Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

This week’s installment of Cinema 1544 marked a major first – our first second-generation presentation!  That’s right, Carlee Neverkovec (all of going-on-ten-years-old) took the opportunity of a Friday holiday to stay up past her bedtime and bring us a film that was pretty much guaranteed to be family-friendly.  And, it was pretty much guaranteed to be either animated, or from the Marvel Comics Universe.  Guess which?  If you guessed MCU, you probably read the title to this review!  Sure enough, we sat down to check out the latest (I think…) MCU offering, 2022’s Thor: Love And Thunder, directed by…Taika Waititi?  Well, I can’t say I saw that coming.

But what I did see coming was a little bit of pain, and Thor: Whine And Lightning did deliver on that.  I’ve got booze to help remember the film, so let’s see how!

The film starts on an alien world with our buddy Racing Stripe Machinist Voldemort having a bad day.  Apparently there’s a drought or a famine or a war or all three on his planet, and while he is on his way to the gods to supplicate like the peasant he is, his daughter dies.  This of course is kinda sad, but we didn’t really know her.  Oh.  Apparently her name is “Love”.  Of course since we should assume that nobody on this alien planet speaks English – and particularly because her dad’s name is Gorr – it’s probably a bridge too far to assume that her name has anything to do with the human emotion but rather is just a fortunate homophone.  But, we have a title!

Anyway, the Machinist Voldemort presses on despite her death and in a bit of a lucky stroke, stumbles upon the oasis of his god, who is chilling around playing lawn darts and eating grapes or Cheetos or whatever it is that gods snack on.  Well, it seems that this particular god wasn’t too keen on the whole divinity-as-protector thing, and besides, he had just gotten rid of some dude who was trying to kill him with the Necrosword, so he really didn’t have a lot of time for the man who was apparently his very last subject.  Well, long story short, the Machinist Voldemort hears the call of the Necrosword and natures of things being what they are, he seizes it (just hanging out on the lawn and all) and slays his uncaring god, vowing to traverse the universe to kill ALL the gods, wherever they might be.  Ambitious.  Gotta respect that.

In the meantime, Thor is hanging out with the Guardians Of The Galaxy, and kinda slumming it.  He’s lazily helping them to save whichever wretched people from whichever horrific monster happens to be going Gojira all over their homeworld or city or priceless crystalline cathedral, you know the deal.

But after carelessly ruining an aforementioned crystalline cathedral while defeating some unworthy beast, the Guardians of the Galaxy decide that it’s probably best if they let Thor just go his own way.

Also, in gratitude for ruining a priceless crystalline cathedral, Thor had been gifted a white-elephant pair of these humongous shrieking goats that basically ruined the day of anybody unlucky enough to be shipboard with them, so the Guardians bid Thor and his goats good riddance.  Thor doesn’t take hints well.

But apparently, one reason why Thor is so self-absorbed is that he’s pining for his ex-girlfriend, the eminent scientist Dr. Jane Foster.  I guess they broke up sometime before the movie, and from flashbacks it looks like this breakup happened because we needed a plotline.  Still, let’s not think that’s the only plotline because – tada! – Jane has stage four breast cancer!

You might be surprised, but the internet is not chock full of promotional photos of Jane-with-cancer.  Go fig.  What the internet is chock-full of is photos of Jane after she has gone to New Asgard and collected the shards of Mjolnir, Thor’s former hammer.  She has done this because she thought that maybe the shards of a broken hammer could be reforged by elven smiths and returned to the true king of…or no, wait, she thought the broken hammer might cure the cancer. 

Well, I guess that’s not a completely ridiculous thing to think, seeing as a broken hammer of the gods is probably worth at least three, four chemo treatments.  I’m not completely sure on the exchange rate on hammers of the gods.  But even broken ones have got to be worth quite a bit in this market.  What’s even better is a broken hammer that magically flies together and reforges itself when cancer-girl comes near.  It also hooks her up with a nice ren-faire outfit, so she’s nearly coming out ahead in the deal.  (It doesn’t cure the cancer, though.)

Before moving forward with our storyline, there are two more things that we ought to establish.   First off, apparently in this universe the realm of Asgard was actually, like, a planet where Thor was from.  Anyway, something happened in a previous movie, probably some god-devourer with a Cryptomace or an Electrospear or some supernatural artifact showed up and must have Armageddoned poor Asgard out of existence.  I guess Thor wasn’t strong enough to prevent that.  Some hero he is.

As an aside, here’s Fat Lazy Trucker Thor in a montage, probably featuring several songs off of Appetite For Destruction, that shows him working out so that he can impress his cancer-lady AND save the Earth, after he apparently miserably failed to save Asgard…

But back to Asgard…oh, we can’t go back to Asgard.  It’s gone bye-bye.  But in its place a few Asgard people (we’ll call them…Asgard people) have apparently survived and taken up residence in Norway, where they founded a city on the fjords called New Asgard and now welcome five cruise ships a day to make a living presenting Flamenco For Foreigners because gods know a half-divine (or at least way-more-divine-than-humans) race can’t possibly be expected to do anything for the Norwegian GDP.

The other thing we ought to establish (remember when I said there were two things?) is that in place of the broken (but now self-annealing) Mjolnir, Thor has come across a BattleAxe.  We’ll call her Flo.  I don’t know where Thor picked her up, but I do know that Flo is extremely jealous of Mjolnir.  She’s got some adequacy issues.  She also (maybe) helps Thor to jump through hyperspace and then to sail through other solar systems without the benefit of you know, like anything to hold an atmosphere.  Breathing is underconsidered in the MCU.

