Well, I tried. Made it halfway through before stopping it.
I have watched every one of the MCU movies and most of the shows, so I’ll probably go back and finish this, just for the sake of completion.
Not that this hasn’t been said for several pages now, but: Marvel movies generally do a very good job of balancing heavy material with lighthearted moments. Some characters are quippy, others are genuinely funny, some will just make you smile. But these movies cannot be open-mic comedy hour. That is not what these characters were built up to be. The sheer volume of unfunny self-referential one-liners, or “awkwarrrrrdddd” asides, interrupts the momentum of every single scene in the movie.
The first two Thor movies were probably the weakest in the MCU to date, but they were decent action movies in their own right. This one is not a decent action movie. This is closer to a throwaway rom-com level of scriptwriting.
Frankly they need to be really damned careful with putting stuff like this out there. Once upon a time, it was inconceivable that a Star Wars movie could be terrible. It was inconceivable that a Game of Thrones season could be terrible. But even the very best franchises can lose traction if they let the quality slip. The MCU seems bulletproof, but part of the reason they’re such a juggernaut is that their spin-offs are so high quality. People feel like they need to watch obscure silliness like Guardians and Ant-Man, and those drive a larger narrative which build up to billion-dollar mega-blockbusters. Let the spin-offs slip into being throwaways, and people quickly stop feeling compelled to watch them. When people aren’t compelled to stay immersed in the universe, they fall away and find other things. That snowball starts with feeling like the production team is phoning it in, and that’s exactly what happened here.
