Week 111: Thor: Ragnarok

At the time, critics were not bowled over by this film; the consensus of reviews at the time seems to be that it was fun but minor and overstuffed. I myself didn't like it because I felt like its chief pleasures were spoiled by the advance marketing; I felt upon watching it for the first time that I'd already seen the whole thing in bits and pieces. I've seen it a number of times since, each time appreciating it more and more, and it feels now like a masterpiece, one of the best things that the MCU ever produced. It's gorgeous, bursting with color and creative inspiration in every inch of the screen, a ridiculous bounty of riches. The soundtrack is also an enormous pleasure (how did I not realize until today that Mark Mothersbaugh composed the music?! is there anything that man cannot make better?), with its throbbing bass and synthetic goofiness. And it's crammed full of great jokes, so many so quickly that they cannot all register on one viewing; I'd list my favorites but I'd be reproducing a third of the screenplay here. This is one brilliant and extremely confident comedy, and what once seemed inessential and too light has now outlasted most other titles. I'm still blown away after all of these viewings. (9/10)

Miscellaneous thoughts:

- Watching Thor fight the dragon at the beginning reminds me of Danny Rand, who I cannot picture making short work of it like Thor does.

- The Dr. Strange scene is great. It really shows the potential of mixing characters within the MCU, since both men essentially play it serious and yet it's crackling with comic energy, one joke after another non-stop. It probably helps that Strange is only in one scene rather than half of the movie; a little goes a long way.

- Miek made me laugh twice this time, by popping out the extensible blades in his armor's sleeves: Once to play along when Korg references rock-paper-scissors, and again to fight when Korg yells "piss off, ghost!" and kicks at Loki's vanishing apparition. Miek doesn't have a clue who Loki is or why he's there or really what's happening at all, but damn it, if Korg senses a fight, he's ready with those wrist blades!

- Speaking of blades, I like the sight gags of Hela summoning increasingly ginormous spikes towards the end of the movie. Hey, if her whole deal is summoning pointy things, and she's getting more powerful, it has a certain goofy logic to it, right? Why not summon one as giant as Avengers Tower?

- The MCU has long been criticized for having a series of boring, one-dimensional villains, and the remedy is usually said to be more psychological complexity. It seems to me that Hela pokes a giant hole in that theory, perhaps with one of her giant spikes: She's plenty satisfying as a villain despite there being only one dimension to her; she wants to rule and/or destroy everything in her path and cannot be defeated, only outsmarted. Nothing more is needed except an overqualified actress having a blast sneering and hamming it up. Hela has to ground the film; she must be a grave threat to counterbalance the silliness on Sakaar, and she must be straightforward enough to keep the very busy story focused on Thor's determination to stop her. I like her because of her simplicity. She suggests to me that the MCU villains aren't lousy because they're underdeveloped but because they're just not well-executed. In his treatment of Hela, Taika Waititi made it look easy, as he does with nearly everything.

- Skyrim players: Did Hela's army of undead pseudo-Nordic warriors look very familiar to you, too?

- In a movie that is stuffed with so many exciting visual details in nearly every scene, the single best-looking sequence might be Valkyrie's memory of fighting Hela, which looks like a living painting and a waking nightmare at once. My least-favorite image in the film would be in the balcony scene, when Hela flips Thor onto his back and holds him by the neck, because that upside-down shot looks so fake and composited together; Thor's head doesn't even look attached to his body.

- Ok, one other unimpressive image in the film is Odin's grassy oceanfront view in Norway. It's just so plain and ordinary in a movie otherwise crammed with creative detail. Was this plainness a consequence of last-minute re-shoots, as in, there was no time or money to make the sequence look better? It does kind of feel like the two Odin scenes don't belong to the rest of the movie, like they were added late in production as a way to streamline a story that was too complicated.

- Does no one on the escaping ship recognize Skurge hiding among them? He literally just announced to them all that they were going to die about five minutes earlier. "Hey, wait a minute. Aren't you Hela's executioner?"

Discussion question: Would the criticism of Asgard's colonial past be in this film is if wasn't directed by Taika Waititi, who was raised with his Māori heritage in the former British colony of New Zealand? I feel like a white Western director wouldn't have seen Hela's origin quite the same way and thought to include those details.

Possible plot hole: At the beginning, Thor says that he has been traveling the Nine Realms, searching in vain for the Infinity Stones. Yet the treasure vault in Asgard has a complete Infinity Gauntlet with all six stones. Hela knows that it's only a fake replica because she was there for the building of Asgard back when Odin was into conquest and showing off his spoils, but Thor didn't know about this stage of Asgard's history. It seems unlikely to me that he would know that the replica gauntlet is fake.

I am aware that some people are bothered by the Grandmaster's electric obedience disk paralyzing Thor with power surges, when he's the God of Thunder and should be immune to it. But it seems to me that part of his arc in the film is learning how to control his lightning powers without Mjolnir, the magic hammer that he previously thought was what made him special. (The first Thor treats him as entirely de-powered on Earth without access to his hammer.) In the gladiator arena, he still stares in wonderment at his sparkly hands and doesn't seem to understand how he channeled the lightning strike on Hulk. Therefore, I see no problem in the obedience disk working on him at this stage in his arc. Does it bother you?