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Thor films

Whatever Happened to Hercules?

by Hutch Morzaria September 2, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

September 2, 2026 0 comments

Asgard Is a People, and Then It Isn’t

by Hutch Morzaria August 10, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

I finished my 2017 review wondering what would happen when Thor met whatever was on that very large ship pulling alongside the Asgardian refugees. What happened is that roughly half of them were murdered in the first four minutes of the next film, Loki among them, and the triumphant ending I’d just spent a paragraph enjoying turned out to have a shelf life of about six months. That’s the single biggest difference watching it now. This is a film about a man losing absolutely everything and finding it funny, and it ends on the one note of pure hope in the whole trilogy, and you simply cannot watch that ending in 2026 the way I watched it in 2017.

“Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.” I called it a good line, earned, and it is. It’s also a promise the franchise breaks almost immediately. The people are the thing that survives, says the film, and then Infinity War opens on that same ship with most of those people dead on the floor and Thor spending the rest of the film building a weapon out of grief. I don’t think that’s bad storytelling — it’s brutal, it’s clearly deliberate, and the contrast does exactly what it was built to do. But something is genuinely lost. The last five minutes of this film used to play as relief and now they play as a setup for a punch you already know is coming, and I can’t get the 2017 version back.

Did the funny version save him or break him?

This is the real argument about Ragnarok, and my answer is that it saved him and then everybody misread why it worked. The comedy here is precise. Thor is funny because he’s a confident, slightly thick, enormously powerful man who keeps being humiliated by circumstances he doesn’t understand, and the film never once suggests he isn’t formidable. He loses the hammer, the eye, the father and the entire planet across two hours. Every joke is sitting on top of a real loss, and Taika Waititi holds that balance the whole way through without ever letting one cancel the other.

What came afterwards kept the jokes and quietly dropped the loss. By the time of Love and Thunder the funny had become the entire personality rather than a coat of paint over a badly damaged man, and Thor got noticeably lighter in a way that made him harder to take seriously in a room with anybody else. So the diagnosis I’d offer now is that this film didn’t break him. It demonstrated something delicate and the franchise treated it as a formula. I said in 2017 that lining him up with the Avengers version was the right call, and it was. The mistake happened downstream, and it’s a shame the thing that gets blamed is usually this film rather than the ones that copied it badly.

Endgame is where it first went wrong. It puts Thor in a genuine depression, which is exactly the right destination for someone who has lost his brother, his father, his home and half his people inside about a year, and then it shoots most of that for laughs. The joke is the body, largely, and the film keeps going back to it. Watching Ragnarok again makes that worse rather than better, because this film is proof the balance was achievable. It puts a devastated man on screen, gets enormous laughs, and never once invites you to laugh at the devastation itself. The tools were right there and nobody picked them up.

The best idea in it got left on the table

In 2017 I said the best thing about Hela isn’t Hela, it’s what she reveals: that Asgard’s golden age was built on conquest Odin painted over, that she was the vanguard of all of it, and that the truth was sitting a few inches above his sons’ heads under a coat of gold paint. I said the film raises it, lets it land, then gets on with the gladiator plot, and that I’d rather it raised it than not. Nine years on, nobody has picked that up either. Not once.

That’s a genuine disappointment, and probably my biggest one about this film’s legacy. An empire that rewrote its own founding, whose surviving heirs have no idea what they inherited, is a strong idea sitting in a franchise that has had plenty of room to use it. Asgard gets rebuilt as a fishing village and a tourism gag instead. Cate Blanchett is obviously having the time of her life and the film hands her the strongest idea in the trilogy to carry, and it ends up a loose end. Go and read what the film actually establishes about Odin’s conquests and then try to name a single thing built on it since.

