The Long Overdue & Unnecessarily Grumpy Review of Thor Ragnarok

I'm actually writing this in March but thanks to the A to Z Challenge it's not posting until now.  And the movie came out last November so this really is overdue.

Short review:  meh.  Is there such a thing as being too funny?  I mean we've already had Thor in 4 movies and he's not really funny.  Nor from the comics I've read is he supposed to be.  I mean Spider-Man and Iron Man are supposed to be the smart asses; Thor and Captain America are straight men.  That opening fight with Surfur and his minions I thought, is he drunk?  All that quipping and smart-assery was definitely not him.

But hey I know what you're thinking:  it was fun!  For some reason that seems to be the only standard most Marvel movies are held to.  Yeah, it was fun, I guess.  I mean if you wanted Guardians of the Galaxy 2.5.  I thought maybe it'd be a Thor movie.  Or from the Hulk's appearance a Thor version of Planet Hulk.  But no.  It's just some half-assed Gladiator meets Guardians of the Galaxy thing.  And then there's some Asgard stuff that's thrown in and really doesn't go with spaceships and lasers.  But then this Asgard is just another planet and the gods aren't really gods; they're just aliens with magic or something.

The thing is there are like 50 years of Thor comics by now and Asgard has its own rich history and universe.  So why do we need to go to some other planet and borrow from GOTG?  In three movies we've hardly gotten to see more of Asgard than the palace and Bifrost.  And now it's gone!  Well, too bad, we hardly knew ye.

Also gone is just about everyone from the previous two movies except Thor, Loki, Odin, and Heimdall.  What about Jane Foster?  There's just some lame joke about mutual dumping cribbed from Seinfeld in 1995.  The "Warriors Three" have been a part of the comics for most of the book's run, but here they're dispatched with barely a thought.  As for Lady Sif, his possible Asgardian love interest, she's not even mentioned. (I know, she's on The Blindspot, but they couldn't steal a joke from Seinfeld or another 90s comedy for her?)

Instead of getting lost in space, Thor could have been stranded on some other part of Asgard and we could have gotten to know the planet and people a bit more.  Nah, let's go to Junkion with Jeff Goldblum in full Jeff Goldblum parody mode and do the most half-assed version of Planet Hulk possible.

Bringing me to my next point:  Planet Hulk deserved better than this.  If you've never read it, you should.  Or you can watch the animated version, which I guess is the closest we'll ever get now to a movie.  It's a really good story that allowed the Hulk to show he could be more than a rage monster smashing things.  Or in this case acting like a fucking toddler.  In that story the Hulk leads a rebellion against a tyrannical leader and falls in love and even makes a baby!  It was a story that allowed the Hulk to be a 3-dimensional character without Banner, something almost unheard of.  But this just takes that story and pisses down its throat.  It's too bad we'll never get a real adaptation.

As part of that, I guess we'll just ignore the fact that the Hulk killed dozens of sentient beings like "Doug."  I guess he did that in The Avengers too but those were an invading horde; these were just other aliens who were stranded on Junkion--or whatever it's called.  Poor Mark Ruffalo gets nothing to do in Banner mode except whine and cringe while other than fighting Thor, Hulk does what?  Fight a really shitty-looking giant wolf?  The trailer scene of him punching giant Surfur was just a fake-out; they don't really fight.

Seriously, Fenris looked so lame.  It was one step removed from those 50s monster movies where they'd film normal insects or reptiles (lizards, ants, grasshoppers, etc) and superimpose them on the film so they'd look huge.  I guess the wolf could have looked too computerized like Sharknado sharks or Birdemic birds, but this wasn't much better.

And once again Marvel fails to create a memorable villain.  Hela is just another boring one-note villain who is then disposed of, though not as easy as some like Whiplash.  Her extremely nuanced goal is to take over the universe.  She just kills and bitches and makes some bad quips.  Yawn.

The only other important female character was the Valkyrie with a drinking problem.  Apparently she's the last Valkyrie and was saved by a hot blonde one.  Was there maybe something going on there?  Well of course we couldn't really explore that because if we had a gay kiss or anything the movie couldn't be shown in China or the Middle East or Russia and Disney would lose hundreds of millions of dollars.  So just keep it in the closet.

Like with the Hulk, Loki is responsible for a lot of deaths.  His usurping Odin's throne is what allowed Hela to come back and kill thousands of Asgardians.  This on top of thousands of New Yorkers and various other people.  But he's totally learned his lesson now, right?  So it's cool.

The whole thing just struck me as a lot of tedious eye candy lacking much real heart.  All Thor learns in the end is to stop relying on his hammer so much.  And maybe Loki will stop being such a dick after a million years or so?  Ha, yeah, that'll stick.  I mean until the next movie.

But it was fun!  And critics liked it!  Most critics still think Superman: The Movie is the greatest superhero movie ever.  The movie where Superman turns back time by spinning the Earth backwards.  Ugh.  Hey, why didn't Thor think to spin Asgard backwards?

At least Idris Elba got slightly more to do than stand by the Bifrost entrance in uncomfortable armor with a big sword.  So that's something.