Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Thor: Love and Thunder
2022 · Taika Waititi · Thor: Love and Thunder on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at how loud the color is in every frame. (light)
Idoine works in primary hues and neon rim light, flat like 1970s fantasy illustration and airbrushed Heavy Metal covers. Almost nothing is photographed in neutral tones.
Payoff: Color here is feeling rather than description. Hold that baseline, because the film's largest visual decision is a subtraction from it. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: hue used as a scene's emotional temperature instead of a fact about objects.
Watch the actors on the wooden stage in New Asgard. (staging)
Famous people play Asgardians re-enacting events from earlier films for tourists holding souvenirs. Nobody fights. Somebody performs a fight that already happened.
Payoff: The film keeps staging actions instead of performing them. Once you see it, Omnipotence City and Zeus read the same way. In the reading: the Figure (reflection-image). The reading calls this a reflection-image: an action transposed into spectacle and talked about rather than done.
Listen for Guns N' Roses arriving whenever Thor does. (sound)
The needle drops work as Thor's personal motif. Giacchino and Melumad's orchestral score threads between the songs. The method comes straight from Ragnarok and the Guardians films.
Payoff: The songs tell you what register a scene is in before anyone speaks. They also make the sincere moments harder to land.
Watch how differently Hemsworth and Bale are playing this. (performance)
Hemsworth plays Thor as self-satire, deflated and jealous of his own axe. Bale plays Gorr gaunt, wounded, and completely serious. The two performances belong to different registers.
Payoff: The gap between them is the film arguing with itself. Decide as you watch whether the counterpoint deepens the story or defuses it. In the reading: inversion-image. The reading calls Thor here an inversion-image: the mighty hero presented in his deflated, feeble form.
Count how much story gets told in montage. (cutting)
A four-person editing team compresses Thor's recovery, the setup, and most exposition into fast comic runs. Scenes get cut for the joke landing rather than for the beat continuing.
Payoff: The rhythm is what critics fought about. Watch whether a serious moment is given time to sit before the next gag arrives.
Once you have seen it
Watch the opening scene in the desert again. (structure)
A devout father loses his child, prays, and is ignored. It plays completely straight, and it sets up material the comic surface then has to carry for two hours.
Payoff: The film opens in tragedy and spends most of its runtime elsewhere. Bale is the only performer still playing that first scene.
Look at what happens to color in the Shadow Realm. (light)
The film drains to near-monochrome for the last battle, and lightning and costumes land as isolated splashes on gray. Two hours of saturation were setting this up.
Payoff: The palette makes the argument the screenplay keeps interrupting. Gorr's world is the color leaving everything.
Watch what the gods in Omnipotence City actually do. (staging)
They pose, preen, and applaud. Crowe's Zeus rules a coliseum whose only real weapon is an entrance. The design presents deity as celebrity merchandise.
Payoff: Gorr's charge is that the gods are unworthy of worship. The production design is the prosecution's best evidence.
Listen to Korg telling the story as already finished. (sound)
Waititi voices him as a narrator recounting a tale that has been told before. The film keeps flagging its own worn situations while still running them straight.
Payoff: Knowing the clichés does not get the film out of them. Irony is applied as a finish rather than used as a way through.
Carry this in: Count how often the film stages an action instead of performing one. Everything difficult about it sits there.