very cathartic story about grief, Marvel really does need to lay the character to rest, at least for a while. 

That actually got me wondering; how does Marvel plan to "retire" the second batch of Avengers, i.e. those introduced mostly in Phase 3? The likes of Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Sam Wilson as Captain America, by the next Avengers movie, will have been around for nearly ten years. James Gunn has openly said that the current incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy will end with the third movie.  Avengers: Endgame was the perfect way to retire at least three of the O.G. Avengers, while the Hawkeye series may have provided a convenient road to retirement for Jeremy Renner's Clint Barton as well as a low-key passing of the torch to Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop. As much as I despised Thor: Love and Thunder, it does make sense that Thor, being a god, is still around, as is the case with the ultra-powerful Hulk. One does wonder, however, how much longer Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo will agree to appear in these roles, especially given Hemsworth's recent discovery that he is genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's disease and Ruffalo's, well, age.  Will these characters be allowed to retire, or will they get barbecued by an Infinity-Stone-like McGuffin? It's not particularly pleasant to contemplate but considering how Black Widow and Iron Man met their ends in Avengers: Endgame I can't help but think about it. 

Another issue I have with characters being retired, whether through death or otherwise, is that I can't help but wonder: what happens if audiences don't embrace the replacements that Marvel is lining up for them, much in the same way that Star Wars fans have, by and large, rejected the poor copies of Luke Skywalker and his crew that were trotted out in the Disney-era sequels?

In the last few years, it has been made clear that nearly all of the "OG" Avengers have replacements lined up, with Anthony Mackie's Falcon having taken up the Captain America mantle, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova clearly being set up as the new Black Widow, and Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk rather blatantly being set up as the replacement for the Hulk.  Ironheart, or Riri Williams was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever to set up her upcoming Disney+ show and it's pretty obvious that she's basically the next Iron Man.  It would seem that all of the MCU characters are fair game for this treatment, with the exception, of course, of Sony-held Spider-Man, who will likely live forever.   The thing is, how will audiences feel about it? I can't help but wonder. 

What I find sad about this development is that, apart from the characters who have made it to the big screen, Marvel has literally thousands more at their disposal, especially with the return of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Marvel's stable.  They went the right route by introducing characters like Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, neither of whom has any connection to what came before.  This was what made most of the characters introduced from Phase I through Phase III endearing: they all felt  fresh and new.  Shang-Chi and Moon Knight both have that feeling, and if people had responded well to the Eternals, well, they would have benefited from that too. 

By trotting out "replacement Avengers," however, Marvel could be setting themselves up for a serious fall in the not-too-distant future.

That's just me speculating, of course; in the end the market will determine what stays and what goes, just like it's done with the comic books for decades. 

 

Not The Disaster I Was Expecting: A Review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

 directed by Ryan Coogler

written by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan

I'll be honest; I was firmly in the camp of the "recast Chadwick Boseman" viewers. I had my choice of actors who could have filled in his shoes, and quite frankly didn't see the point of indulging the sentimentality that had attended his death. For one thing, recasting roles vacated by actors' deaths is nothing new; Warner Brothers didn't kill the Joker after Heath Ledger's death and that worked out pretty well for them eleven years later. Also, T'Challa felt like far too important a character to bury so soon after his introduction.  All that said, I understood the imperative that pushed Marvel Studios and Ryan Coogler to forge ahead with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever without T'Challa.  Even so, I was basically expecting an absolute train wreck of a film. I ultimately watched it because I wanted to see where they would take the story, but my expectations were as low as they could possibly be.

I was, as a result, pleasantly surprised by what I eventually saw.

The film starts with King T'Challa (Boseman, depicted later exclusively in old footage) dying offscreen, with his sister Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) trying and failing to save him from a disease that is never named.  Shuri, together with her mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and the entire nation of Wakanda mourn the passing of their king. 

A year later, Wakanda,  now under the rule of Ramonda, is fending off attempts by the "developed" world to steal its precious metal, Vibranium, which they are constantly searching for in Wakanda's outreach centers. 

