What’s behind Taika’s fall from sweetheart to hate figure

The hammer of the geeks has fallen upon Thor: Love and Thunder. Marvel’s latest big-screen romp has earned a muscular US$302 million at the global box office on opening weekend and has been well received by critics.

And yet, out in the wilds of the nerdom the reaction has been very different. Hardcore comic book fans appear to loathe the movie’s jokey tone, claiming that at moments it is difficult to tell if Love and Thunder is a superhero movie or a

Mel Brooks-style parody of the genre (a sort of Blazing Spandex).

And the person they blame is not Thor actor Chris Hemsworth or Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige – but the film’s co-writer and director Taika Waititi.

‘‘Taika Waititi,’’ went one typical assessment, ‘‘has lost all of his earnest charm, dry sense of humour and reliability that made his earlier work so compelling and is now just an unfunny rich corporate d...head’’.

‘‘I’ve never seen anyone lose as much goodwill as quickly for a single movie as Taika Waititi,’’ said another. ‘‘He was Twitter’s golden boy a few months [ago]…. now all I’m seeing is hate for him.’’

It is easy to see why Love and Thunder would be so divisive. When Waititi joined the Marvel universe as director of 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok he brought a refreshing zing to the po-faced Norse God Of War. Ragnarok was recognisably a Marvel caper – but one spring-loaded with gags (helped by Jeff Goldblum gurning to the max as a villain).

Love and Thunder takes the wackiness that was a component of Ragnarok and cranks it all the way up. The film’s script is 90% banter between Thor and his sidekicks.

Russell Crowe turns up playing Greek god Zeus as a Monty Python character. There are two comedy goats whose shrieking is inspired by a complicated Taylor Swift meme. The best acting in the movie is by Thor’s axe, Stormbreaker, who fears it is being sidelined when Thor’s hammer, Mjo¨ lnir, makes a return.

The axe gags are undeniably hilarious. And yet you do have to wonder about a film that gives more screen-time to an inanimate object than to Tessa Thompson, playing flying warrior Valkyrie.

There is also a certain queasiness to writer/ director Waititi’s insistence on juxtaposing the never-ending chortling with some of Marvel’s most serious story beats yet.

Let’s start with the villain. The movie’s bad guy Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale, 100% not in on the joke) has kidnapped a group of children and locked them in a cell.

That plot line has landed with a thud in the United States, where people are still reeling from the Uvalde school shooting.

Even darker is the storyline of Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Thor’s old girlfriend has been reborn as a gender-flipped ‘‘Mighty Thor’’ (she now has the hammer) after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. This is a film where guffaws about Thor’s bum sit alongside Portman delivering dialogue about stage four cancer. For many, that comedy cocktail has left a funny aftertaste.

And they have largely directed their ire at Waititi. The charge against him isn’t that he’s a Hollywood airhead in the vein of Michael Bay.

Or that he’s a self-glorifying hack comparable to Zack Snyder. It’s far more serious: fans see him as a sellout.

Before Marvel, Waititi had a long career in quirky independent cinema in New Zealand, beginning with 2007’s Eagle v Shark, starring his then partner Loren Horsley. He was clearly a dyed-in-the-cloth geek too and a friend of Flight of the Conchords musicians Jemaine Clement and Bret Mckenzie.

That outsider sensibility informed his biggest hit before Thor: the 2014 mockumentary What We Do In the Shadows. Co-directed with Clement, it charted the misadventures of a group of vampires living in an inner-city suburb of Wellington.

In addition to directing, Waititi stole the film playing super uptight 379-year-old vampire Viago Von Dorna Schmarten Scheden Heimburg. He had based the character on his mother, he explained.

He had by this point already come to the attention of Hollywood, first with a small part in the calamitous Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie. And he was involved as producer and director in a disastrous attempt to remake Channel 4’s The Inbetweeners for American audiences.

All of these triumphs and failures were ideal preparation for his new life as a Marvel writer and director. And with Thor Ragnarok he was instantly beloved. Waititi clearly adored superheroes but came across as in on the joke too – a mix that landed well with hardcore fans and casual viewers.

It also helped that in his public appearances he affected a sort of dorky modesty. Waititi, who is of mixed Ma¯ ori, Russian Jewish and Irish heritage, has movie star looks. Yet he had a humble, underdog quality. He gave off that hard-to-define vibe of hardcore geekiness.

But in just a few years he has gone from sweetheart of the internet to hate figure.

The first fissures appeared with his Oscargarlanded 2019 magical realist comedy Jojo Rabbit. A childhood fantasy set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany – and with Waititi playing a buffoonish Hitler – the film had divisiveness baked into its DNA. And yet it garnered Waititi an

Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as well as a Best Picture nomination.

He had meanwhile started to look like a proper star, rather than an outsider who had blundered into fame.

His celebrity pals included Matt Damon (who has a cameo in Thor: Love and Thunder) and Reynolds. And after the end of his marriage to producer Chelsea Winstanley in 2018, he started dating pop star Rita Ora. The journey from anorak to A-lister was complete.

There may also be darker reasons for some (though obviously not all) of the hate. Waititi’s films celebrate LGBTQI+ identity. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie is a front-and-centre queer superhero and in the latest Thor it is revealed that Waititi’s character Korg has two dads. This month the director – who also produces and stars in the TV series Our Flag Means Death, a pirate comedy in which pretty much all the shipmates are gay – told Out magazine that ‘‘we’re all queer’’, adding, ‘‘just to varying degrees of where we are on the spectrum, I think. I think, innately, humans have all got some degree of queerness in them.’’

That won’t have gone down well in all corners of fandom. And it may have rung bells in particular in the reactionary hell-pit that is the Star Wars fanbase. And that is because, for his next trick, Waititi is to take the helm of the Jedi franchise with a live-action feature.

This could make his Marvel rollercoaster look like a romp through the daisies. Star Wars fans notoriously hate anything deviating from the blueprint set down by the original Star Wars and by the Empire Strikes Back (many are iffy even about Return of the Jedi).

A truly diverse, jokey Waititi Wars could send them over the edge entirely. And so the director’s journey from geek godhead to nerd hate-figure may have only just begun. – The Telegraph