Movie Review: "Thor: Ragnarok"Hey folks, it’s been a while since you heard from me, but today, I want to talk to you about this new little movie called "Thor: Ragnarok"! Directed by Taika Waititi and starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston & Cate Blanchett, this is the third Thor movie from the folks at Marvel Studios.
Now I used to really hate Thor. I’ve dabbled in some of the Thor comics from the last 50 years, and I’ve liked some of what I read, but some of it just wasn’t very good. And it seems to me that the bad vastly outweighs the good, when it comes to Thor comics. And on the film side of things, the first movie left me very cold (it wasn’t necessarily a bad movie, but it was not what I wanted from a Thor movie. I wanted more of a fantasy epic like Lord of the Rings, not hilarious mug breaking in the present day). And the second movie, while I like it a little more now than I did when it first came out, is still one of the worst movies out of the 200 Marvel Studios things. In fact, when it first came out, that was the movie that convinced me I needed to give up on the Marvel Studios stuff altogether. I later went back and watched all the movies I missed, which I think was a smart decision, because all of the later movies have been much better than Thor the Dark World. Where was I? Oh, yes. I’ve never been a big fan of Thor. But if most Thor stories were like this movie, then I might just be ready to convert to Thorology. Yeah, this movie is good. Really good. I remember about 2 years ago, our very own Kazekun told me that the next Thor movie would be called Ragnarok, which was probably the only thing anybody could have said to get me excited for another Thor movie after the last two outings. But then he told me that it would be a buddy space adventure with Hulk guest-starring in a prominent role. Oh. I like Hulk, and am probably the only person on the planet disappointed that we still haven’t had a followup solo Hulk film with the Leader as a bad guy. And I guess there’s some kind of rights issue where Marvel Studios can only do a Hulk solo movie with the blessing of Universal Studios, which I guess they don’t have, since it’s been 9 years since we got a solo Hulk movie. SOOOOOO I guess the only way we can get Hulk is whenever they do an Avengers movie, or if they shoehorn him into other solo movies, like they did here. But my love for Hulk extends to me wanting to see him in another solo movie, not see him get pushed into other properties so we don’t forget that he exists. I wasn’t feeling the idea of pushing the franchise into a comedic space team-up story. When I think Ragnarok, I think a tragic bloody epic where everybody dies. I want to say “Like _______ but in space” but I can’t even think of anything that has even done anything like what I would want my ideal Ragnarok movie to do, which is why I was pumped for a cinematic interpretation of Ragnarok, for 4 seconds until I found out it would not be what I wanted it to be. In a way, now that I think about it, this movie is kinda sorta similar to the first Thor movie. The first movie was all about setting up Thor in the present day so he could go straight into the Avengers. And that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a big epic sword and sorcery movie set in Asgard. Basically the first 15 minutes of the movie, stretched out into an entire feature film. So even though the first movie isn’t bad, I didn’t enjoy it like many other people did, because it wasn’t what I wanted. I guess I sorta had that here, because this movie didn’t give me the Ragnarok that I would want to see some day. But I did enjoy this movie. Maybe I’ve matured since those halcyon days of 2010, and I’m ready to accept a movie on its own terms, instead of the terms I want it to be on. Or maybe this movie is just that good, and even though it isn’t what I wanted when I first heard the “r” word, it still impressed me. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. 
Now I should say there’s some things about this movie I didn’t like, and I’ll go ahead and get them out of the way now. There is a cameo by Doctor Strange that I feel is extremely unnecessary and is only here to remind us that this movie is part of a larger tapestry. This scene was teased at the end of the very lackluster Doctor Strange solo movie last year, and I didn’t like it then either. (Side rant: I really wish these end credits scenes would be extra scenes pertinent to the movie they are attached to, and not condensed scenes that will later show up in another movie. We’ve seen this a couple of times already, and I don’t think I’ll ever like it. If you don’t have a teaser scene, then don’t do one. I know it’s expected of you at this point, but this business of taking a scene from a movie that won’t even come out for a full year is bogus.) I get the reason they think they needed to put the Doctor in this movie, but what he accomplishes could have just as easily been accomplished by Thor and Loki doing 15 seconds of detective work. Now maybe I’ll feel differently about this in 5 movies when Thor and Doctor Strange team up in some huge way that effects the movie-verse. But right now, I’m not feeling it. We get the introduction of the Executioner in this movie, which I guess excited some people. I’m not one of those people. I guess they could have made me happy to see him if he had just done something. But throughout the entire movie, it felt like they only put him here because they wouldn’t have another chance to introduce him (unless they break their pattern and give one of the solo heroes a fourth solo movie, which they don’t seem ready to do just yet). In the entire movie, I didn’t have a great grasp on his character, and I don’t know if the people making the movie had a great grasp either. There is also a weird sense of trying to distance this movie from the other Thor movies, while also holding on to the “shared universe” thing that these movies tend to do. We’ve known pretty much since Thor the Dark World came out that Natalie Portman really didn’t enjoy working on these movies, so we all pretty much knew she wouldn’t be coming back. So this movie throws in a blink and you miss it mention about how Jane dumped Thor. Now I’m going to go ahead and say Thor hasn’t been the best boyfriend, so he probably had it coming. But, man, they have had 4 years to figure out how they would write her out of this movie, and this explanation feels so lazy. Not only is Jane missing, but her comical sidekicks are also absent. I’m okay with this, since I had just about had enough of their hijinks in the previous two movies. But they’re not even mentioned. It would be like if