I Remember Having Seen It
I saw Thor: Ragnarok in the theater two weeks ago; although I found it entertaining, I haven't thought about it since. Bombastic, colorful, action-filled with fights and computer-generated imagery, the third Thor movie has a light touch compared to its predecessors. Humor predominates in many scenes. Jeff Goldblum as the whimsical tyrant Grandmaster, with his melting stick that turns people into smelly puddles, offers a performance that seems off base from the high seriousness of the basic Thor story. Asgard, the Rainbow Bridge, Odin's decrepitude and final words to his sons, Loki and Thor, all seem undercut by a movie bent on fun rather than drama that's also fun.
Cate Blanchett has some spectacular moments as the evil death goddess, Hela, Thor's older sister, a sibling he knew nothing about, who, in their first encounter, destroys Mjolnir, his treasured hammer. Without Mjolnir, Thor doesn't seem like Thor to me, but maybe that's my own problem. Blanchett's character, pure evil as she is, commands the screen when she's on, a kind of inverse version of her take on the good elf, Lady Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Because Hela is so evil, though, there's nowhere, character development-wise, for her to go. Thor and Loki, too, are so well-established by now, after two Thor films and the Avengers movies, that they seem stuck in the mold of myths from which there is no movement.
The film, as I put it above, is entertaining--it absorbed my attention for most of its 130 minute length--but it didn't sink deeply into my psyche. That's fine, for some movies, especially those I don't pay to watch, but I'd like comic book-based movies to have foundational ideas within them, a philosophical notion here and there to explore through incident and character interaction, through events that shape the destinies of protagonists and antagonists. Any mythological cycle of tales, Norse, Greek, or otherwise, has a magnitude of possibilities to explore in the art of film. More could be done with Thor than making him a simple and robust, hyper-confident braggart moving from incident to incident without ever seeming to grow intellectually.
He is thunder, of course, the by-product of sudden light uniting earth and sky, an image and symbol of insight, a massive natural event mirroring the mental universe's constant firing of neurons. Being the son of Odin, supreme lord of gods and goddesses, holding sway over Midgard (Earth), Thor could be depicted with a robust confidence but also possessing an intellect above the dumb smash-and-kill party animal depicted by Chris Hemsworth.
It's ridiculous of me to expect a film meant entirely as entertainment to have a thoughtful base of ideas. In writing my criticism of this film, I'm simply trying to account for why I haven't thought about Thor: Ragnarok since I saw it two weeks ago.
Vic Neptune
I saw Thor: Ragnarok in the theater two weeks ago; although I found it entertaining, I haven't thought about it since. Bombastic, colorful, action-filled with fights and computer-generated imagery, the third Thor movie has a light touch compared to its predecessors. Humor predominates in many scenes. Jeff Goldblum as the whimsical tyrant Grandmaster, with his melting stick that turns people into smelly puddles, offers a performance that seems off base from the high seriousness of the basic Thor story. Asgard, the Rainbow Bridge, Odin's decrepitude and final words to his sons, Loki and Thor, all seem undercut by a movie bent on fun rather than drama that's also fun.
Cate Blanchett has some spectacular moments as the evil death goddess, Hela, Thor's older sister, a sibling he knew nothing about, who, in their first encounter, destroys Mjolnir, his treasured hammer. Without Mjolnir, Thor doesn't seem like Thor to me, but maybe that's my own problem. Blanchett's character, pure evil as she is, commands the screen when she's on, a kind of inverse version of her take on the good elf, Lady Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Because Hela is so evil, though, there's nowhere, character development-wise, for her to go. Thor and Loki, too, are so well-established by now, after two Thor films and the Avengers movies, that they seem stuck in the mold of myths from which there is no movement.
The film, as I put it above, is entertaining--it absorbed my attention for most of its 130 minute length--but it didn't sink deeply into my psyche. That's fine, for some movies, especially those I don't pay to watch, but I'd like comic book-based movies to have foundational ideas within them, a philosophical notion here and there to explore through incident and character interaction, through events that shape the destinies of protagonists and antagonists. Any mythological cycle of tales, Norse, Greek, or otherwise, has a magnitude of possibilities to explore in the art of film. More could be done with Thor than making him a simple and robust, hyper-confident braggart moving from incident to incident without ever seeming to grow intellectually.
He is thunder, of course, the by-product of sudden light uniting earth and sky, an image and symbol of insight, a massive natural event mirroring the mental universe's constant firing of neurons. Being the son of Odin, supreme lord of gods and goddesses, holding sway over Midgard (Earth), Thor could be depicted with a robust confidence but also possessing an intellect above the dumb smash-and-kill party animal depicted by Chris Hemsworth.
It's ridiculous of me to expect a film meant entirely as entertainment to have a thoughtful base of ideas. In writing my criticism of this film, I'm simply trying to account for why I haven't thought about Thor: Ragnarok since I saw it two weeks ago.
Vic Neptune
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