We stay in the Marvel universe with Thor: Ragnarok. This movie was nearly universally praised, not just as the best of the Thor movies (which, let’s face it, wasn’t much of a challenge), but also as a great movie in general. Of course, if I agreed, I wouldn’t be writing this review. Warning: SPOILERS.
I like What We Do in The Shadows, both the movie and the TV series, and also JoJo Rabbit, but Taika Waititi would never be my first choice to direct what should be a tragedy. That he turns everything into comedy is one of the problems with this movie. The other is that most of it isn’t even set on Asgard. For those of you who don’t know, the Ragnarök is the end of the world in Northern mythology. It’s basically the Viking apocalypse. Loki and his allies attack the other gods, and everyone dies in the war. It’s all very tragic and bloody. Of course, Marvel comics are different than the original myths, but it’s still about the destruction of Asgard and the Asgardians. Since the movies haven’t shown us that many Asgardians, you’d think that Thor: Ragnarok would spend most of its running time among them, so that when the end begins, viewers are invested in more characters than just Thor, Loki, Sif, Heimdall, and the Warrior Three – you’d be wrong.
The movie doesn’t waste time in revealing Loki’s deception and as soon as it does, the two brothers leave to go find their father. The Doctor Strange cameo was… I don’t know, it felt off somehow. The constant moving between rooms was so unnecessary and excessive. And this is a complaint that could apply to most of this movie. Thor: Ragnarok suffers from an excess of kinetic energy that keeps much of it irritatingly frantic. Odin dies as he lived: being a shit father. He reveals the existence of a surprise evil sister, Hela. Hela is a great villain, she really is, and she deserved a much better movie. She’s powerful enough to smash Thor’s hammer and she takes her power from Asgard. This means that as long as there is an Asgard, Hela will never be defeated. That sounds promising and ominous and makes for a good twist when Thor finds out that the key to defeat Hela is to let the Ragnarök happen. But back to that scene where Hela destroys her kid brother’s magical hammer. It’s awesome and followed by Thor and Loki being thrown into outer space. Hela goes to Asgard, orders people to submit to her, kills those who don’t, including the always underdeveloped Warrior Three, and redecorates the palace by crashing the painted ceiling that shows Odin victorious alone, and revealing the one underneath showing their bloody joint victories. So, at no point in his very long life did it occur to Odin that it’d be better to destroy that particularly damning piece of evidence? Sigh… I expected better from the God of Wisdom.
With Hela in Asgard, and Thor and Loki lost in space, this means the movie will be split between her takeover and their attempts to return home so they can defeat her and save Asgard. This wouldn’t be a problem if the Thor and Loki storyline weren’t so completely removed from the main plot and took so long. Of course, I’m presuming that the Ragnarök is the main plot, but I could be wrong. After all, it’s just a title, right?
God, that stupid planet! That stupid, ridiculously colourful planet! It might’ve been funny in another movie, but here it’s just annoying how much time we’re wasting on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot. Look, I get that Jeff Goldblum is really cool and that everyone loves him, but the Grandmaster, the arena, and the gladiator revolt were completely superfluous. The only character that matters for the Ragnarök plot that Thor and Loki meet there is Valkyrie. She fought Hela along with the other Valkyries, but after her lover died in the fight, she left Asgard and became a drunk slave trader. Like everything and everyone in this movie, Valkyrie being a drunk is treated as a joke. She’s not just a social drinker, she’s an actual drunk who drinks to forget her past. But hey, she fell off her spaceship cos she’s drunk and that’s funny, right? As for the Hulk, there was no need for him to show up here. If Marvel wants the Hulk’s screentime to not be limited to the Avengers movies, they should just give him his own movie. Look, I know this Hulk is really popular, and I like him when he’s interacting with the other Avengers and helping to save the world, but at the same time, I don’t really care much about the character, so I really hated to see Thor: Ragnarok being described as a Thor/Hulk road trip somewhere. Oh, and I didn’t like the new talking Hulk either. Seriously, fuck off, you don’t belong in this movie!
Meanwhile, back in Asgard, Hela has resurrected her dead army, including the giant wolf Fenrir, and is killing people left and right, while Heimdall leads survivors to safety. You know, the kind of thing Thor and Loki should’ve been doing. And of course, Sif is nowhere to be seen because even though she was Thor’s love interest in the comics, even had her own comic book series for a while, and was also his wife in Northern mythology, the movies keep side-lining her. I don’t care if some of it is due to scheduling conflicts, they could’ve just recast the part, FFS! It’s not as if the actress was so amazing in the role that no one could ever replace her. By the way, the handling of Sif is one of the reasons I always roll my eyes at the people bashing the Fox X-Men movies and their unwavering conviction that Marvel will do the comics justice. I’m not saying that the Fox’s version of the X-Men doesn’t have many flaws, I just don’t think Marvel would be as faithful to the comics as those people believe. (Because, let’s face it, that’s what “doing the comics justice” means) It’s not just Sif, there’s the Mandarin, too. He’s the main Iron Man antagonist but in the MCU they’ve never even met. Surely there was a way to have them clash without it coming across as racist. The Thor movies themselves changed a lot from their source material. Black Widow’s backstory was changed, too, and the movies did away with her connection to the Winter Soldier. Then there’s Sharon Carter, who keeps getting sidelined in favour of her dead aunt Peggy and recently got turned into a villain. When Marvel finally tackles the X-Men, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made as many changes as Fox did (which the fans will defend because it’s Marvel and Kevin Feige can do no wrong). The only good thing about it is that the female characters will probably be better written. Probably.
Now, back to Thor: Ragnarok, which, well, there really isn’t much more to say. Thor, Loki, Valkyrie, and Bruce Banner/Hulk return to Asgard in the Grandmaster’s stolen spaceship to face Hela. Thinking he’ll automatically turn into the Hulk, Banner jumps out of the ship to fight Hela’s zombie army, only to “hilariously” hit the ground in his present form and presumably break every bone in his body. After we see him go splat and stay splat for a while, he finally becomes the Hulk to fight Fenrir. Valkyrie’s backstory with Hela never comes into play. Some guy whose name I won’t bother looking up and who spent most of the movie serving Hela switches sides in the very end, just in time for a quick redemption. Thor is the one who loses an eye and gains knowledge, well, at least the knowledge of how to defeat Hela. With Loki’s help, he summons Surtur, the fire demon, and as the survivors fly away in the spaceship, Hela dies along with Asgard. It’s basically your typical Marvel CGI heavy finale. Since we barely know any Asgardians, the movie doesn’t have the emotional impact it should have. It’s all just fake buildings being fake destroyed and nothing more. Also, since I watched this after Infinity War, I already knew that most of those survivors will run into Thanos, which really took away from what should’ve been a triumphant escape.
I’m not an idiot. I know this is based on the comics and not on the real myths, so I didn’t expect anyone to show up in a ship made of dead people’s fingernails. However, since the movie is called Thor: Ragnarok and deals with the destruction of Asgard, I expected it to not only spend more time there, but to also have a lot less humour. It’s like no matter how dramatic a situation is supposed to be, there’s always a joke waiting around the corner to ruin the moment. Movies can be both dramatic and funny, but Thor: Ragnarok overdoes the funny part, which isn’t even always as funny as it’s meant to be. This one definitely fulfilled my expectations, in that I expected it to be crap and it was. Except Hela, of course.
By Danforth