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.