What not even Wakanda knows, however is that the United States has built a Vibranium detector and has started poking around under the Atlantic Ocean in search of the precious metal, where its machine found some. The Americans are then attacked by an all-new threat: blue-skinned, superhuman adversaries, led by a mysterious, extremely powerful flying assailant.

As Shuri grapples with her grief, Ramonda takes her to the riverbanks in an attempt to help her process it, when both of them are visited by the Namor (Tenoch Huerta-Mejia) king of the sea people who attacked the Americans. Namor blames Wakanda's act of opening itself to the world for the Americans' rapacious hunt for Vibranium which was brought them to the depths near his kingdom. He therefore commands Ramonda and Shuri to bring him the American scientist responsible for creating the machine, threatening to bring war upon Wakanda if they do not comply.

Wanting to head off disaster, Shuri and General Okoye (Danai Gurira) travel to America where they visit their old friend Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and get him to tell them where to find this scientist, who turns out to be a prodigy studying at MIT named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne).  Realizing they cannot bring themselves to turn her over to Namor, with his clearly murderous intent, Shuri and Okoye attempt to bring Riri over to Wakanda, but when Namor and his forces attack, Shuri goes to his kingdom of Talocan in an attempt to talk him down, only to realize that Wakanda and Talocan are basically on a collision course, a problem made worse by the fact that Wakanda is still without its greatest protector, the Black Panther, unless she can do something about it.

 If I had watched the first Black Panther movie and this one movie back-to-back without knowing the real-life event that inspired it, I can honestly say I would have been far unkinder to this movie than I am feeling now. A lot of the changes would have felt nonsensical.  Boseman's shadow looms large over the entire film, which struggles to fill the shoes he has left behind.

The good news, though, is that they manage to tell a coherent story even despite this massive handicap.

 The bad news, however, is that even though Coogler, screenwriter Joe Robert Cole and the whole crew lean heavily into Boseman's death as a story point, they remain unable to fully overcome the challenges that  his absence from the story has created. Letitia Wright does a commendable job portraying Shuri's grief throughout the film, quite likely inspired by how broken-hearted the actress was at the death of her co-star two years ago, but though she is clearly written as the lead, she is simply not enough to carry the film by herself. She does, however, get able support from her  co-stars like Bassett, Gurira, Lupita N'yongo who returns as Nakia, and Winston Duke who returns as M'Baku, but the net result is a film that feels very much like it's missing its lead. Then, of course, there's the usual Marvel malaise of the big CGI battle at the end, punctuated by the fact that when Riri Williams finally goes into battle in her Ironheart suit that fans knew as coming, it does not look anywhere near as convincing as the original Iron Man suit that Stan Winston Studios and Industrial Light and Magic built all the way back in 2007.  Given the fantastical nature of Namor and his army, Coogler had to have known that the final battle would be CGI-heavy, but he doesn't seem to have learned his lessons from the truly awkward CGI mess that was the first film's final battle. Plus, the film was at least twenty minutes too long.

All of that said, the storytelling was genuinely affecting, especially when it focused on how the characters involved dealt with the grief of loss.  It informs their decisions, and in Shuri's case her compassion shines through as she seeks to honor her brother, even as she longs to avenge her own losses late in the film.  The acting is pretty solid all around, with Angela Bassett turning in a particularly powerful performance that elevates every moment she's in the film. 

Also, apart form the CGI, which is the usual melange thrown together by ten thousand different contractors, the production work on this film is rock solid, with most of Coogler's key collaborators like composer Ludwig Goransson, costume designer Ruth Carter and art director Hannah Beechler all having come back to lovingly render once more the world they brought to the screen for the first time four years ago. Goransson's score was, for me, a particular highlight as I was happy to note that he didn't lean into his themes and leitmotifs from the first movie but rather composed a whole new set of tunes for Coogler to work with, including a haunting siren song for the denizens of Talocan. Carter and Beechler, apart from bringing back the color and power of Wakanda, also bring a whole new world with the Kingdom of Talocan and its underwater denizens. While I doubt this movie will walk away with the brace of Oscars that the first one did, some of its technical work is bound to get some kind of recognition.

