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.