The following contains spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder, now in theaters.

Thor: Love and Thunder has a lot going on. In trying to balance several narratives, tonal and thematic plates simultaneously, writer/director Taika Waititi's Love and Thunder grows increasingly messy and disjointed the further it gets into its runtime. One of the clearest examples of this is the use of Christian Bale's Gorr the God Butcher in the film, whose motivations go from clear-cut to a jumbled contradiction by Love and Thunder's end.

Since his debut performance in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun in 1987, Bale has remained a ruthlessly committed actor who fully invests himself in every role. In the past, this has often manifested itself as overt physical changes but to focus too much on that aspect of Bale's performances is to sell the actor's internal process short. Bale is a phenomenal performer who goes to great lengths to establish his characters as authentic creations, which enables the diversity of roles he has played. That results in him seeming just as at home in Bruce Wayne's skin as in Patrick Bateman's.

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Gorr the God Butcher from the MCU

But Bale's unparalleled commitment to his characters makes the contradictions of Gorr the God Butcher stand out more. Love and Thunder opens with a prologue detailing Gorr's tragic backstory, in which he and his daughter get left to wander a barren wasteland without food or shelter. Marked with religious tattoos and wearing a token around his neck, Gorr continuously prays to their god, Rapu, throughout their suffering. Ultimately, Gorr's daughter dies, and shortly after, Gorr finds Rapu, an indulgent, uncaring deity that shows no remorse toward Gorr's strife or loss. It leads to Gorr killing Rapu and proclaiming, "All Gods will die."

One cannot get much more straightforward in laying out the motivations for a character. Tragic events occur, and the character's worldview shifts drastically, giving them someone to blame. But if that wasn't enough, Waititi literally punctuates the scene by having Bale articulate Gorr's entire motivation in a single line of dialogue. And for as narratively simple as this is, it's also incredibly thematically compelling.

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The idea of a character getting let down by their hero, abandoned by a being they believed to love them but who ultimately could not have cared less about their survival, is both starkly existential and relevant. Theoretically, an arc like this would allow Waititi to explore concepts of religion in the modern age, examine the false idols and hero-worship within the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and outside of it and present Thor with his most personal conflict yet. And while it feels like there are loose threads kicking around within Love and Thunder that would support such explorations, the final cut appears to be steadfastly uninterested in exploring any of this in a meaningful way. That extends to the point that Thor never even remotely grapples with the idea that Gods are bad, and Gorr, for all his talk, isn't allowed to commit to the idea.

Gorr's driving motivation is that the Gods do not help those in need, making them cruel creatures who deserve to die. In his rampage in-between the prologue and the actual events of the rest of the film (all of which happens offscreen), he has apparently been keeping true to these motivations, killing several dozen Gods. So when he shows up to New Asgard (assumedly to kill Thor) and instead settles for kidnapping all the children of New Asgard, it's bizarre. Again, Gorr's whole drive here is to punish Gods and, if anything, save children (like his daughter) from suffering.

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Thor fighting Gorr with Zeus' thunderbolt in Thor: Love and Thunder movie

But then things get even muddier because it turns out that Gorr's plan involves him needing to get his hands on Stormbreaker. Thus, he kidnapped the children of New Asgard to lure Thor out to the Shadow Realm, where he is at his "most powerful," so he can take Stormbreaker. But that entire line of thinking depends solely on Thor doing the one thing Gorr believes Gods won't do: coming to save their followers.

If the children were all Asgardians, an argument could get made that they are essentially young Gods-in-the-making and that that incites a rage that eclipses Gorr's rational judgment (even though that would also tremendously short Gorr as a character). But the children are distinctly not all Asgardian. Love and Thunder goes out of its way several times to show that New Asgard has become a haven for Earth-bound creatures of all shapes and sizes, a veritable melting pot of interstellar immigrants.

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If this aspect of Gorr's plan wasn't contradictory enough, he wants Stormbreaker because it is the key to attaining an audience with Eternity. It never gets stated if Eternity is a literal god, but it's clear thematically speaking that, yes, this is a being of immense power capable of granting wishes. So, for all intents and purposes regarding any meaning of the story, Eternity is a god. That means that Gorr's entire plan to kill the Gods because they never helped him is to wait for one god to come and help his hostages so that he can seek the help of another god.

This whole journey for Gorr feels very tacked on. Waititi has practically admitted that everything with Eternity got added very late in the game, and it's incredibly evident in Gorr's arc. Bale does the best he can, but amid reshoots and drastic story overhauls, Gorr's actions wind up feeling divorced from his every motivation. Rather than exploring the rich depths of character and theme that Bale's performance and the central motivation invite, Love and Thunder turns it all into just another MacGuffin chase and allows Bale's attuned work to get devoured by narrative machinations.

To see Gorr's contradictory actions, Thor: Love and Thunder is now in theaters.