Also, I was glad to see how Marvel had addressed the problem of Namor appearing to be an Aquaman clone, despite his comic-book counterpart actually being older than the DC Comics character (for a change). I wasn't particularly bowled over by Tenoch Huerta-Mejia's performance, but I thought it was all right, and I look forward to seeing what Marvel can do with the character. 

Do I think Marvel could have made a better movie if they had simply recast T'Challa? Honestly? I still think so, but it is what it is.

7.5/10

Is Marvel Fatigue Real?

 It seems silly to even suggest that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, officially the biggest box-office franchise in the history of movies is in any sort of trouble.  As of writing, the MCU has an unbroken and unequaled streak of 29 films that have opened at number one, the aggregate global box office gross of which, as of writing is $27.1 billion.

Since restrictions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have eased, the MCU has released six films theatrically, all of which have opened at number one, all but one of which spent at least two weekends as the number one movie in North America, and one of which, namely Spider-Man: No Way Home has the distinction of being the first movie released during the pandemic to gross over a billion dollars at the global box-office. 

It's not all happy news, though; of the six MCU movies released during the pandemic, four of them, namely Black Widow, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder,  shed over roughly two-thirds of their audience in their second weekends.  Black Widow was arguably a victim of Disney's idiotic day-and-date release strategy which saw the movie released in theaters at exactly the same time as it was made available for a fee on Disney+. In the case of, Spider-Man: No Way Home, there were extenuating circumstances, namely the second weekend coinciding with Christmas eve. That movie is an outlier, though, as it has since gone on to recover quite well from that first-to-second weekend drop, grossing over three times its mammoth opening weekend of $260 million. 

The steep second weekend drops of the Doctor Strange and Thor sequels, however, don't have any particular explanation behind them, other than that, perhaps, the long-dreaded Marvel fatigue may finally be setting in. 

The films of Phase 1, like the first installments of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Avengers, on the average, saw second weekend drops of around 50%. Captain America's first movie, with its 60% drop, was the outlier there.  With Phases 2 and 3, the average attrition of a Marvel movie in its first to second weekend shifted gradually from the low 50% to the high 50%, bordering on 60%. This was tempered, of course, by the fact that Marvel movies tended to have bigger and bigger opening weekends as the sprawling Infinity Saga neared its climax.  There were outliers, like Black Panther and Spider-Man: Far From Home, which experienced gentler-than-average drops from their opening weekends, but overall attrition tended to be higher.

Looking at Phase 4, I found it notable that only one of the six MCU movies released, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, experienced a first-to-second weekend drop below 60%, although it was also among the lower grossers of the six.  It didn't shed as much of an audience as the other films because its audience wasn't as big to begin with. 

Is it fair to say, then, that audience interest in these movies is waning? 

It is really hard to say, since these movies are still making money hand over fist. At the very least, though, these figures, coupled with the less-than stellar reviews for three out of the last six Marvel movies, should at least put Kevin Feige and his brain trust on notice that they may have to shake things up a bit in terms of how they tell their stories.  The chinks in Marvel's armor are showing. 

Another Type of "C" in the MCU (HEAVY SPOILERS for THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER)

 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.

The Thunderous Return of Jane Foster: A Review of Thor: Love and Thunder (Spoiler-free)

 directed by Taika Waititi

written by Taika Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

I'm going to be blunt: I was not expecting much from Thor: Love and Thunder. When it was announced some months before the pandemic I rolled my eyes a little bit, wondering why unlike Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Evans, who had wrapped up their tenure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in fine style with Avengers: Endgame, Chris Hemsworth was insisting on having another go.  It didn't really matter that Taika Waititi, who had breathed fresh air into the Thor franchise with Thor: Ragnarok, was returning to direct and this time write the film, I just felt the film was superfluous at a time when Marvel needed to start focusing on their next generation of Avengers. Subsequent announcements like the casting of Batman himself, Christian Bale, as well as acting legend Russell Crowe piqued my interest, but I still felt jaded about it.

My mind changed quite a bit with the trailer, though, which promised a dazzling, fun romp through space with the God of Thunder with colorful new characters and some familiar old ones as well.

