Reviews of Thor: Love & Thunder,
Jurassic World: Dominion &
Top Gun: Maverick
Over the weekend of 9/23/2022 I saw Thor: Love and Thunder… Andrzej Żuławski’s “POSSESSION” (1981)… You can see a review of that film all by itself. Link provided at the bottom. I had also previously seen Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World: Dominion a few months back. This will be a mini review of each.
SPOILERS AHEAD…
Thor: Love and Thunder is so bad it might be worse than Black Widow as Captain of the worst Marvel movies to come out during Phase IV and possibly EVER... There really isn't anything good about this. The pacing and tone are all WRONG. The jokes, which seemed frequent don't fit and are not even funny. The cameos do not make any real sense and are just there for nostalgic humor purposes.
All the humor from Thor III: Ragnarok and Avengers: End Game that seemed to work in those movies for Thor does not work here and just make the film look cheesier than it already does. Love & Thunder is like a miss mash of deleted scenes/outtakes from other Thor movies that didn't fit in those movies, surrounded by a very basically written cookie-cutter villain and story. Christian Bale, however, was amazing though and I feel like his negative outlook on the film during the pressers is because he believed this would be a serious story, characterization, and it simply was not. He is a serious actor and if you tell him we are gonna make a serious movie and you ended up lying to him, it is no surprise he was negative about the quality of the movie when it was making the marketing rounds.
The romantic connection between Thor and Jane is gone. It is there in plot and we see it on the screen, but it has no chemistry to it. It looks forced and is badly written. The whole movie was poorly written… This was the shortest Thor film of the 4 released and I am glad. If this would have been 2 plus hours I would have shut this piece of garbage off. I almost shut it off my Disney plus because it was “that bad…”
The only thing that even made me smile at all were the screaming goats. That is about it for Thor: Love and Thunder. I feel bad for the people that paid money to see this in theaters and are a fan of the character. The acting is fine; but feels like parodies of their well-established characters. I thought this would have been a no brainer as far as it being good or not but it is so bad I do not know if we will see another Thor film and not sure if I want to. Even the Guardians of the Galaxy stuff in this was done poorly… Of the 4 Thor films the original and Ragnarok are great and Love & Thunder and Dark World are pretty bad.
Dark World isn’t terrible on the same level of Love & Thunder. It really is technically bad. The writing, tone, direction, choices, humor and the special effects. A lot of the effects look like poor green screen and/or just digital backgrounds, even when there are other key characters in the shot. Film Students, take notice to this stuff…
I didn't care for the latest Jurassic World flick either, Jurassic World: Dominion. It has some good stuff in it, but like the last one, they really didn't execute this well. It isn’t terrible just this one and the last one were not very good, but they were not terrible either. The first Jurassic World was excellent. How they fell so far, so fast just makes my eyes roll.
The cartoon villain, who is already a billionaire, wants to control all the world’s food supply so that he may charge whatever he wants for said food? Um, he is already a billionaire right? Yeah, I can totally identify with that villain’s motivations here. (sarcasm)… This villain is written badly even if it were a Bond villain or a Marvel super villain… I watched Tobe Hooper’s “Invaders from Mars” over the weekend too and I have more positive things to say about that flop than I do Jurassic World: Dominion…
Last on the list is Top Gun: Maverick and that was done right. I am sure there are gonna be haters out there, but I feel like they got the nostalgia right and didn't overly bathe in it as a main focal point of the movie. Which is what seems to be popular in these attempts at recapturing nostalgia. They do go back and do some of the normal nostalgia stuff, but it doesn’t linger, nor does it absorb the entire movie, like say, “Ghostbusters: After Life” did. Where the entire movie revolves around the first “Ghostbusters,” movie with full nods to the original that look great, but miss their mark. They did this with Jurassic World: Dominion with “these attempts at recapturing nostalgia.”
Maverick is its own story. So much so that the only thing I thought that was bad was the love interest aspect of the story. Jennifer Connelly’s character makes absolutely no sense as to why she is there and why she is important to Maverick. That was done poorly and I am sort of tired of these big properties/franchises that do things within the plot, off-screen and either force us to purchase extra properties like; novels, comics, video games, YouTube Easter egg videos, just to get caught up on the story…
To me, Maverick has a really bad love story/drama prequel out there that takes place after Top Gun and Before Maverick, aka Top Gun 1.5, that no one has ever seen, yet, seems to transitioned into Top Gun: Maverick like we all didn't miss a beat, which we did. To me, it doesn't ruin the whole movie, but it is a major distraction and/or miss-step of trying to tell the story here. We really didn't need her, her character in this movie and it hurts the plot.
Jennifer Connelly’s performance is fine. She is always pretty good except for 1985s Dario Argento’s Creepers/Phenomena, depending on which version of the film you find. Granted she was only a child then working with a foreign horror genre filmmaker. Those types of movies are made differently so her being overly bad in it I will chalk up to age and working with a foreign director.
I Give Maverick a solid A-. It would get an A+ but the love story element doesn’t fit. I give Thor: Love & Thunder a D+ and Jurassic Park: Dominion a C. These were 3 huge movies and it is very sad that only one of them ended up being actually good in my eyes, while the other 2 probably will never been seen and/or heard from again just like Amber Heard’s career…
The other 2 films I mentioned here; Andrzej Żuławski’s “POSSESSION” (1981) and Tobe Hooper’s “Invaders from Mars” (1986) are totally worth seeing if you can find them. Why get reminded of nostalgia when you can see its original form for yourself. For my review of Possession, click the link…
Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” (1981)…