Goldblum needs no revision at all. The Grandmaster is still the most purely enjoyable thing in the film and I’d still lead with him if somebody asked what to expect. Nine years of Marvel comedy since, most of it broader and much less confident, has made that performance look better rather than worse. He isn’t doing bits. He’s playing a specific man who has never once been contradicted by anybody and has therefore stopped bothering to finish his own sentences. The film is still rated absurdly well and most of that goodwill is him and the fights.

What December gets, and which Thor turns up

I wrote in 2017 that Hemsworth and Hiddleston had finally stopped playing two actors performing brotherhood and started playing brothers, and that’s held up as the most durable thing in the whole film. It also became the most costly. Loki dies in the next film’s opening scene and it lands as hard as it does entirely because of the work done here. This is the film where their relationship finally warmed into something real, and it gets used as ammunition about twenty minutes of screen time later. Loki got a strange second life afterwards through a version of himself who never had any of these scenes, which is the multiverse for you. The brother in this film stayed dead.

Thor deserves his seat in December, mostly on seniority. He’s one of the last originals standing and Hemsworth has been doing this since 2011, which counts for a lot in a film built on history. My worry is which Thor actually turns up. The one from this film, funny and formidable and quietly wrecked, belongs in that ensemble and would be one of its best assets. The one from his last few appearances is a comic-relief slot holding a hammer. Doomsday will have an enormous cast and very little room for anyone, and the temptation to use him as the joke will be strong, because the joke is quick and character takes minutes nobody wants to spend.

Better as a film than I remembered, sadder as an experience. I gave it a four, possibly four and a half, and I’d keep that exactly. It’s still one of my better Marvel films and still one I’d put on happily. What’s changed is that it now sits in the middle of a story rather than at the end of one, and everything it resolves gets taken away almost immediately afterwards. That’s not a flaw. It might be the most useful thing about watching it right now, going into a film that’s going to ask an awful lot of characters to have survived things.

Next in the rewatch: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the question of what a shield is actually worth.

August 10, 2026 0 comments

Marvel Movies

Thor: Love and Thunder — The Jokes Ate the Film

by Hutch Morzaria July 18, 2022

written by Hutch Morzaria

Christian Bale is giving a genuinely frightening performance as a man who has decided every god deserves to die, and he’s doing it in a film that keeps cutting away to screaming goats.

Two and a half out of five. It’s okay. Nothing amazing, and the gap between what’s in it and what it does with what’s in it is the whole problem.

The good bit: the weapons are jealous of each other

My favourite thing in the film, easily.

Mjolnir and Stormbreaker are both treated as sentient, and both are quietly resentful of the other. The axe sulks. The hammer has moved on to somebody new. Thor is stuck managing a relationship between two lumps of enchanted metal, and the film plays it completely straight-faced.

That’s quite funny and genuinely enjoyable, and it’s the kind of specific, silly idea that Ragnarok was full of. There are some good action sequences too, and a few real surprises. The film is not without pleasures.

Gorr deserved a much better film

Bale is excellent. The opening, with a man in a desert who has lost his daughter and then meets the god he’d been praying to and finds him indifferent, is the strongest material in any Thor film.

And the Necrosword sequences work. The way he moves through shadow, the way the weapon corrupts him while making him effective, all of that lands.

Where it stops working for me is the logic. Theoretically, any of these gods should be able to deal with one man, sword or no sword. If nothing else, they could simply leave. Fly away, don’t engage, don’t give him the opportunity to get within range. The film needs them to stand still and be killed, so they stand still and are killed.

That’s a big ask. I can live with it because the story it enables is decent, and I noticed it every time.

Zeus is the film’s worst decision

The whole sequence in his court, with the assembled gods watching, is pretty bad. Nothing great about any of it.

Zeus is played entirely as a comedy character, which would be a defensible choice in isolation. The problem is what it does by comparison. Think about Odin across the previous films, and the gravitas that brought. A serious actor, playing a king with genuine weight, whose presence made Asgard feel like it mattered.

