Thor Gets Ragnarok’d Into a Comic Stupor

Marvel Studios’ (second) most dysfunctional franchise goes out on a silly note…

(Warning: Spoilers abound. Yadda, yadda, yadda. You know the drill.)

At the end of Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Marvel Studios probably hoped to have four fully functioning franchises — Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America.

In actuality, it wound up with two and a half of what was kind of a mixed bag. Iron Man and Thor stood tall. Captain America: The First Avenger didn’t suck but felt a little off. The Incredible Hulk was, and still remains, Marvel’s greatest misfire. However, in Phase 1 even the seemingly golden Iron Man laid a not very golden egg with Iron Man 2.

But all this was basically forgotten with what landed at the end of the first phase: The Avengers. Suddenly the near gaffe of Iron Man 2 (despite its huge box office numbers it was definitely a near gaffe) and the dud that was The Incredible Hulk faded into obscurity as we basked in that Avengers glow which showed that the MCU’s sum was definitely greater than its parts.

This was driven home with Phase 2 which saw a better but far from perfect Iron Man 3 but a surprisingly drab and dour Thor: The Dark World. Ironically, as the Iron Man and Thor franchises stumbled, Captain America’s ascended as each of its sequels was better than its predecessor (something you rarely see in sequel films).

Both Iron Man and Captain America have (presumably) concluded their franchise runs…leaving just Thor to wrap things up (never mind The Hulk). It took a while but the third Thor film landed this week in the form of Thor: Ragnarok. It is a magnificent misfire.

Now hold on with those rotten eggs you have aimed my way. Let me explain that.

By calling it a “magnificent misfire” I mean Ragnarok is a magnificent film that misfires. It breathes new life into a franchise that seemed to have boxed itself into a corner but does so at a very steep price that may not sit well with some and does it in a way that is both uneven and unnerving.

There were three fundamental problems with the Thor franchise. One was unexpected — the popularity of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. Unlike Marvel’s other franchises which haven’t carried antagonists along with every successive film (No, I don’t consider Hydra an antagonist per se…I’m talking individual characters rather than organizations), Marvel has kept Loki around and Hiddleston’s continued command of the character ensured that Loki would eat up a significant chunk of screen time. While that’s great for fans of Loki (of which I am one), it did reduce the prominence of one half of Thor’s entourage, The Warriors Three and Lady Sif, with each successive film. By the time of Ragnarok, Sif doesn’t even show up and the Warriors Three are all too easily (and conveniently) slaughtered.

The second problem was other key characters would either be killed off or dropped. Frigga dies in The Dark World. Jane Foster becomes a non-entity by Age of Ultron and was elmiminated entirely from the Thor’s world in Ragnarok as almost an afterthought. The Warriors Three are on the screen for a nanosecond and then needlessly killed off.

While Captain America lost all his companions in the first film (for the most part) and was able to get by just fine, you couldn’t drop Rhodey, Pepper, and, Happy out of Iron Man without ruining the franchise. Iron Man needs them to be grounded properly. In my view Thor still needed his entourage and losing it piece by piece has weakened the franchise.

The third problem was pure story telling. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about…

• In Thor, Odin reveals a deep secret (Loki’s heritage) and a villain from the past threatens to wreak havoc with Asgard.
• In Thor: The Dark World, Odin reveals a deep secret (The Ether) and a villain from the past threatens to wreak havoc with Asgard.
• In Thor: Ragnarok, Odin reveals a deep secret (Thor has a sister) and a villain from the past threatens to wreak havoc with Asgard.

Part of me is genuinely surprised that nobody at Marvel Studios has caught on by now to just how much of a broken record the Thor franchise has become from a storytelling standpoint. Oh sure, they changed up the characters, the methods and means, and the circumstances…but the skeleton has remained stuck in an endless loop.

If you think about it, with Ragnarok, Marvel basically rebooted the franchise...even though this is probably the end of the franchise. It killed Odin, killed the Warriors Three, destroyed Mjolnir, officially ended the Jane Foster romance, and destroyed Asgard. Short of killing Loki that’s as close to starting over with a clean slate as you’re going to see in the MCU. But, while these plot points may have served a purpose, the execution of some of them was a little bungled.

