THOR RAGNAROKKIN'

Well, yes, Thor: Ragnarok  roks. It is as funny as advertised, and the movie really benefits from the sensibility of its director, Takia Waititi (What We Do In The Shadows) and his offhanded way with a joke, as well as the setup to that joke, as a means of defusing the standard-issue grandiosity to which these pictures usually default. Watiti's touch is unusual among Marvel directors, and he ends up lightening (but not watering down) the feel of the entire movie, even the more de rigueur CGI battles toward which the movie eventually moves. And it made me realize that over the past couple of years my favorite Marvel pictures are either the more-or-less self-contained origin stories (Captain America: The First Avenger) or, more often, the ones which don’t take themselves too seriously—Ant-Man, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Iron Man 3 and now this one—as opposed to the ones which make too much of a show of not taking themselves too seriously, like the Guardians of the Galaxy pictures. (The answer to how my admiration for the stand-alone thrillers Logan and, from a few years back, Wolverine, fit into this neat little observation is that they don’t.)

As for the cast, Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo work a comedy-team sort of magic (even when Ruffalo is in Big Green mode) that is, forgive me, a particular marvel, and I was continually grateful for the patented elliptical smarm of Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster, overseer of the super-sized gladiator spectacle which ends up pitting Thor against his old pal The Incredible Hulk. Cate Blanchett wears her antlers well—her entire Emma-Peel-as-the-Goddess-of-Death-look, actually—as Hela, who unfortunately presides, however grandly, over the movie’s most conventional aspect, the Marvel villain bent on destroying Asgard and ruling the universe. But the biggest surprise is Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, a hard-drinking, ass-kicking bounty hunter who is stranded on the garbage planet which the Grandmaster calls his kingdom. She has enough attitude for two movies and the sexy style to back it up, which she wears even during her big entrance, a (big) misstep which immediately seals her status as the most welcome, no-nonsense (yet good-humored) female addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet. In the words of a friend who saw Thor: Ragnarok the same day I did and was equally impressed by Thompson, more, please!

 
 

But it’s the movie’s day-glo-disco sheen that most seduced my eye. That sheen is most apparent on Goldblum’s garbage planet, but the pretense-deflating shimmer even finds its way to Asgard as well, where some of the more typically overwrought iconography is leavened by the visual attitude of the production design. Thor: Ragnarok  is also resplendent with reminders of the epic, dynamically detailed panels of Jack Kirby, the artist who was originally responsible for the memorable energy, visual weight and occasionally hallucinatory fever of the early Mighty Thor comics. (If you've seen the movie, imagine Thor's confrontation with the demon near the beginning of the film done up in frames that stretch over two full comic-book pages, with Kirby's customary sense of scale, clarity and striking lines.)

The picture that Thor: Ragnarok most happily reminded me of, however, was not (thankfully) either of the previous two Thor pictures, or any other Marvel picture really, but instead Mike Hodges’ simultaneously reverent and revisionist Flash Gordon (1980), which was positively awash in opulent, sublimely tacky production design and correspondingly outrageous costumes courtesy of Danilo Donati. That Thor: Ragnarok could be said to be circling in anywhere close to the orbit of that movie’s magnificent Mongo is perhaps the highest compliment I could give it. Mark Mothersbaugh, who supplies the score, doesn’t come close to the exuberant operatic explosions which Queen provided for the 1980 movie, but he hits his own bouncy balance between Euro-disco bliss and a more standard-issue symphonic sonic landscape which, more often than not, brings a touch of Flash (“Aaaaah-ahh!”) to the ears and contributes to the contact high the movie offers with seductive and disarming ease. As it happens, we are treated to not one, but two action sequences choreographed and edited to the sonic thunder of Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song,” which serves the same function, and that gets Thor: Ragnarok an “Aaah-aaah-aah Aah!” of its own, more or less, with which to link back to Queen’s kitschy Flash Gordon theme. 

I’m sure we’re due for a lecture or two from the sect of Those Who Know More Than We Do About Such Things, much like we got this past summer when Spider-Man: Homecoming managed to curry too much favor from critics and audiences, about how Thor: Ragnarok dishonors the spirit of the original Marvel Comics source material or somehow or another provides cause for offense among hard-core genre wags. But I don’t much care how engaged it is with the MCU or whether or not it stays true to the way things panned out in the canonical texts (Jesus Christ…). The fact is, the movie may simply be too much fun for sourpusses seriously worried about whether or not this is the Thor they grew up with. I don’t think it’s necessarily misguided for some of the more poker-faced among us to express displeasure at the way the whole Marvel/DC blockbuster aesthetic has swamped American movies. But if even half of the superhero stuff that has come before were anywhere near as entertaining as Thor: Ragnarok is, I suspect there’d be a whole lot less complaining.

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