Here you have another very good actor handed the king of the Greek gods, and the film uses him for a joke about a toga coming off. It’s a misuse, and it drags Thor down with it. He gets stripped in front of a laughing crowd, and the scene exists so the audience can laugh at him too.

That’s the film’s real failure. Ragnarok made Thor funny while keeping him formidable. This one makes him the butt of it.

Jane, and the version I’d rather have seen

Jane taking up the hammer is comic accurate, and I know that, and I was still a little disappointed.

Natalie Portman is fine and the cancer storyline has real weight buried in it. The tone keeps undercutting that weight, which is a shame, because a film that sat with it properly would have been more interesting than this one.

What I’d have preferred is the other version from the comics: the one where someone genuinely out-fights Thor, beats him, and earns the hammer that way. Beta Ray Bill, who is a much stranger and more interesting proposition than a returning love interest, and who would have given the film an actual contest at its centre. That character has always struck me as more interesting, and it would have been quite cool to see.

The ending is a cop-out

I didn’t really get the daughter thing, and I wasn’t a fan of where it leaves us.

Thor ends up raising Love, Gorr’s resurrected daughter, and I have no idea whether she’ll ever appear again. It’s presented as an emotional resolution to a film that hasn’t earned one.

Worse is the sequence where Thor hands power to a group of children so they can fight. It felt lame. Everybody becomes a god, everyone gets a weapon, everyone joins in. It’s the superhero equivalent of everyone becoming Shazam, or the end of Buffy where every potential Slayer everywhere is activated at once. That worked there because seven seasons had built to it. Here it’s a scene that arrives to solve a fight.

Power should cost something. Giving it away by the handful at the end drains it.

The comedy problem

Ragnarok worked because the jokes sat on top of genuine loss. Thor lost his hammer, his eye, his father and his planet in that film, and the comedy was how he coped.

Here there’s no equivalent weight underneath. Endgame left him in a bad place, and rather than deal with that, this film opens by having him work out with the Guardians in a montage and moves on. The register that saved the character is now the character’s entire personality, and there’s nothing left for it to sit on top of.

Whether that tips over into parody is a fair question. There are stretches where I think it does.

Where it lands

Two and a half. Some good action, a few good surprises, one great performance and one great gag about jealous weapons.

Against Infinity War, where Stormbreaker actually meant something, this feels weightless. Against Ragnarok, which it’s directly sequelising, it’s a considerable step down, and I’d say the problem is that it mistook the tone for the point.

The mid-credits scene introduces Hercules with a lot of ceremony, and given how many of these stingers have gone nowhere lately, I’m not holding my breath.

July 18, 2022 1 comment

Marvel Movies

Thor: Ragnarok — They Finally Worked Out What Thor Is For

by Hutch Morzaria November 17, 2017

written by Hutch Morzaria

Thor has been the least interesting person in every film he’s appeared in, and this one fixes that by finally admitting he’s funny. I really enjoyed this. Four out of five, possibly four and a half, and I’ve come out of it more interested in the character than I’ve been in six years.

The first two Thor films played him in a serious vein and it never quite took. All that solemn Shakespearean business about kingship and worthiness, delivered by a man who is fundamentally a giant blond who hits things with a hammer and enjoys it.

What this film does is line the character up with how he’s actually been in the ensemble pictures. Go back to The Avengers and he’s already the one getting laughs, mostly at his own expense. That version was always more watchable than the one his own films kept insisting on, and Waititi has simply decided to make that the whole register.

It works. It ties much better to the Thor we know from the team films, and it means he’s no longer the character you tolerate between the good bits.

The Hulk fight is the sequence everyone wanted

Thor against the Hulk, in an arena, on a junk planet. That’s it. That’s the pitch. It’s awesome, and it delivers on something Age of Ultron gestured at and never properly gave us. Ruffalo is good throughout, too. The Hulk has been Hulk for two straight years here, has picked up some language and a considerable ego, and the version of him who sulks in a hot tub is a genuinely new thing after four films of tortured Banner.

