Thor: Ragnarok · 11:09pm Nov 3rd, 2017
My suggestion is to avoid the new Thor movie at all costs. I hated it.
Spoilers, probably.
It's a terrible mess of a movie that really feels like it was put together by a committee. One minute, it's trying for Guardian of the Galaxy zaniness. The next it's asking for the audience to be moved by something serious. The plot is way too epic for it's own good. They lay out the most important of events, and then give none of it any time. Things just happen, and lead to other things. Sometimes those things makes sense.
The Executioner is totally irrelevant to anything going on in the film. There's no good reason why he's in it.
Hela is a total waste. For a god of death, she does nothing but throw swords around. It makes me laugh now to think how people were speculating that this was going to be the character Thanos was trying to impress. She's less death god and more "really good ninja."
Loki does nothing clever or interesting.
Jeff Goldblum... ugh. I mean, not his fault. I'm sure he's doing as instructed with a script like this, but still... ugh.
Some of Thor's stuff toward the end of the movie were good, but getting there is incredibly tedious. Almost everything about the film was tedious. It's seriously tilted toward comedy, and very little of the jokes landed, in my opinion. A comedy with jokes that miss is a very tedious indeed.
This was one of the few times I legitimately thought about walking out of a film. It was awful from beginning to end, and it was a film I was super hyped for. Even the credit extra scene wasn't worth it.
It was the most fun I've had at a movie in a while :P
Well, it was funny, apparently. Which seems to be all a Marvel movie needs to be considered another shoe-in for movie of the year... until the next Marvel movie in the same year.
Hmm. Well, I'm going to go see it tonight. We'll see how that goes, then.
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Maybe other people thought it was funny. I did laugh once or twice, but by and large, I didn't think that the comedy worked.
Of course, I didn't think that the comedy worked in Guardians of the Galaxy either, and look how well that did.
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To each their own, I suppose.
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Hopefully you'll be more into it than I was. I guess it depends on if you really liked Guardians of the Galaxy. I didn't like that film, and it's influence is really apparent on this one. However, GOTG didn't have other films in it's library. This one did, and it clashes horribly with them. The tone is completely different. Every character is far more dull than in previous films. It's like a knock-off of GOTG.
I am sad, because I loved the first Thor movie (like, it's among my favorite comic book movies of all time) and I feel like Marvel is completely uninterested in what I loved about it, so I have no interest in seeing this one.
What I loved was how basing it in two underused sci-fi traditions (turn of the century/John Carter of Mars sci-fi for Asgard and 1980s B-movie/Roswell/trashy sci-fi for the New Mexico stuff) gave it room to be both over the top and silly within literary/cinematic traditions, which let it be just as weird as a movie about an intergalactic Norse god should be, while still feeling totally sincere. If you remove that framework, and don't find a similar tradition to nest it in, the entire concept of Thor can't really build its own framework, so it ends up feeling like "yeah, and this guy's a god. Just roll with it."
I can see why the Guardians of the Galaxy feel was tempting to them, but... argh, the first one is so underrated and why can't they find another director like Branagh? What's Bryan Fuller doing these days? Guillermo Del Toro? I'll even take Tim Burton in a pinch...
Sorry, fan girl rant over.
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If you loved the first Thor film, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that you should never see this one! It basically throws away any level of respect the Marvel universe has for Asgard.
Sincerity is something that this film lacks, in my opinion. There is one moment at the end with Thor growing as a character that felt sincere. The rest felt very self-aware. I could almost feel the director sitting next to me, nudging me in the side and saying, "Wasn't that funny? Wasn't that awesome?"
To me, this seemed like a film with no real vision. As you said, the original film felt very rooted in old sci-fi traditions and some cheesy period drama stuff. This movie is a Guardian of the Galaxy clone. Nothing more. They completely derailed the tone that the first two films had set up and replaced it with Guardians of the Galaxy. They also threw in Dr. Strange for no reason at all. That's something Marvel has generally avoided. Most of their films have pretty tight scripts. I've rarely felt like things were happening in the film for no reason.
This is what happens when things become too popular. For some reason, movie execs always feel the need to interfere more when things are successful. Marvel has had a strong track record for a while now, but with each movie, the studio is getting more controlling. Producers always feel like they are more important than directors, and that's what kills franchises. Thus far, this film is getting great reviews, but it sets us on a dark path. This film is more like a Transformers film than Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
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The humor could have definitely been cut down a bunch, and there were some unneeded characters, such as that rock guy whom I did not enjoy all that much outside of a few cute lines here and there. A lot of its jokes hit, but when they missed, they missed hard. I agree about it being a GotG clone, or at least, I could see the influences. It shouldn't have tried to be hilarious all of the time. "oh, look, here's a really interesting, character building moment between two characters that should really... and there's a wacky joke that ruins it." It was a very enjoyable film for the most part, but the flaws were definitely visible.
And I'm freaking sick of Stan Lee cameos.
I adore the whole sequence on the Junkyard planet, and it might be my favourite sequence in any of the Marvel movies so far. Then again, I always wished they took the Thor movies way less seriously, so I'm glad that they went in such a weird direction. My only real complains are that I wish they hadn't spoiled the Hulk review on the trailers, and that Jeff Goldbloom went too far in a few places.
But I pretty much agree with everything else you said. Every single stand-alone Hella scene could had been cut from the movie without any loss to the plot, the Doctor Strange cameo felt like a studio mandate, and even the big action scenes at the end felt weirdly sedated.
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Oh wow, I'm agreeing with Inquisitor M!
Seriously, it's the most fun movie in a long time.
I don't mean "the plot makes sense" or "the characters behave rationally." What I mean is that, unlike Bladerunner 2049 (which is an amazing and fantastic piece of art that no one can enjoy actually watching) I enjoyed the actual experience of viewing the movie.
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I LOVED the first Thor movie as well. It was written by JMS (who did Babylon 5) and it was awesome. Ragnarok is entirely different, yet awesome for it's own count.
As for "The Rock Guy" that was the director himself: Taika Waititi, who also directed one of the most hilarious movies ever, "What we do in the Shadows." The rock guy was dumb, but that's intentional. Most of the movie was full of dumb characters, but that was intentional.
"Thor: Ragnarok: is the nerd/geek version of "The Fast and the Furious!"
If you take it as anything other than that, you'll be disappointed. I went into it expecting ridiculous puns and in-jokes, combined with bad ass (and still ridiculous) fight scenes, and it delivered on all counts. It's the thinking man's "Transformers" or, better yet, "The joking man's Avengers."
At the end of the day, friggin' caped super heroes from 50+ years ago are inherently ridiculous. I'm arguing this on a site dedicated to magic talking horses. Suspend your disbelief for just one moment, compare "Ragnarok" to the MLP Movie, and judge them on the same levels. It doesn't work. Ragnarok let you down because you wanted the best mankind could do. MLP was still kinda fun, because we, in this fandom, are willing to take what we can get. Shift you expectations though, and the world can be a better place.
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This. Blade Runner was beautiful in many, many ways. It was also dull and not even really a story at all. It's a sequence of events that are of interetest to fanboys of the original. As a standalone film (even one in a franchise) it is boring.