The Reel Rejects - THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER Movie Review!!

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

FRESH FROM THE PERMIERE!! Here's our SPOILER-FREE Discussion of the 4th film in Marvel's THOR franchise, featuring Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Natalie Portman returning as Jane Foster (aka The Mighty Thor!!), Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher, Tessa Thompson as King Valkyrie, Taika Waititi as Korg, The Guardians of the Galaxy, some very amusing screaming goats, and more!! LIVE SPOILER TALK w/ COY JANDREAU COMING SATURDAY, JULY 9th!! https://youtu.be/qKDagIGcQ4I Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-reel-rejects/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Dude, come here, come here. We just met Chris a few minutes ago. What's good? This is Chris. Hey, guys, what's good? He did not watch this movie, but he came out to us. What do you think you'll think? You know, I think it's going to be a great movie, you know.

Chris Hemsworth in it. Christian Bale is in it. Chris Pratt. So many Chris is. My name is Chris, too, you know? You recognize us. You get to be on camera. Simple as that's the reward.

Thanks, buddy. That was nice. Now we got to stick with this footage. What is going on to Reject Nation? We are at the Thor, Love and Thunder premiere. We just got out of here. Now, I'm going to give a couple of disclaimers. There are a vast number of distractions we are surrounded by at the moment.

We got people, we got drums, we got fire trucks, we got the crew tearing the entire premiere down. We also have the pressure of, we might get kicked out of here any second. That would happen when we were doing light here. And having an articulate opinion on top of all that. Yes, it's kind of a lot going through our brain. But the main thing we want to do is give our honest thoughts and our instant reaction, our opinions about Thor, Love, and Thunder. So if you guys can leave a like, that would be insanely appreciated. Now let's just get into Thor Love and Thunder.

Now, if you guys have seen the trailer, there's essentially two plots for this film, mainly two plots for this movie. One is dealing with the fact that Jane Foster is back after Thor and her have been broken up. There's a lot of details that are not revealed in the trailer that I think are so rich and rewarding in this film. As Tycho Waity revealed, it is barring from the Mighty Thor storyline and she has cancer, the thing that helps her to not have, this is just one part of the story. I'm not going to give it all away because you ever read the comics. One part of it is that, you know, she doesn't look or feel like a cancer patient. suddenly she is imbued with the powers of Thor.

She wields Milner in here. And the second story is dealing with Thor looking for his place in this world, looking for his purpose. Nothing to help him find a better purpose in life than dealing with a thing called Gore the God Butcher, playing by Christian Bale. Look, I'll just go to side the way. Christian Bail, we all know, is, he's known to be an all right actor. He's got a career ahead of him.

Tyco Waititi knew he got Christian Bail on his hands, and he really utilized him because this is definitely, I'm not sure where I'd rank him just yet. Christian Bail is definitely one of the best Marvel villains, I think, to have ever graced the screen. He steals every moment he is on screen. There's one criticism I have with Gore of the God Butcher that I'll get into, and it's really more of an expectation, not really an execution problem. But I still feel like, I know, I still think it would have made the movie just that much better if we had that. However, Gore the God Butcher delivers. I think overall, there's a lot of weight to the character, a lot of pathos.

If you know anything about the character, you need that. You can't just have them coming in here playing evil. There's a lot of pain to the performance, and I think Christian Bale full-heartedly delivers, and the makeup on him is just excellent. With this film, here's the first thing that most people are going to be doing. I noticed everyone at this screening was doing, because it's Taika Waititi, who helped reinvent Thor for the MCU. What do you think they're going to be saying? Is it as good as Ragnarok? Is it as good as the only bar?

This is literally what everyone was doing. I don't know if I'd like it more. It might be better. I'm not sure yet. I didn't see this guy's like a time. And my thought, like, 30 minutes. into this film was, this is so much different than Ragnar Rock. Which is great.

It still feels like Tycho Waititi made the film. It's still really funny. And it still keeps a lot of the sensibilities that that movie has with the humor, but also the very colorful and sci-fi-inspired cosmic landscapes and different peoples that you see represented on screen. While it's a little bit more cosmic, it also is definitely leaning way more into the gods side of it all. You know how Eternals dealt with the gods as well.

This deals with the gods, but in a more humor. colorful exciting way and in a way that seems to embrace and confront the idea that so many of these phase four movies have had which is we've never intervened for various reasons and hey look at the fallout from that I really liked what Typeka decided to go with on the flow of this because the mood and pacing and the overall tone to me feels personally I don't know how many people will agree with me on this I think you do it feels very different than Ragnarok yeah and I like that it feels different than Ragnarok and I like that it feels different than Ragnarok I mean, I'm glad it's still funny. Overall, it's just not the same thing. Yeah, it feels like it took what he was able to establish with Ragnarok and then really run forward with that and take a lot of those color palettes and a lot of those sensibilities, but then expand them into something that does pack a bigger emotional punch

and something that does build into something a bit more interesting. Like, if I have a criticism of Ragnarok, it's just like that by the end, you know, you've got a kind of big battle, you know, you've got to vanquish hell out. And in this, they go a more interesting route. There are certainly big battles. There are certainly culminative battles towards the end and I'll have. They do something different that's very thematic with all of that really builds well upon the previous films. See, I think that's the thing is it's so much more introspective and it has so much more heart.

