Review Detail

Tremault had some serious work cut out trying to remove the comedy from this deeply awkward entry in the MCU but has largely succeeded in crafting something watchable and actually quite moving here. The brutal arc of Jane Foster throughout the film no longer feels undercut at every possible turn (particularly as death is elsewhere treated as something reversable and comic in the original cut of the movie -- looking at you, Korg). Some of the fixes don't entirely work (the dream sequence cutaway with Zeus is a valiant attempt to trim the middle of the movie's bloat while still retaining important exposition but I'm not sure it quite succeeds). There's also just a few instances where the re-editing is apparent due to some lapses in editing grammar -- a number of characters are shown for the first time without any proper introduction, not given a name nor even a character establishing shot. Valkyrie in particular appears first as part of a group shot where normally she would be at least visually shown to stand apart from her subjects. Granted, not necessarily an easy thing to accomplish given the mess of the original film, but some kind of visual orientation is needed when introducing key characters in a text.

Nitpicks aside, this is such a vast improvement over the original version, and with some revisions, this could easily be a seamless replacement for the Thor 4 we got. The potential is there to be one of the most moving entries in the MCU -- if only Taika Waititi had had tremault's good judgment for emotional story beats on hand in the editing room!