Thor: Love and Thunder: All those little Taika touches hiding in plain sight

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ANALYSIS: The whole world knows that filmmakers like to hide jokes, jokes and cameos in their movies.

Hitchcock has featured himself in nearly all of his best-known films at least once. Also Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola can’t resist the temptation to cast themselves and wink at the insiders. And let’s not even get started “A113” and the Pixar movies, or the strange and seemingly never-ending history of the Wilhelm Scream. If you know it, you know it. And if you don’t, there’s Google.

So I’m glad Taika Waititi chose to be a part of this proud film tradition. But Taika, being Taika, is does it in its own way†

READ MORE:
† Thor: Love and Thunder: It’s no Endgame, but Taika’s likeable, engaging, and wacky story is still a Marvel
† Thor’s Sam Neill Admits The ‘Entire Marvel Universe Is A Complete Mystery To Me’
† Alice Brine: I’m going to see Thor because I love New Zealand

Maybe my favorite moment of all Thor: Ragnarok heard a character refer to a spaceship as “The Kingswood”. A few minutes later, someone else was on his way to the stars in “The Commodore”. Taika, bless him, named all the good boys’ spaceships after the Holden cars he loved as a kid.

What was less noticeable, however, was that the Asgardian ships carried the red, yellow and black color scheme of the Australian Aboriginal Flag. Sam Neill – who appears in both Thor: Ragnarok and Love and Thunder, included the same design in the “Australian flag” on his spacesuit, in the 1997 sci-fi horror Event Horizon†

Sadly, Thor: Love And Thunder doesn’t feature a return of those starships, but it does show what appears to be a very respectfully reproduced Indigenous Australian rock art in the opening frames. Because this is Taika’s movie, we know those images will be authentic to the area in which those scenes were filmed. And, without spoilers, they made me think a lot more afterwards about the implications of the Gorr the God Butcher origin story—to which those scenes are devoted—and the fable of the colonization that I now believe is embedded in it.

If you stick with native starships – and that’s not a sentence I’d write today – you’ll find that Thor’s “Viking Long Boat” in Love and Thunder isn’t really anything like that. It’s definitely a seagoing Māori-waka—a waka hourua—complete with a deck decorated with carved kōura (crayfish).

Even better, Taika has decorated the whare like an intergalactic tiki bar, filled with Fanta – and dressed the outside with a neon sign that reads “Cocktails and Dreams”.

Which – no really – was the name of a bar featured in the 1988 Tom Cruise clunker Cocktail, created by New Zealand/Australian/American director Roger Donaldson, who directed Sam Neill and Anthony Hopkins, who both played Odin in the Thor film. movies – or, Sam played an actor who played Odin, if you want to be picky. What does it all mean, except that Taika has a good sense of the absurd? I have no idea.

Not to mention the name control of Tūmatauenga, a Māori god of war, as one who wants Thor in his crew for an upcoming battle. Or the presence of Chayla Korewha, credited as a “Māori princess” in the Temple of Zeus.

Elsewhere, Taika throws in a visual joke that perfectly recalls Georges Méliès A Trip To The Moon (1902) — considered the very first science fiction film and also the first anti-imperialist satire. Martin Scorsese also adores Méliès. He recreated the same shot of Taika references in his wonderful 2011 film Hugo†

But Taika goes one step further, flowing into an eerily beautiful sequence borrowed directly from the illustrations for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel The Little Prince, which also inspired a sequence in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar—a movie directly mentioned in an early scene of Love and Thunder. Honestly, if you start in these rabbit holes, you never know where they will lead. So let’s not even get started on the polyamorous dolphins. Or a scene towards the end that would have made me laugh out loud, if only Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart had played on the soundtrack.

Thor: Love and Thunder is a hoot from start to finish, but it has some real points to make if you keep your ears and eyes open. As with any good movie, there’s a lot more going on up there than meets the eye.

Thor: Love and Thunder is now showing in cinemas across the country.