Thor: Ragnarok

In which Thor walks like an Egyptian.

+: funny, fast-paced, character-driven, good action

-: humour sometimes a little too obvious, Asgard scenes sometimes a drag

You can often spot a studio’s reaction to a film not just by how quickly they order a sequel, but how long they give it. Warner Brothers offered Christopher Nolan 4 years to follow up The Dark Knight, knowing he’d need the time to craft anything that’d have even a tenth of the impact.

Marvel Studios decided to let the standalone Thor films sit for the same amount of time, for different reasons. The Dark World hadn’t failed, exactly, but Thor, between his first and second films, had been thoroughly overtaken by Captain America as a box-office asset, and then beaten by Doctor Strange. A bad third film stood to place Thor, second only to Iron Man during Phase One, behind Ant-Man. Something very different needed to be done.

Sakaar, a demented cross between Idiocracy, Power Rangers and The Crystal Maze, represents this shift, but it’d be glib to associate Jack Kirby’s design approach with improvement of the film. Indeed, it’s the return to Asgard which demonstrates the original problem — as Thor flew through the cityscapes, great golden towers of Asgard itself, I realised how after three films, I didn’t know this place. When Thor, at the end of the film, sits atop his makeshift throne, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of Asgardians, I realised I had no idea how big Asgard does, what its people do every day, how its economy worked. Asgard, for the most part, was the Bifrost and some surrounding infrastructure; it never became anything else.

Sakaar, meanwhile, is utterly defined, albeit straightforward, rooted in the colossal trash piles outside the main city, the Contest of Champions, and its numerous portals, including the biggest one of all, the Devil’s Anus (typical of the humour in the film — big, not necessarily clever). It also provides us the Grandmaster — really just Jeff Goldblum as a crazed, planet-ruling dictator — and Valkyrie, probably the best female character in the trilogy.

Her bisexuality was apparently edited out of the film (being PG-13, anything more than hints would’ve met MPAA cuts anyhow), but she’s coded very butch regardless — after Thor is captured, for example, he finds himself laid flat under her wide sitting stance, ready to be emasculated at the touch of a button. Yet Valkyrie is also an odd character, given the MCU’s history; where Marvel has been squeamish about connecting Tony Stark to alcoholism, and has allegedly ducked the “Demon in a Bottle” storyline for fear of underserving it in a two-hour timeframe, Valkyrie is gleefully drunk much of the time.

Then again, Thor: Ragnarok seems to upend all kinds of continuity (the whole “science=magic” angle from the first film seems to have disappeared; Thor’s prophetic dreams, for example, have no science behind them). It also, however, continues Phase Three’s theme, this time in a very explicit way. Asgard, portrayed in the previous films as something of a benevolent superpower across the nine realms, turns out to have been an empire. Vanaheim wasn’t an ally, and Jotunheim wasn’t a rogue state; these places were conquered and looted. In the end, Thor comes to the conclusion that the past must die, and unlike Star Wars: The Last Jedi, this film commits — Asgard explodes, and nothing but the characters will survive.

Even there, the coming Infinity War suggests even the characters won’t necessarily make it in the long run. Just as the Age of Ultron didn’t necessarily end with the film, its effects spilling over into Civil War, so Ragnarok might not be over either. The Marvel Cinematic Universe rolls on.

Ultimately, Thor: Ragnarok manages to be the strongest entry in the Thor trilogy. Sure, humour’s a part of it — the fish-out-of-water gags of the first two don’t compete with the dry, absurdist approach here — but it’s more down to confidence. Ragnarok is utterly prepared to be what it is, without the previous films’ half-measures. In this regard, it might have deeper implications for superhero films in general; where The Dark World (2013) contained the last vestiges of the need to compromise for a general audience, the kind of muted palettes and costumes that began with X-Men (2000), Ragnarok marks the final victory of closely adapting the source material over this compromised approach. Alongside the yellow costumes at the end of X-Men Apocalypse (2016) and the brighter tones of Justice League (2017), it’s a sign that the MCU, after a decade and 17 films, was more than dominant by this point. It had become a hegemony.

High Points: both scenes featuring “Immigrant Song” are highlights.
Low Points: any Asgard scenes without Thor tend to be a little too dour — and the jokes within them a little too glib — to really have impact. Pity Idris Elba, who draws the shortest straw on these.
Curios: Valkyrie mentions any spaceship the Revengers steal needing cupholders. She doesn’t seem to drink at any point during the journey, or afterwards.
Flagrant Product Placement: no Earth scenes mean practically no product placement, although “Pure Imagination” somehow manages to show up on Sakaar.
Connections to Elsewhere: back to both Avengers films and The Dark World; forward, pretty much, just to Avengers: Infinity War.
Stan Lee Cameo: Stan Lee turns out to be the best hairdresser in the galaxy; despite, or because of the equipment to hand? (9/10)
End Credits: a slightly vague lead-in to Infinity War (6/10); the Grandmaster ends up on the scrapheap, negotiating (7/10).

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Next: Black Panther (2018)