THOR: Ragnarok VS Love and Thunder: Why One Works and the Other Didn't

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Something Don Cheadle said in Ocean's 13, "You don't run the same gag twice. You do the next gag." Something Taika should take note of.

We had Christian bale on cast as one of the nastiest villains in the cosmos, and instead of having him on screen killing gods, and ya know, raising the stakes, we had SO many scenes of screaming goats.

"Ragnorok works because Thor is attempting to be serious and fails." Thats a really good way of putting it.

I saw Love and Thunder in the middle of the night on a Disney cruise ship and it'll always have a special place in my heart because of that. But the entire time I was watching it, I was thinking to myself, 'Taika had too much creative freedom with this one.' I think what it needed more than anything was restraint, and for better or worse, this was Taika unrestrained.

To me, the reason why Ragnarök worked, and Love and Thunder didn't was because of the goals and styles of the antagonists. Hela's goal to reclaim Asgard and resume her conquests of the universe is a very active goal, you can tell she's going to be aggressive in her approach. But for Gorr, it's the complete opposite. Despite being called "the god butcher" Gorr doesn't act aggressively in his approach in genocide and the gods he kills, he does it off screen. And when it's revealed that he wants to go to Eternity to make a wish that all the gods were dead, that's the most passive way to accomplish that goal. Gorr should've been a much more active and aggressive antagonist to make it work.

Taika didn't write Ragnarok Craig Kyle and Chris Yost did the draft and that's why it was good.

As a person who loves the character of Thor, I didn't think the the Dark world was that bad but the excessive jokes and goofiness of everyone was just awful in Love and Thunder, most jokes if not all didn't land

The thought I had throughout the movie and long after was "but would he actually say that joke? Would he actually react that way?" A leg day joke? A weird love triangle between thor and his two weapons, that are being treated as sentient enough to feed a drink to? Just about every joke in the movie felt like a joke someone might make ABOUT the characters, not a joke the character would make themselves. Just like you said, the jokes in ragnarok felt like they were genuine reactions from the characters in the situations they were in.

The biggest missed opportunity that Love and Thunder had was to make Gorr sympathetic to the audience. Thor: Love and Thunder was released in 2022, which means that it had to have been written in 2020. We all questioned "Where was God?" in the cacophony of all the cataclysmic events that took place that year, if Gorr had been written in a way that questioned " What's the point of worshiping the gods when they abandon you when you need them most?" that would've made Gorr the voice of the audience and extremely relatable.

Another good comparison are the Mat Damon play scenes. In Ragnarok it was a character moment about what Loki actually did with Asgard once he took over. The play was funny, but it also was an important plot and characterization moment. In Love & Thunder they just went "that was funny, let's do it again!" But the play served no purpose, so fell flat.

I admire your restraint in not beginning and ending this video with, "The goats. The goddamn goats."

In an interview with GQ in 2023, Chris Hemsworth was asked what he thought of Love and Thunder and his response was "It just became too silly for its own good." He later went on to say that his family and friends of his children all have heavy critiques of the film, so even he's aware that it really sucks.

There was no tension in Love & Thunder. Any scary darkness brought by Gorr, was drowned out by constant silliness. There was never any fear that things could go wrong.

Thanks for this video; you explained exactly how I felt when I left the theaters. "It was too silly," I said. I didn't have the words like you had but this video captured it perfectly.

I love content like this. A movie expert giving words and an explanation to the feeling these movies evoke (or don't). Thanks!

Comic book Gorr is one of the best villains Marvel has come put with, in my opinion. In the comics, Gorr isn't actually seen killing very many God's, but here's the thing: Thor in the present day tracks down dead gods like in the film, but he instantly realizes this is the work of Gorr, whom he met hundreds of years ago. The story of Thor finding the deads gods in then intercut with flashbacks to a young Thor being captured and tortured by Gorr. This way, Gorr feels like both a physical and looming threat at the same time. Aaron rules.

I really hope big name studios (or at least someone with some pull) watches these videos and others like it - is this not what they teach in film school? The bits about having comedic moments in your movies, but not at the expense of the stakes seems so obvious in retrospect. Another banger of a video props to Ryan and the whole Screencrush team 👏

The 3rd film didn't have him as a writer. The 4th one did. That simple.

Unpopular opinion: i really liked natasha and bruce and thought the shower dialogue scene between the two at hawkeyes house to be one of my favorite marvel dialogue scenes.