Thor: Love and Thunder is the fourth installment in the MCU’s Thor franchise, this newest one being directed once again by Taika Waititi. The movie is about the titular space-viking (Chris Hemsworth) along with his ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) stopping an angry alien (Christian Bale) from killing all gods. I found that Thor: Love and Thunder was an enjoyable movie that did a lot of things right. However, despite its triumphs, many people found that this movie had its fair share of problems.

Thor: Love and Thunder is currently one of critics’ lowest rated Marvel movies of all time, holding only a 67% from Rotten Tomatoes against Thor: The Dark World’s 66%, remembered as one of the worst Marvel movies of all time. The audience scores aren’t much higher, with both movies landing only 10% higher. Waititi did a great job bringing Thor back into audiences’ good graces with Thor: Ragnarok five years ago, so what happened this time around?

To answer that question, let’s address the glaring issues this movie does have. Many viewers had complaints about the film’s rampant and often unimpressive humor. What started out as a very serious series now whips out a family-friendly gag every five minutes. For example, there are giant screaming goats that seem to provide “comedy relief” on screen for what seems like half of the movie. 

Although I didn’t appreciate the humor and felt that the amount of jokes in the film could’ve been sliced in half without hurting the film’s quality, I think Waititi made the movie that way on purpose. Waititi has a reputation of taking scary concepts and making them digestible through humor, so it’s no surprise that a Waititi movie sporting a villain that goes by “the god butcher” has an incessant amount of jokes. It’s also worth noting that while sometimes the CGI looked nice and colorful, a few specific scenes looked so unprofessional they made me wonder how they ended up in the final cut.

Its flaws hardly disqualify it from being a good movie, however. While remaining surprisingly comic-accurate, the movie tells a childishly tame story about grief and the life of a warrior. I can’t compliment the story too much without giving away spoilers, but I do think that  the lesson was well-written and the movie had a good ending.

Thor: Love and Thunder should definitely be remembered more fondly than Thor: The Dark World, although I don’t think it’s quite good enough to warrant anyone to go see a Marvel movie unless they’re already fans of Marvel.