The film starts with Gorr (Bale), the last of an unnamed race who walks the desert with his ailing child Love (India Rose Hemsworth) and who offers the last of his strength praying to his god for her to live, all in vain, as she dies. Shortly thereafter, Gorr stumbles into an oasis where the very same god to whom he was praying is apparently celebrating the defeat of a mysterious creature with an even more mysterious sword and discovers just how indifferent that god is to his plight. The sword, which is actually called the Necrosword calls out to Gorr, and he uses it to take his bloody revenge on the god, which then prompts him to take an oath to kill all gods.

Meanwhile, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) following the events of Avengers: Endgame is a bit aimless. He goes on adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt as Star Lord and the rest of the gang are all back sans Zoe Saldana's Gamora, of course) but when he hears reports of a mysterious figure killing gods all over space with a mysterious sword he sets off on his own in search of the threat with his best bud Korg (Taika Waititi).  Elsewhere, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is in a bad way health-wise, and basically at the end of her rope. Having exhausted normal scientific treatment, she heads over to New Asgard, where the broken pieces of Mjolnir are on display in a museum, and hopes to receive just a little bit of its magic. What happens next takes her by surprise and she soon finds herself reunited with Thor in a way neither of them had expected. `

Suddenly, Gorr then kidnaps the children from New Asgard, and Thor, King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and Jane, realizing the scope of the threat, seek help from the gods themselves, led by the powerful, pompous Zeus (a gloriously campy Russell Crowe). Will it be enough, and will they be in time? 

Thor: Ragnarok was, for me one of the real gems of Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so to reiterate, I was not really thrilled to hear about this new installment, which honestly felt tacked on. Fortunately, Waititi's unhinged sense of fun, along with earnest, genuinely moving performances by series newcomer Christian Bale and the returning Natalie Portman really helped keep things interesting. Hemsworth really knows that Thor is at his best as a goofball so he brings on more of that, trying on a loud new outfit and quite notably shedding the dad bod his character had picked up in Avengers: Endgame.  

There's an energy to the production that helped me overlook most of its foibles, but not all of the jokes hit, and the shift in tone from the more serious scenes to the lighthearted ones was, at times, enough to give one whiplash. A light and bubbly superhero movie featuring terminal illness? These are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts; Star Lord's mom died of cancer in Guardians of the Galaxy but the movie somehow balanced these scenes out.  Waititi, however, doesn't quite pull it off and for the first time I understand some of the disdain that some critics had for Jojo Rabbit's irreverent look at the dying days of World War II. 

Still, I really do enjoy Waititi's love for the more out-there aspects of Jack Kirby's work. He features the cosmic megabeing Eternity as, well, kind of a MacGuffin, and there are lots of visual nods to the Celestials as Jack Kirby drew them, not how Chloe Zhao reimagined them in Eternals. 

Speaking of visuals, though, I was a bit disappointed at how, after letting Sam Raimi have his way with some incredibly moody lighting to Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, Marvel seems to have reverted to a more generic look in terms of lighting and color grading. Also, majority of the VFX scenes were shrouded in darkness, which is never a good thing. Considering how long Marvel have been at this, it was distinctly disappointing

Equally disappointing is the seemingly half-baked work of yet another Marvel veteran, composer Michael Giacchino, who doesn't even seem to have thought of a proper theme for this film, which is even more of a let-down considering the kind of work Giacchino has previously done for the MCU in its Spider-Man and Doctor Strange films. Thor now has the unfortunate distinction of being the only solo franchise in the MCU to have had four different composers across as many films. They didn't even bring back Led Zeppelin for this; instead they made Axl Rose and company a whole lot richer by featuring a whopping FOUR Guns 'n' Roses songs.  It's somehow apt, therefore, that Thor has an identity crisis of sorts in this film considering that musically, his character, after all these years, still doesn't have an identifiable theme. 

If nothing else, though, Hemsworth, Waititi and the gang have shown that there are still a few more decent Thor stories to tell, and with any luck, they'll be better than this one. 

6/10