Thor Ragnarok Review-Part 2

lucianalight:

I waited 4 years with patience and excitement for this movie. TR was
entertaining, there is no argue with that. And Weirdly enough I enjoyed
it. But it lacked what I care about most in a movie: depth, character
development and consistency. After watching it, I was disappointed,
angry and upset(I know it seems contradictory). I
waited for months to calm down enough to be able to write from a logical
point of view and not just emotionally. So in this series of posts I’m
going to explain why this movie didn’t meet my expectations.

Part 1: Loki or How Thor Ragnarok Tried to Give us Agent of Asgard and How it Utterly Failed

Part 2: Heroes, Villains and Double Standards

In my opinion a good narrator should be neutral to some extend and if not, at least should acknowledge the errors of their protagonist and give some credit to the antagonist view point. While Marvel has always been a hypocrite in regards to its heroes and villains, I’ve never expected to see the white or black narrative that we see in children’s stories. TR forces the view of its protagonist on the audience, that if someone doesn’t act as Thor wants, they are bad and their opinion is invalid. It also feeds the audience the notion that if someone is not on the side of heroes, they deserve everything that happens to them. This is what I call double standards. Because when sth is wrong, it is wrong no matter to whom it happens. Here’s a list of all the hypocritical things in the movie:

1.It is ok to invade a planet and kill their people if you think they are threatening your planet. I don’t know if anyone has written about this issue, but it seems no one noticed that what Thor did at the start of TR, attacking Fire Giants, killing Surtur and the inhabitants was basically the same thing he did in the first Thor movie by attacking and killing Frost Giants. Is it ok because they were plotting Asgardians demise? So does that mean What Loki did by unleashing the Bifrost on Frost Giants was ok because they were doing the same thing? Or is it ok because Thor only wanted Surtur’s crown and all the others he killed were unavoidable casualties? I mean Loki only wanted the Tesseract and the Earth and everyone he killed were unavoidable casualties too. Or maybe it is ok because Fire Giants and Frost Giants don’t look human? Racist much?

2. It seems that it’s ok to threaten someone’s life to reveal their plans if you are Thor(Thor threatening Loki with Mjolnir), but not if you are Loki(Loki attacking Valkyrie).

3. Basically if you are a hero, you can trap someone to fall(what Strange did to Loki) or torture them(Thor leaving Loki with the obedience disc)
for an indefinite amount of time and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you are a villain, then the same acts are considered wrong(Loki dropping Thor in Avengers and the obedience disc being used on Thor).

4. Hulk is bad because he refuses to help Thor or listen to him, not because he’s been apparently killing slaves for fun for two years. Valkyrie is a traitor and a coward because she doesn’t want to go back to her old life, not because she’s been capturing and selling people as slaves for about a millennium.

5. If you are Thor, you have every right to want to take the throne from the rightful heir if you think they are not suited for the job. But if you are Loki then you are a villain for doing the same thing.

6. Basically if you are Loki, your emotions doesn’t matter and you can only speak on Thor’s terms and if you don’t agree and act the way Thor doesn’t approve, then you don’t deserve acceptance and love.

A good narrator doesn’t have double standards. They doesn’t make the protagonist completely right and superior to everyone. A good narrator treats all the characters fairly or at least gives some form of validity to other characters that are not the protagonist. As double standards is one of the things I absolutely can’t tolerate, I was really angry and disappointed to see it to this extend in the movie.

Thanks for making these points about Valkyrie and the Hulk as well as Thor and Loki. I was really uncomfortable with being invited to regard the Hulk as cute or endearing when clearly he has been killing other gladiators, and enjoying it, for two years. Korg makes some jokes about some guy named Doug and that’s pretty much all we hear about it. I was even kind of uncomfortable about Valkyrie just nonchalantly blowing up a whole bunch of other scrappers. I mean, I guess they’re evil… but as far as I can tell, they’re not any worse than she is. They were threatening to eat Thor, so it’s fine to kill them all.

#5 is a very interesting point. I mean, it’s indisputable that Hela was a bad ruler… but we’re also supposed to think that Thor wasn’t ready to rule at the beginning of the first movie, and we’re definitely supposed to have doubts about Odin’s competence by the end of TDW. The key differences between Thor’s actions and Loki’s are (1) Loki does his usurping work in secret while Thor does it out in the open, and (2) the movies are named after Thor, which legitimates his actions as heroic.