Anyone who spotted the Planet Hulk influence on the trailers was right. The film lifts that setup wholesale and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

This movie is just Jeff Goldblum

I mean that as praise. He’s awesome. The Grandmaster could have been a throwaway eccentric and instead Goldblum does the thing only he does, where every line sounds like he thought of it half a second before saying it and isn’t fully committed to it even as it leaves his mouth. A genocidal despot playing at being a chat show host. He’s in maybe a third of the film and he’s the first thing I’d mention to anyone asking about it.

Korg is the other comic success, played by the director himself, and he gets the softest delivery of the meanest lines in the film.

Hela and the thing the film is quietly about

Full credit to Cate Blanchett, who is clearly having an enormous amount of fun and is worth watching whenever she’s on.

But the best thing about Hela isn’t Hela. It’s what she reveals. She was Odin’s executioner, and the two of them conquered the Nine Realms together before Odin decided to rebrand as a wise and peaceful king, locked her away, and painted over the ceiling murals that showed what they’d actually done.

That’s a properly interesting idea and I didn’t expect it here. Asgard’s golden age is a cover story. The warriors of Asgard weren’t protecting the realms, they were subjugating them, and Hela was the vanguard of all of it. It’s quite cool that Odin hid his own history so thoroughly that his sons had no idea, and that the truth is sitting a few inches above their heads under a coat of gold paint.

The film could have done more with it. It raises the idea, lets it land, then gets on with the gladiator plot. I’d still rather it raised it than not.

Surtur closing the loop

The other thing I liked more than I expected: bringing back Ragnarok and Surtur properly.

I’m fairly sure we saw Surtur somewhere in the first or second film, and I couldn’t tell you which, but pulling him back to be the actual instrument of Asgard’s destruction gives the whole trilogy a full arc. Thor works out that he can’t beat Hela because her power comes from Asgard itself, so the only winning move is to destroy the place. That’s a genuinely good resolution, and it makes sense of the title rather than using it as decoration.

“Asgard is not a place. It’s a people.” Good line, earned.

Thor and Loki finally read as brothers

Six films in, something has clicked between Hemsworth and Hiddleston.

I’ve always loved Loki, and he’s excellent here, but the specific thing that’s improved is the relationship. They no longer play like two actors performing brotherhood. They play like brothers: a lifetime of grievances, an established routine for winding each other up, and a mutual understanding that neither of them is going to fundamentally change. The “get help” bit is the clearest example, an old trick they’ve obviously run a hundred times.

That comes from having done this together for years, and it’s the sort of thing you can’t write your way to.

Where it’s weaker

Valkyrie is okay. Tessa Thompson is fine in the part and the character has a decent backstory as the survivor of Hela’s massacre who has spent the centuries since drinking about it. She just isn’t amazing, and next to Goldblum and Blanchett she doesn’t hold the screen the way she needs to.

The Strange sequence at the start is quite funny and slightly detached from everything else, feeling like a scene the film owed his own picture rather than something it needed.

And the comedy occasionally undercuts a moment it shouldn’t. Odin dies and we’re back to jokes fairly briskly. That’s the risk of the register, and mostly the film gets the balance right.

Where it lands

Overall a good movie, and one of my better Marvel films. I’d happily watch it several more times, which is not something I’d have predicted saying about a Thor picture.

It’s the best of his three by a comfortable distance, and I accept that’s a low bar. Set against the rest of this year’s superhero output it holds up well, though Logan back in March is still the one that stayed with me longest, and that’s a different kind of film entirely.

The mid-credits sting has a very large ship pulling alongside the Asgardian refugees, and we all know roughly what that’s building towards next May. Thor has lost his hammer, an eye, his father and his entire planet in one film, and has somehow come out of it more likeable. I’m genuinely curious what happens when he meets whatever’s on that ship.

November 17, 2017 1 comment