Let’s start with the Jane Foster romance and do it via looking through the prism of another romantic coupling that was also ended off-screen (albeit temporarily). Having to end a multi-movie romance off-screen is bad on so many levels…chief of which is it deprives the viewer of closure. But you can only string the audience along for so long hinting the continuation of something that isn’t going to be continued on screen like Marvel did in Age of Ultron with Pepper Potts and Jane Foster or Stephen Soderbergh did with Tess Ocean and Isabel Lahiri in Ocean’s Thirteen by merely mentioning (or rather excusing the absence of) the missing in passing. In Captain America: Civil War, Marvel was smart enough to turn the “break up” into a plot contrivance that benefits the Stark character’s arc in the film. But with Ragnarok, the break up is treated like a throwaway line: Oh yeah…we’re broke up. There was really no need at this juncture for Marvel to even go there. They could have left that dog sleeping until such point as the subject of romance becomes an issue again for the Thor character…especially when you consider that planet Earth barely factors into this film.

But I’m not as beholden to the Foster romance as I am to the Warriors Three. While I could see the plot benefits of killing some or all of them off, I could also see benefits in keeping them around. This wasn’t an either/or scenario. Ragnarok could have succeeded with them living or with them dying. Obviously I would have preferred the former to the latter because I still believe Thor benefits from their presence but I’m not going to be dogmatic about it.

However I am going to be dogmatic about how they were killed off, particularly Fandrall and Volstagg. They were seen alive on screen for less than five seconds. Both deserved a better death than this throwaway demise that was there to serve one purpose…to shock the viewer. But even there Marvel needlessly undercut the impact by having them appear on screen with no dialogue or purpose except to serve as Hela’s target dummies. Where were they when Thor first arrived back in Asgard? Why weren’t they present during the play scene? Bringing them on earlier would have given their deaths greater impact. The characters’ utilization in Ragnorak is head scratching.

Speaking of head scratching, the Odin sub-plot was never properly dealt with in this film. I’m not talking about killing him off to unleash Hela (though that scene and how it played is an issue I’ll get to shortly). I’m talking about the nature of his absence and of Loki’s deception in Asgard.

We are never adequately explained how this all got pulled off. Marvel, obviously, didn’t want to dawdle on this — it would slow down the plot a bit after all. But in not dawdling, it really stretched the believability factor of it all quite a bit. This is particularly true of the play scene on Asgard with both “Odin” behaving totally un-Odin like (and nobody catching on apparently? Seriously?) and the scene playing out like something from Spartacus that was left on the cutting room floor rather than something one would associate with life on Asgard.

One wonders why Marvel decided to reshoot Odin’s death. If you were paying attention during filming and to the previews that were released for the film, you knew that Odin was actually walking around New York City as a bum according to the leaked photos. You also knew that Odin died in a New York alley because that’s where Hela originally confronted Thor and Loki in the film’s previews.

But Odin’s death and Hela’s arrival were both switched to the “coasts of Norway”. In reality it was not really Norway and some bad CGI was utilized to cover up for the fact that they rotoscoped various shots of Hela and the others from the original NYC set footage and inserted the Norse background. Some of the shots looked fine. But some came off looking very sub-standard compared to the rest of the film’s CGI. And if you’ve been reading me writing about the MCU for the past couple of years you know well by now that I abhor shoddy CGI.

All this stuff…Odin’s death, the end of the Foster romance, Hela’s arrival, etc, etc, etc…happens rapid fire to quickly move from the old and on to the new. I am not against the concept. There’s a reason why the tease at the top calls Thor Marvel’s “(second) most dysfunctional franchise”. It has been wildly uneven and at times outright disappointing. Maybe a change was in order.

