The weak digital effects of ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ are not something isolated, they are the symptom of a larger problem

‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, fourth solo film of the MCU character, you have nothing to fear in terms of performance. We can put all the objections in the world to how Taika Waititi has managed this new installment and if Marvel shows signs of exhaustion, but it is clear that for now, the public responds. 302 million dollars at the box office worldwide, 143 million in the US alone (a tad below high expectations), and the third best weekend of the year (after ‘Doc Strange 2‘ Y ‘Jurassic World: Dominion‘).

However, there are buts to put to the film, and perhaps the one that is being talked about the most is the film’s special effects, somewhat neglected for a production of this magnitude. we already commented that it is not that visual artists are bad, but rather the reflection of an endemic situation in the industry and the ways of producing. Let’s delve a little deeper into this topic.

But… what happens to the effects of ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’? Let’s start with a merely anecdotal detail, but highly significant. A clip of Taika Waititi and Tessa Thompson is circulating online laughing openly of the problems with the digital effects of the film in an interview with ‘Vanity Fair’. They clearly do it without bad intention: we all know that Korg is a character that has no physical presence and no matter how it is noted, but the attitude is not sitting especially well in a production sector that is especially mistreated, can’t unionize to improve their rights and has to abide by very strict deadlines. Now we will get into it.

Korg, however, is not the biggest problem with ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’. The comparison with ‘Thor: Ragnarök‘ and, above all, with the character’s first two films, they denote much less elaborate effects. The digital backgrounds are especially poor and the characters are poorly integrated into them, revealing that they are in front of a screen. It is striking that the highly sophisticated technology which bore fruits as impressive as ‘The Mandalorian‘ is, a few years later, the cause of ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ at times looking like a SyFy movie.

And it is not so much a question of technical failures, but of a much less careful art direction, and that is what generates sequences like the absolutely incredible one of the floating heads of children, or this one that is circulating on social networks as an obvious example of theme:

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A problem that Disney has been dragging for a long time. What we already analyzed a few days ago, one of the keys to the problem is that Marvel is not enough: three movies and five series a year, no matter how much they are produced independently and that obviously the means that are injected into a product for television are not equivalent to those of a film production, have the house saturated. And yes: each product has its own team, but there are common work processes, a single production directive led by Kevin Feige and global budgets at Disney that, without a doubt, affect the individual means of each film.

Back in the days of the first two Thor movies, for example, there were two Marvel movies made a year, and the care with which the special effects section was treated was incomparable to what we see now. Paradoxically, ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ is a movie, on the whole, better than ‘Thor’ or ‘Thor: The Dark World’ (perhaps the worst movie in the entire MCU), but the special effects were then incomparably superior.

And it is not an isolated phenomenon for Waititi’s film. Fans have found buts in movies like ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ and his aesthetically flimsy scenes with the Illuminati, or the CGI of ‘She-Hulk’, a sum of approach error (“inflate” a normal actress with CGI vs. “deflate” a corpulent actor with CGI, as was done with the Steve Rogers of ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’) and the obvious limitations from a television series. All this Phase 4 practically has very debatable movies and series in this aspect, of ‘black widow‘ a ‘Wandavision‘.

What’s more: it’s not even a Marvel phenomenon: Disney has had to deal with very similar complaints after ‘The Mandalorian’, a series conceived under much less pressure, aroused admiration for the sophistication of its use of The Volume. The drop in their quality that has been experienced in series like ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi‘, with lightsaber duels in the open and action sequences marred by clumsy CGI effects and not-so-happy chromas, set off alarm bells.

Complaints from the creators. We never tire of repeating that Marvel is not exactly short of talent. In fact, the best CGI artists work for Disney, but the deadlines and budgets are stifling. In the web The Gamer multiple complaints have been collected in a thread Reddit, where it goes so far as to say that “Marvel has probably the worst VFX production and management methodology in existence”. The consequence is that many VFX artists have asked their employers not to return to work on in-house productions.

On the one hand, the creators talk about working conditions: unreasonable deadlines, an overconfidence that “CGI fixes everything” and the famous “we tweak that in post production”. But there is also a fall in standards: Marvel is, according to these artists, less and less demanding, and if the minimum that was asked before is not reached, now it is enough for them. In his own words: “If you haven’t noticed any drop in CGI quality after ‘Avengers: Endgame‘, that is that they have managed to lower the standard for everyone because this is the new financial standard”

They have spoken on the subject artists with names and surnames like Dhruv Govil, who worked on the effects of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ or ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming‘ and makes very clear the severe stress problems that a team or individual working in this field can face. That is why it is significant, no matter how much you want to clarify, that so many artists agree that Marvel is “the worst company to work for”

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The weak digital effects of ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ are not something isolated, they are the symptom of a larger problem