Return of the Jedi was just Luke in some distant corner of the galaxy doing his own thing, with no references to Han being frozen in carbonite, the rebellion, Darth Vader or any of the elements that were established in the previous two movies. This one isn’t quite that severe, but it does feel oddly out of place, even though this is my favorite of the trilogy. (Hey, speaking of those characters, remember in Age of Ultron when Scarlet Witch gave Thor a vision and we were all thinking it would tie in with this movie? Well I don’t think this movie actually follows up on anything from that vision, so if you were excited about that, reign it in a little bit.) Speaking of characters who are missing, if you are going to get rid of all of Thor’s earth-buddies that’ve shown up in the previous films, then a good way to make this film not seem so disjointed from the previous two Thor entries would be to move the focus to Thor’s other supporting characters who live in Asgard, right? Well, no. The supporting characters we’ve seen are either glorified cameos with barely 4 lines of dialogue shared among all of them, or they’re completely absent from this film altogether. Apparently Jaimie Alexander, who played Lady Sif in earlier films, was asked to come back, but it was too late notice for her, and it conflicted with her filming schedule in the TV series Blindspot. I get that, but this movie doesn’t even bother explaining where she was. I’m not exactly a fan of the Warrior’s Three or Lady Sif, but again, it makes this movie feel almost sorta rebooty because those guys are so completely lacking in this one, where they at least had a little bit to do in the earlier installments. There’s also a thing early in the movie that was shown in the first trailer, so I feel okay talking about it here. But if I haven’t already spoiled enough so far, turn back now, for here there be dragons. Hela, the villain of the piece, catches Thor’s hammer, which should be impossible. We’ve seen in these movies that only Thor can lift or carry the hammer. Even Captain America, a pretty noble spirit himself, could only just barely budge it, but that was it. So why is Hela able to not only catch the hammer in mid-throw, but destroy it? We get some nonsense from Odin that the hammer was never the source of Thor’s power, but it was meant to control his power. Okay, but that still doesn’t explain how Hela is able to bypass the whole “only he who is worthy” stuff that’s been pretty heavily entrenched in these movies so far. So you may have just read all of that and said “Are you SURE you liked this movie?” And yes, I really did. For most of my adult life, I have wanted to see a movie that incorporates the space adventureness of Star Wars with the epic fantasy scope of Lord of the Rings. I think that could be my favorite thing ever and it would extend my lifespan at least 2 centuries. And while this movie may lean too far in the Star Wars direction for hard core fans of the Norse Mythology stuff, I liked it. The first movie was mostly set on Earth, the second movie had quite a bit more Asgard, so I didn’t mind that this one got to show us more of the space stuff, and even in a different way than what we’ve seen in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I thought that was cool. 
I also liked the Planet Hulk-inspired middle section of the movie. Pretty much since the first Avengers movie came out, it seems like people have been saying they wanted to see a Planet Hulk film adaptation. And I’ve been the naysayer on that since day one. Not because of any ill will I have toward that comic, though. I actually like Planet Hulk. I didn’t think it would make any sense for the Avengers to send Hulk into space after they became friends with him. But this movie and Age of Ultron bypassed that by having it be more Hulk’s decision rather than him being exiled by his friends. So that’s cool. But the other big reason I didn’t think we’d ever see Planet Hulk was the very expensive CG stuff that would be required. The comic story has almost no Doctor Banner in it, which you would really need in a film, so you’re not spending a bazillion dollars having Hulk be on screen the whole time. But this movie bypasses that obstacle by only having the Planet Hulk stuff take up about one third of this movie. And they change the Planet Hulk thing where he never reverts to Banner, which is also good, because I’ve come to like Mark Ruffalo as Banner. I also like that this movie, much like the Dark World, is able to consistently portray Loki as being self-serving and antagonistic, while also not spinning wheels on stuff we’ve seen with him before. The X-Men movies are a good example of what not to do with a villain. Magneto is one of my favorite bad guys because of his complexity, but the movies are just rinsing and repeating with the same cycle. I do like that these movies are trying something different with Loki, while not feeling like a different character. Some people may not be up for the comedic stuff this movie throws at us, but I liked it. Admittedly, the people in my theater made me wish that Surtur was real and would flood the planet with lava, because they were laughing at stuff that either wasn’t funny at all (a large space ship spans the screen, cue laughter from the rassum frassums in the theater with me) or was kinda funny, but not worthy of an out loud laugh. For every time I laughed, I poo you not, there were another 29 times where everyone in the theater was laughing. That may be a complaint about the people I was watching the movie with, but let it serve as a cautionary tale for you. If you aren’t interested in a laugh a minute Thor flick, you may want to wait til this one comes out on home-release, because watching it with people who will laugh at literally anything might make you hate this movie, when it really isn’t the movie’s fault. And I will say that when I was laughing, I was laughing hard. Moments like the Devil’s anus, or Thor’s story about Loki turning into a snake are never going to not make me laugh. And there’s more, like Executioner talking about Texas, or Loki’s reaction to how Doctor Strange deals with him, or his reaction to finding what happened to Odin. I was apprehensive about a comedy Thor movie when all I really wanted was a bloodbath of Asgardians meeting their prophesied doom, but this movie convinced me that what it was selling was what I wanted to buy. As someone who still is only a casual Thor fan, but used to be much more repulsed by all things Thor, I liked this movie quite a bit, and I think you might just like it too! In the meantime, keep it trashy, muties!
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