Like, it's called Love and Thunder. And there is so much about love in this film and explored in a bunch of different kinds of shades throughout that I just sincerely appreciate it. Yeah. You know, like one thing I wasn't expecting was just how much thematically and visually there is this sort of like theme about dealing with cancer that is represented physically. And internally, obviously with Jane Foster, who's diagnosed with cancer in this film. However, also with Gore the God Butcher, who sort of acts like a cancer and looks like a cancer as he's going throughout the film. And then you see these parallels of these people who are gifted with these powers, yet are also so cursed about what's happening to them physically and what's killing them. How they're using those abilities, what they are sacrificing ultimately, and how strangely enough, even with Gore the God Butcher, that it's all.

backed with the theme of love, even despite how freaking evil core of the coppenter is. There's a really great interplay, I think, between, yeah, those physical stakes of a disease or something that, you know, is affecting your ability to live, and then the psychological rebuttal to that of how do I continue on? Do I trudge the weary road of treatment that doesn't look good, or do I get out there and live? And to that extent, then, if you're in a helpless position, who do you go to, who do you turn to, and how do you cope with that? And I think the movie does a really nice job of, yeah, taking the literal cancer storyline and representing that in a physical sense, but then also zooming way out, because in so many of these helpless

medical situations, there's life situations, people turn to their gods. And I think this movie stumbles upon a really, really effective, overarching theme, which is we all deal with that problem of we pray and we hope and we yearn for that answer and that relief. The gods don't come. And how do you deal with that? And how do you still live a life of love and how do you still not succumb to the parasite you know exactly exactly a thousand percent and i think that you know chris hemsworth what's great it's like in thor ragnerock he got to reinvent himself with being like a funnier thore and here he gets to maintain that humor but man i think what tycho really infused in here was something cheesy but i love the cheese of the

because it doesn't feel or play cheesy in the moment idea of like take on the pain it's okay to have pain in our lives but conquer it would love it's a really kind of corny thing to say But I think that's like what every character here is doing. Chris Hemsworth gets to bring a lot more of that pain. There's one moment he got me really pretty, pretty teary-eyed. I'm not going to lie. I cried several times. I was not expecting that.

I was expecting neither. There was one moment I definitely cried at myself. I think John kind of cried throughout, but I just cry. Yeah, after a while, it's just like my face is just going to stay wet. His chemistry with Natalie Portman here, so much more natural than it never has. Brand new. Because it's great that you get this version of Thor now. And you get this version of Natalie Portman under the direction.

of Taika Waititi, their chemistry just worked so well. Like, I remember not missing at all Natalie Portman and Thor Ragnarok. I never once felt like, we need Jane. But damn, I'm like, Thor and Jane. Yeah. I have such a different association now. And I'm talking about Jane Foster, not just Mighty Thor, where she is great in that. I thought she did an excellent, excellent job here.

Like, I've never cared about Jane Foster more than ever. And, like, Valkyrie is great. The Guardians of the Galaxy, barely in this film, when they are, it's effective. Let's get that out of the way. Don't get your hopes all up that it's going to be like a rollicking adventure with them nonstop. There's a core ensemble, and it's mostly the actual Asgardians and People Close to Thor. In fact, the character who I thought surprisingly had way more to do than I expected was Russell Crowe and Zeus. I know. He showed up.

Oh, no, he's like a real character. I was worried early on about how the interplay was going to be between the economics of storytelling that these movies have to have and the true sense. So it was at this point in the video where there was a complete misunderstanding with a different security guard and so we just had to wrap up the review. But I want to quickly say that the goats were the goats. The action is incredible and it's specifically that one scene with the shadows. Yeah.

In the shadow realm. Yeah. Seen that you guys saw. That is some of the most beautiful visuals I've ever seen. This movie is full of really expressive visuals that really heighten all of the themes that are bolstered by the work done by the ensemble. Like, every time I was worried, it was going to succumb to the economics of storytelling that sometimes dogs these movies.

It would make an interesting choice, or it would build upon those choices. And when it did have to go economical, I thought they found really great motifs about legends and gods to justify those things. I think, like, my minor criticisms, I think there's some weird pacing from time to time. I think sometimes the pacing's a little bit off. But it always came back around and clicked for me in the end. I thought there'd be more of Gore, the god, but there's not... He's always a presence, but yeah, you would expect to spend more actual time with him.

Because, yeah, you get a lot of, like, them saying that's what he's doing. But you don't really get to experience that. The bits that you get there, they are dark and violent. In a different movie, you would spend a lot more time just cutting to gore, butchering gods. In some ways, they're smart not to do that because it opens you up to a lot of other things that are really worthwhile. But I think people might have an expectation that we are going to see him literally butcher. more gods than are depicted on screen in action sequences or something like that.

So for me, it might go higher. I would say right now it's like a pretty solid eight out of ten for me. I imagine like a nine point five for you. Yeah, nine, nine and a half maybe. Like this was this was one of the MCU films where I was like, regardless of what the crowd thought, I loved this experience. I had a fantastic time and I can't wait to watch it again. Yeah, it's pretty high up for me.

It's pretty great. And everyone's going to have a different opinion and expectation for what this is supposed to be. So go in with your own open mind. And Valkyrie and Korg also great. guys thank you for being here we got to get the hell out of here let's see you guys and lock us up