As a complete and total aside, have you ever seen Elysium?  I watched it like within the last month, and I don’t fully recommend it, but there’s this one thing…  You see, there’s a space station that’s built on the inner portion of a rotating ring.  Like anybody who has ever watched any sci-fi that doesn’t start with the word “star”, you and I both know that the centrifugal force in this setup establishes an artificial gravity, nbd.  But in Elysium, there’s no roof!  And part of me thought, “who are the idiots who didn’t put a roof on the space station?”  But the other part of me thought, “…well it’s gravity that keeps the atmosphere from escaping Earth, so could the centrifugal force keep the atmosphere from escaping the space station?”  I don’t properly know the answer to this, but if the answer is “yes”, that’s kinda cool!  …OK, back to THIS movie.

So where were we?  Oh yeah, so anyway Thor gets some intelligence that the Machinist Voldemort is going to attack New Asgard.  I mean, there are apparently a ton of well-populated semi-divine planets that the Machinist Voldemort could go after in his quest to kill ALL the gods, but I have to admit that New Asgard is a soft target.  Anyway, Thor shows up to save the day, and he’s confused by somebody wielding the self-annealed Mjolnir and double confused when it turns out to be his ex-girlfriend, who now wears Thor clothes.

The upshot of the whole thing is that the Machinist Voldemort kidnaps a bunch of Asgard-people kids, and if you’ve ever seen a movie, you know that it’s because he has some diabolical reason to lure Thor into his clutches as Thor attempts to save the hapless children.

Thor has never seen a movie.

So Thor and his cancer-lady ex-girlfriend that he’s totally going to get back together with head off to a place that Wikipedia tells me is named Omnipotence City.  This is basically the Unobtanium of demonyms.

But hey, Zeus lives there, and if Omnipotence City is good enough for the king of the gods then it should be good enough for Thor, who doesn’t even belong in the same mythology.  I mean, guys, let’s get this straight.  Thursday is named for…Thor.  We got that.  But in romance languages, we’ve got in Spanish the day Jueves, which is named for…Jove…who is…Jupiter…who is…Zeus.  THEY’RE THE SAME DUDE.

Anyway, Thor asks himself for some help in taking care of the Machinist Voldemort (remember him?)  but fat, pampered Greek version of Thor is not interested.

He’d much rather strip Thor naked and OH MY GOD YOU CAN SEE THE STEROIDS OOZING OUT OF HIS PORES. Thankfully, the camera never pans down. Now ostensibly this is because it’s a PG-13 movie, but I mean, I’ve heard some rumors about what steroids do…down there…so, you know…

The upshot of the whole thing is that Thor apparently kills Zeus (a death that is retconned by a mid-credits scene that I will not bother to describe further…I mean, like, watch the next Marvel movie, I guess…) and, uh…well, he kills Zeus. He came to Omnipotence City, where the grass is smart and the girls are geniuses, oh won’t you please not kill Zeus? Umm. Lost myself there. He came to ask Zeus’ help, Zeus isn’t interested because there’s no way that the Machinist Voldemort can possibly reach McGuffin…I mean, “Eternity”…so why bother? And in retaliation for being steroid-humiliated, he maybe-kills Zeus. Can we leave Omnipotence City now? It kinda sucked.

Anyhow, it turns out that Flo is the key to everything.  The Machinist Voldemort’s plan is to lure Thor into trying to save the children, steal Flo, and use Flo to summon the Bifrost (new Gatorade flavor!) which will allow him to find Eternity, because if he finds Eternity, Eternity will grant him his deepest desire.  At this point in the movie, you just submit and say that this makes sense.  “Yes!  Yes!  I totally believe you, just please for the love of all that is holy END THE MOVIE!”  But the movie can’t end because Thor’s friend Valkyrie has to die and there’s a dude made of stone who gets all blowed up but it turns out only his face is alive so he comes back as like Jim Carrey in The Mask Part XVIII: Holy Crap Make This Movie Stop Already and all of this god-fighting is really sucking the life out of cancer girl.  So Thor tells his Cancer Lady that he’s going to stop the Machinist Voldemort and in no uncertain terms is she to leave hospice so that she can die with quiet dignity instead of dying saving the universe.

She chooses to die saving the universe.  Completely unrealistic decision, but it’s a movie.

Anyway, so there are like lightning fights — no real thunder happening here…maybe it’s because we’re in a conference-room theater that doesn’t have the whole Dolby experience but really I’m thinking they just didn’t bother with the thunder…it was only IN THE TITLE COULD YOU POSSIBLY HAVE SOME DECENT SOUND EFFECTS IT’S NOT LIKE HUMANS HAVE ONLY ONE SENSE ORGAN but whatever.  There was way more whining in the movie than love, and way more lightning than thunder.  So it goes.

Anyway, so there are like lightning fights and Machinist Voldemorts wielding Necroswords and all that kind of thing, but ultimately Thor, as is his wont, completely fails in his goals and the Machinist Voldemort reaches Eternity.

And things get a bit confused here, but it turns out that the Machinist Voldemort wasn’t really all that bad of a guy, because his true goal wasn’t to kill all the gods after all but just to resurrect his dead daughter and now that he can have that he’s going to die, because he hasn’t figured out how to construct his ultimate wish with an “and” in the middle.  But the totally screwed up thing is that a dying cancer girl basically commits Thor into adopting the Machinist Voldemort’s resurrected daughter.  Thor didn’t even consent to this, he’s just completely blindsided.  He’s just minding his own business saving the universe and all of a sudden his DYING cancer-girlfriend signs him up for the Columbia Adoption Club!  And then she like kicks it 12 seconds later.  I mean, what if Thor wanted to go chill in Cabo and try writing a bodacious album?  Not gonna happen, because now he’s gotta get up at 5:30 in the morning to make a sack lunch for some spoiled brat that is not only genetically not his progeny but furthermore isn’t even from the same planet and how in the hell did he get roped into this?!?  The End.