Thor: Love plus Thunder minus Comedy

Foreword
I truly enjoyed the original Thor movie. Dark Fate was a bit dry and too serious, but also worked really well in terms of narrative and pacing. Though I know people love Ragnarok, it's always hurt me that they took the most powerful Hulk comic (Planet Hulk + World War Hulk) and super glued it to a Thor movie - but people enjoyed it on the whole and Chris Hemsworth seemed to enjoy a lighter interpretation of his otherwise aloof and unstoppable character.

But we can all agree that Love and Thunder was bad. Too irreverent of the characters, too frenetic in its pacing and editing, bookended by slapstick jokes and poorly executed comedic riffs - it was a nightmare, and it also laid waste to one of the greatest Thor comic storylines. So I came into this edit not with high hopes, but with desperation.

Technical Quality: 8/10

I didn't get as much compression or choppiness as some other reviewers. I watched on a 1080p 55 inch Samsung TV with surround sound and really only had a few artifacts on the garish colors of the intro/outro and the darkest blackest scenes had some crushing of the shadows - but nothing worse than I get through 4k streaming these days. Overall, for the size, I think it was pretty well done!

Editing Quality: 7.5/10

The problem is, there's just not much source material to pull from. In the theatrical release, every 15-30 seconds, there is a joke, a reference, a strange edit to a new scene, a clumsy transition. Cutting around those must have been a nightmare. There are several scenes that are necessary for the narrative, but are riddled with tasteless jokes. I enjoyed the inclusion of part of the deleted scene with Zeus explaining to Thor how to use the Thunderbolt and how the Thunderbolt would lead them to Eternity - it made sense as to why in hell Thor would even want the thing, but to use the rest of the scenes with Zeus and actually progress the movie - to tie it in with future releases - you HAVE to keep Thor hurling the Thunderbolt through Zeus' chest and running away with it.

You're cursed either way, but I liked seeing a portion of that put into the movie.

Many scenes are extremely obvious massive cuts have been made (like the very end of the movie, which I feel might have been a mistake, as it gives us no closure for Jane and Gorr's deaths, but I completely understand why it's there.

There is a scene, after New Asgard is attacked by Gorr, in which Thor is inside a community center watching his people bicker, fight, and lament the theft of their children, and the jump cut from a room packed with people to a room half-collapsing with a giant hole in the floor IS jarring, but again - there's no way to edit around it! These mandatory scenes are all hot glued with soul-crushing goofiness.

Overall, I think the editing was well done, I just wish there was more to pull from to connect these scenes together, particularly in the second act of the movie. But the first act is fanastically edited - especially everything before the departure of the Guardians of the Galaxy. I do wonder if the entire edit could have been slowed by 2-4% just to give us time to take a breath with all the rapid fire edits - but that's just a thought.

Narrative: 8/10

Again, it's like trying to pour water into a bowl made of hair. All the biggest pieces were there, but the trip to Ominpotence City is probably the most messy part of the entire film (both the theatrical and fan edit). There's so little to work with and so many scenes were cut for comedy's sake, it's a marvel 90 minutes survived.

Enjoyment: 9/10

I liked this! The use of music in the opening was a little too sad/somber for me, but the flashbacks framed around Thor, who admits that meditation makes him more angry, not less, was a good touch. I really loved seeing the opening of the movie move along and not spend 20 minutes faffing around with weird comedy. Especially the cut moments with the collapse of the alien's temple and the god awful dialogue from Siff were so welcome, i cannot overstate it. If there was just a bit more to work with, id' have rated it a solid 10 for my enjoyment. I don't think there should have been even a single frame cut from Christian Bale's time as Gorr the God Butcher, and i'd have liked to see a little bit of Jane Foster's backstory with bonding with Mjolnir left in, but overall I can watch THIS edit of the movie without heaping piles of regret. So that's a win!

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!

Well, it was short, but it pull it off, for sure, it did, Thank god I didn't watch the original one, This is fanedit is WAY better, For the people that felt disguested bout the movie you watch in theaters, watch this one.