If You Struggle With Love After Loss, 'Thor: Love and Thunder' May Be Perfect for You

“Thor: Love and Thunder” hit theaters earlier this summer. As a Thor Odinson fan girl, I was very excited for the follow up to “Thor: Ragnarok,” arguably one of the most fun movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). 

Taika Waititi mentioned that this fourth Thor installment was a love story, and as a lover of Thor, Thor and Jane, and love in general I was more than excited to see this story. Now that I’ve watched it, I realize that it was a love story, but not in the way I expected it to be.

SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT

 

OK, “Thor: Love and Thunder” is for sure a love story, but instead of it being about riding into sunsets and the elusive happily ever after, it’s actually about learning to love again after loss.

If you’re familiar with the Thor franchise, you know he’s lost an extremely large number of loved ones. Both his parents, his brother (multiple times), his comrades in the Avengers (Tony, Steve, Natasha, the list goes on…), and on top of all of that, he went through a break-up with his love interest from the first two movies, Jane Foster.

Early in the movie, they talk about all of this and how it’s caused him to close his heart off to new people, experiences, and love. Grief is such a tough emotion, and as much as people want to believe it goes away, I don’t think it does. Sure, we grow around our grief, but it doesn’t change that it’s always there in the background, at times dictating and impairing our decision-making skills. At the height of my grief, I couldn’t even watch new television shows or movies because I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle unknown variables, like endings. I’d stop reading books when the third act breakup happened. The fear of loss caused me to block myself off from anything new, good or bad, but especially good.

The way that “Thor: Love and Thunder” explores this is very true to the real journey that people learning to love through loss goes through, and it shows how love, especially after loss, is transformative. That’s why I say this movie isn’t a love story, rather a story about love – how love is terrifying and scary when you know how much it hurts to lose it, but how powerful it is even after that fact and how it’s a needed, real, and true part of life that can both confine us, but also set us free. 

Without going too far into how Thor finds Love, he does in the most unlikely of places, and it’s a tear jerker. 

If you struggle with loving after loss, whether it be death, a breakup, or something else, I believe you have a lot to gain by watching this movie. 

Oh, and I hope you love goats. If not, the movie may be a little annoying.