☆☆☆
The audience I saw Thor: Ragnarok with laughed at all the appropriate places, cheered for their favorite characters, and applauded at the end of the movie while I sat mostly bewildered, though slightly less so than I've been at most recent Marvel movies.
Impressively, Thor: Ragnarok tries to step out of its own way for Marvel neophytes (and it's odd to consider myself that, since I've seen the bulk of the Marvel-branded films), and it comes closer than any Marvel film since the original Iron Man to being an enjoyable experience for those who don't obsessively keep up with the previous films.
That's not to say Thor: Ragnarok is a film I'd recommend to people who have never seen a super-hero movie, but those people are clearly in the minority of the moviegoing audience, so they probably don't matter. Still, Thor: Ragnarok is substantially better and more entertaining than Thor: The Dark World, which apparently I saw back in 2013 even though I have almost no memory of the experience. And it's also a lot better than the original Thor, which I could have sworn was the one with Natalie Portman, though that turns out to have been the last one.
And yet ... there were times, more than a few of them, when I was utterly confounded by what was happening on screen. Thor: Ragnarok assumes more than a passing familiarity with the previous films, but not just with the Thor movies but all of the Marvel films. Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) makes a significant appearance, and because I hadn't seen his movie I didn't really understand the references he was making. Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) shows up, and the Hulk/David Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has a major role. The audience cracked up when he saw Black Widow and made some comments about Tony Stark, and they totally got it when he talked about what happened in the other non-Thor Marvel movies, and the point that the film seems to be making is that if you don't get what they're talking about then you're just not worth worrying about.
That's mostly fine in Thor: Ragnarok since the movie is enjoyable on its own and has just enough of its own self-contained story that it's like sitting down and watching an episode of a long-running TV mystery series -- you can enjoy the murder of the week even if you don't get the sideways glances its characters give each other. Same thing here.
The story of Thor: Ragnarok is more comprehensible than the story of, say Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and involves Thor (Chris Hemsworth, his eyes twinkling even more than usual) and his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) saving their home city-planet of Asgard from their resurgent, long-forgotten sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), who happens to be no less than the goddess of death.
You'd think that maybe sometime their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) might have told them that they were related to the most powerful, angry villain in the galaxy, but, hey, that's family for you. Blanchett seems to be having a great time as Hela, though she's pretty one-note as a villain and mostly makes a lot of large flourishes with her arms while she swears the good guys will never win.
There's a very, very, very long detour to a trash planet that feels a lot like something out of Star Wars. I've always found it interesting that in much populist science-fiction entire planets are only one thing -- desert or ice or water or trash. This trash world is lorded over by a wacky, crazy guy named Grandmaster, who is played by Jeff Goldblum. It would be hard to imagine an actor who is clearly having a better time in a movie than Goldblum is in Thor: Ragnarok. One of his chief deputies is a Valkyrie played by Tessa Thompson, who I thought was one of the oddest characters in the movie if only because she turns out to be almost entirely unnecessary to the plot but has a ton of screen time, probably because she's going to factor in to the next Thor movie.
And there will be another Thor movie, because this one is making boatloads of money and audiences are eating it up. Which is fine, I guess. Complaining about the Marvel movies being narratively slack and the cinematic equivalent of junk food is not going to change the fact that moviegoers really have an appetite for it, whether they're hungry or not.
Viewed Nov. 5, 2017 -- AMC Burbank 16
1300
Impressively, Thor: Ragnarok tries to step out of its own way for Marvel neophytes (and it's odd to consider myself that, since I've seen the bulk of the Marvel-branded films), and it comes closer than any Marvel film since the original Iron Man to being an enjoyable experience for those who don't obsessively keep up with the previous films.
That's not to say Thor: Ragnarok is a film I'd recommend to people who have never seen a super-hero movie, but those people are clearly in the minority of the moviegoing audience, so they probably don't matter. Still, Thor: Ragnarok is substantially better and more entertaining than Thor: The Dark World, which apparently I saw back in 2013 even though I have almost no memory of the experience. And it's also a lot better than the original Thor, which I could have sworn was the one with Natalie Portman, though that turns out to have been the last one.
And yet ... there were times, more than a few of them, when I was utterly confounded by what was happening on screen. Thor: Ragnarok assumes more than a passing familiarity with the previous films, but not just with the Thor movies but all of the Marvel films. Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) makes a significant appearance, and because I hadn't seen his movie I didn't really understand the references he was making. Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) shows up, and the Hulk/David Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has a major role. The audience cracked up when he saw Black Widow and made some comments about Tony Stark, and they totally got it when he talked about what happened in the other non-Thor Marvel movies, and the point that the film seems to be making is that if you don't get what they're talking about then you're just not worth worrying about.
That's mostly fine in Thor: Ragnarok since the movie is enjoyable on its own and has just enough of its own self-contained story that it's like sitting down and watching an episode of a long-running TV mystery series -- you can enjoy the murder of the week even if you don't get the sideways glances its characters give each other. Same thing here.
The story of Thor: Ragnarok is more comprehensible than the story of, say Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and involves Thor (Chris Hemsworth, his eyes twinkling even more than usual) and his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) saving their home city-planet of Asgard from their resurgent, long-forgotten sister Hela (Cate Blanchett), who happens to be no less than the goddess of death.
You'd think that maybe sometime their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) might have told them that they were related to the most powerful, angry villain in the galaxy, but, hey, that's family for you. Blanchett seems to be having a great time as Hela, though she's pretty one-note as a villain and mostly makes a lot of large flourishes with her arms while she swears the good guys will never win.
There's a very, very, very long detour to a trash planet that feels a lot like something out of Star Wars. I've always found it interesting that in much populist science-fiction entire planets are only one thing -- desert or ice or water or trash. This trash world is lorded over by a wacky, crazy guy named Grandmaster, who is played by Jeff Goldblum. It would be hard to imagine an actor who is clearly having a better time in a movie than Goldblum is in Thor: Ragnarok. One of his chief deputies is a Valkyrie played by Tessa Thompson, who I thought was one of the oddest characters in the movie if only because she turns out to be almost entirely unnecessary to the plot but has a ton of screen time, probably because she's going to factor in to the next Thor movie.
And there will be another Thor movie, because this one is making boatloads of money and audiences are eating it up. Which is fine, I guess. Complaining about the Marvel movies being narratively slack and the cinematic equivalent of junk food is not going to change the fact that moviegoers really have an appetite for it, whether they're hungry or not.
Viewed Nov. 5, 2017 -- AMC Burbank 16
1300
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