Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, [Steve Englehart, Roy Thomas, Greg Pak, Mark Gruenwald, Sal Buscema, Steve Ditko, Walt Simonson,] Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost, and Taika Waititi, 2017
spoilers a‑poppin’
Not what I was expecting! Based on the title—Ragnarok being the cataclysm that wipes out the Nordic pantheon—I had assumed that this was going to be a big, somber, apocalyptic finale to the Thor series—but it doesn’t really feel like a Thor movie at all. One of the interesting things about the early years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that the creators made an effort to slot each property into a different genre, but Ragnarok drifts away from the mythic fantasy where the Thor movies had staked their claim and instead veers into the Guardians of the Galaxy lane: it’s mostly a lighthearted outer space romp, with the villains camping it up. It’s also, despite the title, an ensemble piece, à la Captain America: Civil War. Thor is joined by the MCU version of the Valkyrie and by Loki, who seems to be following in the footsteps of Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, making the transition from Big Bad to roguish frenemy. As for the fourth member of the team: Civil War featured all the MCU Avengers and Avengers-adjacent characters except for Thor and the Hulk, and Ragnarok fills in the missing pieces. (I am astonished to say that I somehow managed to go five years without having this film spoiled for me, so the appearance of the Hulk actually surprised me! I assume he was prominently featured in all the TV ads, yeah? Wait—are there still TV ads for movies?) In the comics, the “Civil War” event took place in 2006; at the same time, the Hulk comic was in the middle of Greg Pak’s “Planet Hulk” arc, and given how fixated the MCU is on this era of Marvel history, I suppose it is no surprise that this is the Hulk status quo that Thor ends up stumbling into: the Hulk as a gladiator on the planet Sakaar, with Korg and Miek and all a’ them. Well, not all a’ them—that is a very tangled era of Hulk history, with the Illuminati and the Red King Angmo-Asan and Caiera the Oldstrong and even more head-exploding complexity, so the creators here quite sensibly cut a lot of that out and bring in Mark Gruenwald’s Contest of Champions from 1982 to fill the gaps. Again—not what I expected from a Thor movie! I know that “Thor in space” has a long history—he spent a fair chunk of 1966 on Rigel, which in the MU is a planet rather than a star—but still, this feels like going to see the Beowulf movie only to discover that instead of the Heorot mead hall he’s hanging out in the Star Wars cantina.
When I mentioned that the first Doctor Strange movie had the best ending I had seen in the MCU up to that point, someone warned me that none of the endings of the subsequent movies were any better. But I think this one had the potential to be! It’s still pretty clever as it is. The idea is that the prophecies have foretold that Ragnarok is coming and that the towering fire demon Surtur will destroy all of Asgard—but Thor bests him handily in the opening, and it turns out that the main threat is actually Hela, the goddess of death, who crushes Thor’s enchanted hammer Mjolnir with one hand, kills off most of the B‑list Asgardians, and forces Thor and Loki to flee halfway across the galaxy. Thor’s nifty solution: evacuate Asgard and restart Ragnarok on purpose, letting Surtur destroy the realm that Hela had conquered and thereby defeating her. The problem is that the importance of stopping Ragnarok is not sufficiently built up: as the movie begins and we’re getting our bearings, Thor’s defeat of Surtur is already well underway, and is played mostly for laughs. So the idea that Thor wins a scorched-earth victory over Hela by undoing his foremost accomplishment doesn’t really play as powerfully as it could have. Too bad—it could have been epic, in both the classical and modern senses.
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