Thor: Ragnarok

REWRITTEN and UPDATED (at the end)!

In my ongoing efforts to understand why so many people (including certain youngest daughters who shall remain nameless) enjoy the Marvel films so much, I decided I’d better give Ragnarok a peak. This resulted in four very different responses at various points in the film:

1. My first response, after about ten minutes, was to walk out and not subject myself to any more torture. Not the torture on screen, which was relatively minimal, but the torture of watching Thor be so silly while chained up in front of the super-powerful giant baddie with horns and glowing eyes (Surtur?). Wasn't working for me at all.
2. Just in the nick of time (i.e. just as I was about to get up and leave), I did a double-take: Was that Matt Damon, ever so well disguised? It WAS! And Sam Neill is there too. Well, that was fun. Maybe I should stick around and see who else turns up. It didn’t take long after that to see that the big baddie of Ragnarok (Hela, Thor’s older sister and the Goddess of Death) was played by Cate Blanchett. Blanchett does baddie very well, so she was fun to watch. And of course there are other interesting actors in Ragnarok, like Tom Hiddleston as Loki (Thor’s brother and former baddie), Benedict Cumberbatch in a cameo as Dr. Strange, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner (Hulk), Idris Elba, Karl Urban, Anthony Hopkins, and the ever-quirky Jeff Goldblum as yet another baddie. The primary 'goodies' here are Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Tessa Thompson as a Valkyrie. Hemsworth is okay, but Thompson is the show-stealer, along with Korg (voiced by the director, Taika Waititi), who never fails to amuse. In other words, by far the best thing about Thor: Ragnarok is the acting, which is mostly fun to watch throughout.
3. Insofar as the above actors were given funny, often droll, lines, I frequently enjoyed the writing in the film, so much so that by mid-way through (or maybe even two-thirds), I was glad I had decided to watch Ragnarok after all.
4. Then came the realization, which grew stronger with every one of the film’s last forty minutes, that Ragnarok had no plot worthy of the word and that it was, after all, nothing more than an excuse for more endless PG violence (evil sister comes back to take over Asgard only to be defeated by Thor and company; That’s it? Seriously???). In other words, by far the worst thing about Thor: Ragnarok is that there is no story to even begin to excuse the endless violence (see revised opinion below).

By the end of the film, I was just shaking my head. It didn’t help that the otherwise gorgeous cinematography was mostly ruined by being made for 3D (I watched the 2D). The score had its moments. Bottom line: Watching the fun the actors were having allowed Thor: Ragnarok to just cross the line into watchability: ***. My mug is up. [At this point, my original review stated that the stuff inside the mug was very weak and unimaginative, but I am taking that back, thanks to Andrew Buhr in Edmonton, who sent me the following link: http://endlessyarning.com/2017/11/12/thor-ragnarok-indigenous-film/ . While I had picked up on how the humour in Ragnarok often had a justice theme, I had missed many of the ways this film could be viewed through an Indigenous lens (read the Indigenous review). I stand corrected and humbled, though my complaints about the overall plot and the endless violence remain in effect. Given that the story does, however, possess deeper layers worthy of discussion, I am upgrading my rating to a solid ***. My mug is up without qualification.]