I closed my 2022 review by saying the Hercules stinger arrived with a great deal of ceremony and that I wasn’t holding my breath. Four years later I can confirm the breath was correctly not held. Hercules has never been seen again. Neither has Love. Jane is in Valhalla and hasn’t been mentioned since. This film set up three separate things and delivered on precisely none of them, which is a remarkable strike rate even by the standards of a franchise I’ve spent this whole rewatch project complaining about on exactly this point.
That’s the honest summary. The pitch was Thor building something to care about after losing everything, and he gets Jane back, loses her again, and inherits a daughter. Then the franchise simply moved on and left all of it where it fell. Love is, as far as anybody can tell, still out there being raised by a god nobody has checked in on in four years. I said at the time that I didn’t get the daughter thing and wasn’t sure she’d ever appear again, and that was a guess. It’s now just a fact, and it makes the ending considerably worse rather than better, because an emotional resolution you never return to isn’t a resolution at all. It’s a scene. And knowing that none of those kids Thor hands power to ever appear again makes that sequence even harder to defend than it was. I called it lame at the time, the superhero equivalent of everybody becoming Shazam or the Buffy finale where every potential Slayer everywhere gets switched on at once. It solved one fight in one film and cost the concept of godhood something permanent. If anybody can be handed this, it isn’t worth very much.
Ragnarok looks better because of this film
The comparison I drew in 2022 was that Ragnarok put its jokes on top of real loss and this one had nothing underneath them. Four years on I’d sharpen that into something slightly different and slightly more forgiving of the earlier film. This one didn’t expose a weakness that was already sitting there in Ragnarok. It created one by copying the surface and leaving the foundation behind.
Ragnarok’s comedy is precise, and it works because the man being funny has just lost his hammer, his eye, his father and his entire planet inside two hours. Every joke is sitting on something. Take that away and keep the jokes, and what you get is a very powerful man who is mostly a punchline, which is what happened here and what has largely happened to the character since. So Ragnarok is a better film than it was, in the specific sense that watching this one demonstrates how hard the thing it pulled off actually was. That’s not a defence of this film so much as an accidental compliment to the last one.
Bale is still stuck in the wrong movie
Christian Bale’s performance hasn’t aged a day, mind you. The desert opening, the dead daughter, the god who couldn’t care less, all of it is still the strongest material in any Thor film and it’s still sitting inside a movie that keeps cutting away to screaming goats. My logic complaint stands too: any of those gods could simply have left rather than stood still to be killed, and nothing in four years has made that read better. What I’d add now is that Gorr’s argument, that the gods are indifferent and deserve nothing from anyone, was the most interesting idea the franchise had that year, and it was raised and settled inside a single film. Nobody picked it up. The MCU has an entire pantheon problem sitting right there and has never gone back to it, which is becoming the theme of this whole rewatch.
The Zeus material I called pretty bad and a misuse of a very good actor, particularly measured against the gravitas Odin brought to the earlier films, and that’s held completely. It’s also become part of a bigger pattern I can see much more clearly now: introduce something enormous, mine it for one comic set piece, abandon it. Zeus and the assembled gods should have been a threat, an institution, a future direction. Instead it was a gag with a lightning bolt in it. The reception at the time was rough and I don’t think it was unfair.
Has my opinion softened or hardened? Hardened, mildly, and not on the film’s quality. I gave it two and a half in 2022 and I’d still give it two and a half. It has good action sequences, some real surprises, that excellent gag about the jealous weapons bickering over Thor’s attention, and a great performance stuck in the wrong movie. That’s exactly what I said then and exactly what I found again. What’s changed is that I reviewed it as a setup and it turned out to be a dead end. In 2022 you could reasonably assume the daughter, the stinger and Jane’s death would all lead somewhere. None of them did, and a mediocre film that plants seeds is a lot more forgivable than a mediocre film that just stops.
Thor should still be in December, and he should be there as the Ragnarok version: funny, formidable, and carrying real damage. The version from this film, weightless and mostly ridiculous, would be a waste of a seat in an ensemble that size. There’s unfinished business the film could use too, if anyone remembers it. A god who was handed a child and then vanished from the story is an interesting person to bring back.
Honestly though, if you’re prioritising your rewatching before December, this is the most skippable film in the project so far, and that’s the verdict in itself. Nothing in it is required. Watch the first fifteen minutes for Bale, watch the weapons bicker, and take or leave the rest. Four years of the franchise not referring to any of it suggests the franchise agrees with me.
Next in the rewatch: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which had to solve a problem no film should ever have to solve.
