Female characters in superhero movies don’t always get the best treatment. From getting unceremoniously killed for another character's development, to existing only to be a love interest, to barely characterized femme fatales - we’ve seen it all. But things seem to be on a better track recently. Female heroes are not only getting their own films like Birds of Prey or Black Widow, but they’re also getting better treatment in male-lead films. Thor: Ragnarok found two incredibly interesting characters in both Valkyrie (Tessa Thomspon) and Hela (Cate Blanchett), so, when Thor: Love and Thunder was announced, hopes were high not just for the film itself but for the return of its female characters. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) being brought back held incredible potential after we’d seen how the Revengers had each gotten their own satisfying arcs in Ragnarok. Unfortunately, the end result was a blunder. The badass ladies we’d waited to see had their own stories pushed to the wayside and the film feels emptier for it.
The ensemble of Thor: Ragnarok was phenomenal. Each character had a distinct arc and those arcs culminated in satisfying ways during the finale. The same cannot be said for Love and Thunder. Though our main hero squad is composed of four people once again, the only one who really has an arc in the film is Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who comes to grips with the idea that loving something means being okay with losing it. But Valkyrie, Jane, and Korg (Taika Waititi) are all mostly left without direction. Korg was always more of a comic relief character but Jane and Val are staples of the franchise now with lots of fans who were eagerly awaiting both their returns. What adventures would they go on? What new struggles would they face? How would they change in the face of this? We don’t really get to find out, and it’s extremely disappointing.
Valkyrie was a fan favorite after Thor: Ragnarok. Her transformation from jaded drunkard only trying to preserve her own life into a warrior of Asgard once again was wonderful to see and her reign as the King of New Asgard was an exciting premise on the horizon. When we catch up with Val in Love and Thunder, it’s clear this job is not all it's cracked up to be. New Asgard has become a tourist hub, and she spends most of her time doing menial work like advertisements and posing for diplomatic appearances. It’s clear this isn’t what she expected or what she wanted.
It seemed like the film was setting up a plot where her return to a life of adventure helps her realize that being King isn’t what she wants or even helps her rediscover her passion for the role outside the minutiae of day-to-day tasks. But, instead, she just tags along most of the time. She makes quips, talks to Korg about her dead lover, and gets to wield Zeus's thunderbolt, yet it feels hollow. She has no trajectory, no arc and by the final battle, she gets left behind for her injuries and barely appears again. It’s frustrating to see a character who felt so integral to the last film be turned into an auxiliary part of this one. The bones of an arc for her are there in her struggles with being King, but the story seems completely uninterested in her outside of a few cheeky lines and cool fights.
Jane makes her triumphant return to the screen after years of absence and brings Mighty Thor to life. We spend some time with her by herself at the start of the film as she deals with her battle against cancer and desperately tries to find a way to cure herself. Like Val, she’s got an arc set up in that. One could easily imagine a version of Love and Thunder where Jane uses her new access to both magic and science in order to come up with a new way to save her life. Or, if the film wanted to stick with her dying in the end, they could’ve made her arc one about accepting that not everything can be fixed with science or magic no matter how much you try.
But, in the end, her arc tapers off and she dies to save the day and complete Thor’s arc of learning to love in spite of loss. It’s particularly frustrating with Jane because it's easy to imagine what little changes could have been made to give her a complete arc. One more scene of her at the hospital before the climactic battle that actually showed her choosing to go join Thor despite the consequences could’ve shown her resignation to dying with a purpose and dying as Mighty Thor rather than letting herself fade out over time. It wouldn't have been perfect, but even a small scene like that would’ve made it feel like she had more impact on the narrative.
In the end, Jane, like Valkyrie, remains static in her character throughout the film. Sure she gets new powers, but we never see her struggle with them or her new role outside the physical toll it takes on her. She’s set up like she’s the other main character of Thor: Love and Thunder, yet she never reaches that potential because her arc and suffering is all in service to getting Thor to where he needs to be.
Even Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander), who’s barely in the film, receives this lackluster treatment. She’s been absent from the films for years, so you expect it to be a lovely reunion and maybe even have her get added to the adventure party, but, instead, she disappears due to her injury only to pop up briefly at the end of the film. Sif’s character has been miraculously preserved where the Warriors Three were comedically cut down but nothing comes of it. With her reappearance, one would think she’d become a sort of Chekhov’s Asgardian, freshly recovered and ready to help with the dramatic final confrontation when the heroes need her most but, like her counterparts in the main cast, she seems to be there more as an accessory to the story than an actual part of it.
We see these cool, powerful women we’ve known for multiple films, but they’re given nothing to do. They fight, they get injured, and they get written out until they’re deemed relevant again. It’s almost baffling to see that only two characters (both men - Thor and Gorr) in this film have fulfilling arcs when Ragnarok managed to give satisfying conclusions even to its secondary and tertiary characters. It’s disappointing that the film brought all these characters back but didn’t seem to know what it wanted to do with them. Valkyrie, Jane, and even Sif are all staples of the Thor franchise at this point and to have them included in such a massive film is wonderful, but their purpose in the film feels diminished While they get their badass moments and fun scenes, it all feels empty when you realize it adds up to a net-zero in terms of impact on their characters. The films may be named after Thor, but they aren’t just his films alone, his supporting cast not only helps to bring him to life but gives the story overall more dimension. Love and Thunder fails to capitalize on the cast of characters it has to work with, instead leaving them to simply trail along with little thought given to their own arcs and motivations.