Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Avatar: The Way of Water

Picking up over a decade after the events of Avatar, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) are living peacefully on Pandora with their four children, two boys and two girls, one of whom is the adopted offspring of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) from the first film. The same business conglomerate who tried to relieve the planet of its unobtainium and destroyed a sacred tree home of Neytiri’s family, has brought the minds of the marines who carried out their devastating mission, but were killed in action, and plugged them into Avatars to get past the native defense of the first film.

This is a gargantuan adventure set on a mystical world where fantasy allows for the creatives to embrace their imaginations and the details put into the film are great. That should be expected after a 13-year development cycle. The performances were about on part for Cameron’s films, good but not great. Cameron’s direction is familiar and a lot of the camera movement choices seemed unnecessarily grand with few small moments sprinkled in to give the film depth. The 3D was a waste of time as it only felt compelling in a few scenes and was otherwise forgettable. 4K, on the other hand, is a scourge on cinema. It’s excessively smooth features make many of the sweeping action scenes stomach-churning and those scenes then also look like they were filmed for a daytime serial, overly realistic.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

The multiverse is a strange universe, one that’s been best visualized in animated movies where the restrictions of the physical realm are removed. Yet, director Sam Raimi saw a challenge and rose to it in bringing Doctor Strange into it with a wild and spectacular extravaganza that’s visually amazing even if it’s structurally formulaic. After the events of the original film, Strange entered the Infinity War briefly before being waylaid by the Snap. He also got a terrific What If…? series. While Wong has appeared briefly in other films in the MCU since then, Strange has been oddly absent, but returns here in multiple guises across multiple universes as he tries to stop Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen) from taking control of the Darkhold and potentially destroying the Multiverse.

The characterizations here are familiar, having been explored in other sources. The attempt to turn Wanda into the villain the Scarlet Witch is hamfisted and predictable with the same platitudinous exhortations one would expect when trying to calm her down. Olsen does fine thanks to the complex character, but the story just isn’t strong enough to carry the day leaving the dazzling special effects to save the day. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez embodies American Chavez, a Multiverse-walking teenager thrust into a complex series of events all happening as a result of her inability to control her powers. Gomez does fine in the role, but isn’t given the kind of room to grow that Iman Vellani gets in her own streaming series Ms. Marvel. The visual effects outstanding and mark a significant advancement in the form, showcasing the brilliance of myriad permutations on screen at one time, an array of effects that are crisp and focused without overbearing the action that’s taking place.

Thor: Love and Thunder

If there’s a better match for the Thor films than Taika Waititi, it’s not obvious what that would be Waititi understands how to blend absurdist humor with great skill, making ludicrous situations such as a pair of screaming goats, a pompous Zeus (Russell Crowe), and other even more bizarre situations and events shine. His inventiveness doesn’t quite overcome the weaknesses of the screenplay, namely overly familiar tropes and philosophical ramblings that never quite materialize into something compelling or cohesive.

That’s not to say they aren’t clever, everything Waititi does is clever, it’s just formulated to fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe without the kind of room needed to grow into something more exciting as his previous film, Thor: Ragnarok was able to do being removed from most of the other existing storylines and not needing to advance much in the way of MCU phasing. Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), and Natalie Portman (Jane Foster) give their all to the abjectly weird premise that surrounds them while Christian Bale presents the film’s villain in an overly serious, darkly unhumorous way, which makes the events taking place in the film feel frivolous.

Therein lies Thor: Love and Thunder‘s biggest issue, its inability to balance tone and spectacle. There are some great moments in the film, especially any scene with the goats, but when there’s a grandiose soliloquy by Zeus, the weight of the peril facing the children of new Asgard, whom the heroes are supposed to be rescuing, feels out of place. It’s like they tried to blend the super-seriousness of Thor: Dark World into the lighter tone of Thor: Ragnarok, which only made it feel like it was diminishing down to the level of Dark World rather than successfully building on Ragnarok.