Think Thor: Ragnarok was nuts? Well, THOR: LOVEANDTHUNDER— flying goats and all — may well out-nut it. Yet, as director Taika Waititi and his cast tell us, this one wants to make you cry, too. Let the cosmic romcom commence

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

Top: Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Dave Bautista as Drax and Chris Pratt as Star-Lord/ Peter Quill.

TAIKA WAITITI HAS A LOW BOREDOM THRESHOLD.

Ask anyone. Ask Chris Hemsworth: “Taika is someone, like me, who can get distracted easily or bored easily and needs more stimulation and entertainment to keep him focused.”

Or ask Natalie Portman. “Taika is so brilliant, I just don’t know how he’s that generative of ideas,” she says. “If you shoot something and you do the same thing twice, you see his heart fall, in a way.” Hell, ask Waititi himself: “You watch these films over and over and over again, and then eventually you just become numb to it,” he says. “You get bored of an idea and get rid of it and then replace it with something better.”

It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s why the New Zealand director’s filmography is littered with the kind of tenacious tonal shifts that would derail many lesser movies: think of the way a scene of intense grief in Hunt For The Wilderpeople slingshots into a comedically inept eulogy (delivered by Waititi himself ), or the moment in Jojo Rabbit where a butterfly flies away to suddenly reveal one of the most devastating deaths in recent cinematic memory, or the part in Thor: Ragnarok where Asgard blows up, followed immediately by an undercutting one-liner. This is where Waititi likes to operate: if something ’s not working, he likes to mix things up, switch things around. And if something is working, he switches things up, mixes things around anyway.

Which is exactly what he vowed to do when he decided to make Thor: Love And Thunder, his second film with Hemsworth as Marvel’s God of Thunder. He knew that people, overwhelmingly, would want a repeat of Ragnarok, a film so deliciously demented that a giant hologram of Jeff Goldblum wouldn’t even make a list of the top ten weirdest things in it.

But he switched it up. “Taika said he didn’t want to make ‘Ragnarok 2’,” says Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios’ main man, producer of Love And Thunder, and the guy who first brought Waititi on board. “He didn’t want to just say, ‘Hey, how much more silly can we be?’”