Thor: Ragnarok

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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 silly with the super-powerful giant baddie (Surtur?) with horns and glowing eyes. Just was not working for me at all (keep in mind how much I hate Suicide Squad).
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 was Hela, Thor’s older sister and the Goddess of Death, played by Cate Blanchett. Blanchett does a really good baddie, 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 always-quirky Jeff Goldblum as another baddie. The primary goodies here are Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Tessa Thompson as a Valkyrie. Hemsworth is okay, but Thompson was the show-stealer (along with Korg, voiced by the director, Taika Waititi). In other words, by far the best thing about Thor: Ragnarok is the acting, which is mostly fun to watch throughout.
3. Insofar as some of the above actors were given some funny, often droll, lines, I frequently enjoyed the writing in the film, 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.

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, but the stuff inside is very weak and unimaginative.