But the execution of it all; how to get rid of Odin, how to unleash Hela, how to dispose of the old so that you can move on with the new…could have been done a lot better. It’s almost as if Marvel was so obsessed with breaking the pattern that it was focusing too much on the new pattern at the expense of paying enough attention to how the change would be carried out. Which leads me to the biggest part of the “misfire” in this magnificent misfire.

Comedy can be a tricky thing sometimes. In out and out slapstick comedies you can get away with throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the viewer because just as soon as one joke is over and done with, another one comes along. But when you have to do a balancing act; when you have to straddle between serious and funny, that is a much tougher road to stay on.

In the MCU it can be done, and has been done, very well. Everyone points to Guardians of the Galaxy 1 as the shining example…and rightly so. But even in films like the original Avengers we could see some very funny stuff pop up out of nowhere…stuff that wouldn’t normally be associated with that kind of film like the Galaga bit and Thor’s “he’s adopted” dead-pan take.

Ragnarok’s problem, in a nutshell, is that it mistakenly aimed at aping the former rather than the latter.

Guardians of the Galaxy could get away with that kind of comedy because everyone was a blank slate. There were no preconceived notions to cling to the audience as it went in to the theater. This made it easy to accept the over the top silly aspects of that film precisely because there was nothing previous to compare it to.

This is not the case with Ragnarok. It had two previous Thor films and Thor’s appearances in both Avengers films as well as Loki’s appearance in the first Avengers film to establish characters. The past boxes Marvel in with what it can credibly get away with in terms of alterations. If it diverges too far from the established past the studio risks alienating the fans of those films and those characters. But diverge too far Marvel did. It took Ragnarok deep into the realm of the silly.

That’s the problem with Ragnarok — it is too silly at times. Worse than being too silly, it is too silly in all too obvious ways.

• Valkyrie drunkenly falling off her ship while making a grand entrance. Yeah, like we didn’t see that coming a mile away.
• Thor wimpering at the prospect of Stan Lee giving him a haircut. “Please kind sir”?!?!?! THOR NEVER TALKS LIKE THAT!
• Korg’s bit right at the destruction of Asgard. Another punch line we saw coming a mile away.
• Thor screeching like a scared little girl just before he meets the Grandmaster. Oh please…
• The way the filmmakers ran into the ground the “sun’s going down” bit between Thor and Hulk/Banner. It was funny for ohhhh…about five seconds. That they were still going back to that (now exhausted of humor) routine twenty minutes later was sad.

Comedy works best when it is consistent and in character. When it’s not — when the comedy pulls the character out of character — that is a problem for the film.

Call it the Casino Royale effect. No not the Daniel Craig debut…the David Niven comedy. They took Bond so far out of character and made the comedy so slapstick that even if the production hadn’t been as troubled as it wound up being the film still would have crashed and burned on arrival because they made Bond not-Bond.

Ragnarok doesn’t crash and burn but it’s not as good as it would have been had Marvel toned it down just a tad and reigned in the sillier aspects that they saddled Chris Hemsworth with. Marvel didn’t make Thor not Thor but they yanked him far enough out of character at times that it was needlessly jarring.

Here are two examples to show what I’m talking about.

The first is Thor’s scene in the Quinjet when he’s trying to gain access to the system. He’s fumbling about trying to guess what his login is and finally realizes Tony Stark used “Pointbreak”; a reference Eagle eyed viewers would remember comes from the first Avengers film (“No offense pointbreak, you got a mean swing”). As comedy that scene is pure gold because it’s true to Thor’s character and it’s true to Stark’s character. It works because it fits and its subtle. It resonates precisely because we could see Tony Stark putting the pointbreak login into the system and because we could see Thor thinking that his login would be indicative of his Asgardian status. It totally plays.

The second example is Thor’s attempt to disguise himself and Valkyrie comes along and says, “I can still see your face” and Thor retorts “Not if I do this” and lamely attempts to cover his face. This scene may be funny but it fails to keep Thor in character. It takes him out of character. Nobody seriously believes Thor is this big a dunderhead. The script drags Thor down into something he isn’t because his character has had four films to establish that this is not him. It totally does not play.

