Now we know what you’re thinking… But, his name is in the end credits. He’s credited on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. He was on stage at Comic-Con handing Mjolnir to Natalie Portman… What do you mean he didn’t write or direct Thor: Love and Thunder?
Well, hear us out first and then you can decide for yourself if we’re full of shit or not.
It’s been about a week since Love and Thunder hit theaters, and since then we’ve had a lot of time to reflect on just why this movie fell flat. Especially when compared to literally every single one of Taika’s other works, including Thor: Ragnarok. To try and prove our point, let’s break down this conspiracy theory into three parts: overuse of humor, scheduling conflicts, and post-release interviews.
OVERUSE OF HUMOR
By far, the biggest flaw in Love and Thunder is the overuse of humor. Almost every critic can agree that the film forced the audience to endure humor as often as it possibly could, thus never allowing for the story to fully go as dark as the topics that it attempted to tackle. The proper use of humor to navigate deep topics is literally what Taika Waititi is known for, however, in Love and Thunder, humor is used so goofily and seemingly as a means of avoiding these topics.
How could a director known for successfully making hilarious and heartwarming films about vampires struggling to live modern lives (What We Do In The Shadows), children struggling in the foster care system (Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and the Holocaust (Jojo Rabbit) all of a sudden change their entire writing/directing style and go on a foolish joke after joke onslaught? If the jokes were good and made sense to the story, maybe we could overlook it and consider this just a one-off bad film for Taika, but the type of humor in Love and Thunder compared to his previous work is just incomparable.
We refuse to believe that Taika Waititi said, yeah let’s have those goats do the scream from the Taylor Swift memes from almost ten years ago throughout the entire film. Goat screams aside, let’s take the Infinity Cones ice cream shop gag from when we revisit New Asgard. Seriously, a pun about the most catastrophic event in MCU history that led to multiple deaths (including those of countless Asgardians) is the source of yet another dumb joke? Nah, this isn’t Taika-level humor, even on an off day.
SCHEDULING CONFLICTS
Ever since Thor: Ragnarok, Taika has been taking on a lot of projects. If you exclude Chris Hemsworth, he’s also become the name most associated with the Thor franchise. Audiences love Taika Waititi’s work and have come to expect that if he’s attached to something, it’s inherently going to be good. We know that, and Marvel execs DEFINITELY know that.
Since the announcement of Love and Thunder in 2019, Waititi has written and directed three episodes of What We Do In The Shadows, written and directed Jojo Rabbit, directed an episode of The Mandalorian, created two brilliant television series called Wellington Paranormal and Reservation Dogs, produced and directed episodes of the hilarious series Our Flag Means Death for HBO, and is in the process of writing and directing the upcoming films Next Goal Wins and The Incal. Oh, and he also managed to sneak in writing a Star Wars film.
When the hell would he have found time to also direct a huge blockbuster Marvel movie? Is he an actual superhero? Because I don’t know of a single human on the planet that can take on that much work in the span of three years. James Cameron has been working on one single Avatar movie for like the last 13 years, and you want us to believe that Taika Waititi completed nine high-budget projects, not including Love and Thunder in a quarter of that time? It just doesn’t add up.
POST-RELEASE INTERVIEWS
If you’re still not convinced, let’s take a look at some of the interviews and clips that have come out since the Love and Thunder release.
Here’s an interview that Waititi did with NME:
Early on in the interview, while discussing the music in the film, Waititi appears to be extremely excited about the fact that they were able to get the rights to four Guns N’ Roses songs. Then he expresses that he has no idea how much it cost to get the rights to those songs and that he refused the opportunity to personally talk to Axl Rose about requesting the music. Considering how much of a GNR fan he claims to be, it seems a bit odd that he wouldn’t want to seize that opportunity.
Towards the end of the interview, the Change.org petition to #ReleaseTheWaititiCut is brought up. Waititi’s response to this is, “They suck. Director’s cuts are not good.” Well, that’s just simply not correct. There are plenty of great director’s cuts. Blade Runner, Almost Famous, Aliens, hell even Zack Snyder’s Justice League was solid. To us, this sounds like nothing but a cop-out answer from someone that doesn’t actually have a director’s cut because he didn’t actually direct it. He then goes on to add that his cut might include a few more jokes and some deleted scenes. More jokes? Did he even watch this movie?
There’s also an interview with the God Butcher himself, Christian Bale, expressing that “there’s so much gold that’s on the cutting room floor” in regard to scenes of his character and some of the darker sequences involving Gorr. Seems like those would be some great sequences for a director to bring up when asked about what they would include in their director’s cut.
Here’s a scene breakdown that he did with Tessa Thompson:
During this breakdown, Waititi just seems confused straight out of the gate. He does a horrible job of breaking down the scene and questions pretty much everything. Tessa Thompson seems to know more about the film and how it was made than the supposed director. At one point she even makes light of a sequence where her reaction doesn’t match the action in the scene and how much it doesn’t make sense as to why he left it in the film. In response, Waititi does nothing to defend this creative decision, he just laughs it off.
Throughout the rest of the clip, Waititi just seems to be there to make vague jokes about filmmaking as a whole while he also belittles the efforts of hundreds of VFX artists. I’m sure they really appreciate hearing him mock their work. Luckily Tessa is there to move the clip along while sharing her perspective about what it was like to actually be on set. We bet she knows who directed this movie.
*****
In conclusion, we have too much adoration for Taika Waititi as a filmmaker to believe that Thor: Love and Thunder was his creation. He might have had some involvement along the way, but to say that he wrote and directed this entire movie just doesn’t make sense to us. We would rather believe that Marvel simply used his name to trick us into seeing this film. This is not the work that we know he is capable of creating.
I actually agree with this sentiment entirely. I believe that it is completely possible that Taika had minimal involvement in this film and was likely studio executive directed. Of course, Taika could have had all of his best writing axed and thrown on the editing room floor, but that still further suggests that the majority of this movie, if not all, came from someone who forced Taika’s hand which only further proves the point that this isn’t a film of his own. I feel like something similar happened with Edgar Wright and Ant-Man originally.