Ironically, Jeff Goldblum’s silly take as the Grandmaster was awesome and has been widely heralded precisely because he was a new character. He didn’t have the baggage of four prior MCU appearances Hemsworth had. Goldblum had a blank slate to work with.

Loki didn’t escape the script unscathed either. Of all the turns in that character Hiddleston has made, this was his weakest effort. A lot of this isn’t his fault. The script was very unkind to the character; reducing him to reaction takes. Some of those reaction takes were priceless, if not too predictable. I knew what was coming when Hulk started whipping Thor around like a rag doll ala Loki in the fist Avengers film and Hiddleston didn’t disappoint.

But Loki is an alpha character…he needs to be in alpha scenarios to maximize his value in the film. He’s not the main villain here. He’s hardly a villain at all in fact. The only time I really saw him in character as “classic Loki” was just before Thor zapped him with the “bottlecap of doom”. By the end of the film the character is in a kind of limbo…has he turned a page or is he just biding his time? And yes, we all know he took the Tesseract and will cough it up to Thanos in Infinity War.

Even Mark Ruffalo was forced to take Bruce Banner in decidedly un-Bruce Banner-like directions for the cause of being silly. And what’s with the swearing? Come on Marvel. Swearing is going for cheap laughs. It’s infantile.

I had high high hopes for Cate Blanchett. When you bring someone with that kind of acting pedigree to a film you’re going to get something positive out of it. The only question is how much.

Unfortunately Marvel’s long running streak of unrealized villainy potential reared its ugly head yet again with the paint by numbers character arc for Hela. Blanchett vamps and preens her way through the film and does her best to inject something into a character that was surprisingly poorly defined and given relatively little to do except threaten and kill people. This is Cate freaking Blanchett — two time Academy Award winner — we’re talking about here. When she got attached to the project it was paramount for Marvel to not sleepwalk through defining the character fully as it has so many times in the past. Blanchett’s best scenes are with Hemsworth for it is there that we get some real back and forth dialogue going. The rest of the time it’s her barking and everyone else reacting. Skurge’s primary purpose in Ragnarok is essentially to serve as Hela’s foil — to give her something to interact with and the results are less than spectacular. Again, this is the script’s fault. Since most of Blanchett’s scenes consist of the latter and not the former, we can only dream wistfully about what might have been.

This should have been a gimme for Marvel and they still muffed it. Again. It really concerns me as we inch ever closer to depending on CGI villainy in the form of Thanos. Thank goodness Markus and McFeely are plotting this one with the Russos manning the controls. Don’t screw up Thanos Marvel! Just don’t.

I did begin to breath a little easier about Infinity War when I saw Korg in Ragnarok. My second biggest fear going into Infinity War, after whether or not Marvel was going to make Thanos a fully developed character, was whether Marvel could successfully pull off centering a film around a fully CGI character surrounded by flesh and blood characters. But when I saw Korg I realized the CGI tech was now good enough that this should not be an issue for Thanos.

One might easily come to the conclusion that I disliked Thor: Ragnarok but one would be wrong. I found it so much better than The Dark World and on par with the first Thor (maybe not quite as good). I would be completely devolved and need to turn in my Spud card if I didn’t note Mark Mothersbaugh doing the soundtrack for Ragnarok. It was the perfect marriage to put a surprisingly well done 80's based synthesizer aural assault with the off kilter vibe that one picked up from the world of Sakaar. Excluding the Odin Norway shots, the CGI was first rate. Jeff Goldblum steals every single scene he’s in and he’s in a lot of scenes. If we ever get to see The Grandmaster and The Collector together at some point it would be such a sight.

But this film would have been better had it cut out on doing the silly. It’s one thing to have scenes with a bit of wit attached to them. It’s another thing entirely to be bludgeoned over the head with blunt humor. It worked in Guardians. It didn’t work here. Every time things got silly, the film was weakened. It pulled Thor too far out of character and weakened Loki. Most folks probably won’t care because they’ll just get caught up in the moment and laugh when prodded to. But I know this film could have been better had a little more restraint been applied.