This is a poorly thought-out rant post with no cohesive structure, because I couldn’t be bothered. It was inspired by criticisms I’ve seen levied at Thor: Ragnarok lately, both by people I don’t know and people I respect and consider friends. The intention isn’t to say “you’re wrong for not liking this thing,” but to explain why I happen to think this is one of the best films in the MCU to date and how it pulled me into the fandom where none of the other movies could.
I’m going to start with a personal anecdote.
Before November 2017, I’d seen a handful of Marvel movies–bits and pieces of Captain America, Iron Man 2 & 3, and Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2. What I knew of the rest of the franchise I’d gleaned from Tumblr since about 2011. I was not impressed with it. I didn’t get it, and that made me frustrated, because I felt like I was left out of this huge thing that I couldn’t possibly catch up on.
So I saw Ragnarok on a whim–it looked accessible, and it was. I didn’t need to know a lot about the universe, because its intention was to deconstruct it and wipe the slate clean. It was funny, but it was also more brutally honest about topics like Odin’s campaign of terror and imperialism than the past films; it fully embraced Asgard and Thor’s presence in the MCU as a sci-fi/fantasy spectacle; it poked fun at everyone but never punched down and respected the journeys that led them to that point.
Most importantly, Ragnarok is the film that did the impossible, though I didn’t realize it on my first-time viewing: it deliberately set out to repair Thor and Loki’s relationship. That is the core of this film, the key takeaway, and it wouldn’t have worked if the tone, setting, and narrative were any different.
I went back and watched Thor 1 & 2 and the Avengers. It became painfully clear to me that after all of the heartbreak, betrayal, attempted murder, hate and mistrust, Ragnarok was the only solution.(And how fitting–Ragnarok is, in mythology, the culmination of a cycle of destruction and rebirth.)
To be content with one another again, Thor and Loki needed to be broken down, hit rock bottom, and make the decision to move forward together. Their relationship in Ragnarok is the metaphorical equivalent of the Japanese art of kintsugi: breaking pottery and repairing it with molten gold.
It achieves this in two key ways.
1) Villain decay. Loki’s deeds and their consequences had to be put in a different perspective–and more importantly, he needed to show some semblance of having learned the error of his ways by teaming up with Thor against a new, darker, more unambiguously evil threat.
2) Sakaar. I could write fucking essays about Sakaar. Sakaar is Thor and Loki’s purgatory. Their Hotel California. Their Pleasure Island. Their Garden of Eden. It’s a place that is tangibly and emotionally far removed from the real world, where no one knows who they are and no one cares.
Loki jumps at that–and it makes complete sense why. He’s not a villain or a hero here; not a prince or a usurper; he’s not the brother of Thor, he’s not Thanos’ puppet. He’s just Loki, and he can carve out a fresh start. Thor, on the other hand, fights it; he needs to get back to Asgard, needs to return to his duties and responsibilities.
To further this rather convoluted metaphor, they’re both tempted to stay here in this almost-paradise where they can forget everything bad that has ever happened to them and live out their days in relative happiness. And they both choose to leave.
Loki was tempted by the Grandmaster into remaining; Thor was probably at least a little tempted by Loki’s offer in that prison cell. “You, me, taking over.” That was everything he wanted but shouldn’t want; to forget the pain, to abandon a hopeless mission, to be with Loki and rule together, safe and happy and ignorant.
So at the climax, when they both have lost everything–their home, most of their people, their family, their body parts, in Thor’s case, and their freedom in Loki’s–it’s still a victory. They’ve learned that Sakaar was a lie, that that dream to forget and abandon reality to save themselves from more pain was an illusion.
As Tom Hiddleston said (and I’m paraphrasing): “They only have each other, and maybe that’s enough.”
“it poked fun at everyone but never punched down and respected the journeys that led them to that point”: that’s where we massively disagree. If you’re actually interested in knowing why many of us disagree, you’re welcome to search “thor ragnarok meta” or “thor ragnarok criticism” on my blog; many of my detailed explanations are from months ago, so you may not have seen them, and may have the impression that all any of us have are snarky throwaway comments. I’m not invested in changing your mind, and if you want to continue enjoying the movie you might make the conscious choice NOT to read the critical analysis, which is fine. But I do want you to be aware that those of us who don’t like it have very well-thought-out reasons for not liking it. It’s not that we’re not aware of the virtues people claim for it – most of Tumblr has been citing them at us for months – it’s that we have reasons for thinking those purported virtues aren’t so virtuous and/or that they’re outweighed by much more important vices.
There are things I thought Ragnarok did well – I kind of liked the psychedelic 80′s aesthetic of Sakaar, Valkyrie was cool, Heimdall’s role was fantastic, and the half-baked critique of imperialism was heading in the right direction. And maybe someone who saw Ragnarok *before* seeing the other movies just wouldn’t have the same sense of dissonance between the characters as they had been established in the other movies and as they were retconned in TR. But I don’t think there was anything Ragnarok did well that couldn’t have been done better by someone who genuinely respected the previous movies and the characters, as Taika Waititi – and Chris Hemsworth! – showed plainly in all their interviews as well as in the film that they did not. What’s more, all the “breaking down to nothing” had already been done in the previous films. That was the whole point of Thor 1; both Thor and Loki lost everything they thought they’d had. “Villain decay” had already been done in TDW: Thor and Loki had to team up to face a villain more evil and destructive than Loki had been.
What Thor and Loki really needed was to fucking talk to each other, and that’s exactly what TR *didn’t* have them do. It lampshaded the lack of communication (which “has never been our family’s forte”), but that doesn’t excuse the continued lack of it. No one ever asked Loki for an explanation of his actions. In fact, as I’ve argued on a number of occasions, Ragnarok makes a point of implying that Loki doesn’t even have much in the way of motivation for anything he does beyond “I’m a trickster/ the God of Mischief, it’s in my nature,” i.e., “I did it for the lulz,” or childish self-aggrandizing narcissism. In previous movies Loki always had complex, psychologically compelling motivations for the things he did. But Thor never acknowledges that Loki might have some legitimate reasons for resenting him, never asks why Loki invaded Earth; and they never talk about Loki’s Jotun heritage or the internalized racism and self-hatred that was such a huge part of his breakdown in Thor 1. As I have remarked, if TR really wanted to explore the impact of Asgard’s racist imperialism, that would have been a really good avenue to go down; but apparently it didn’t want to take Loki’s problems that seriously.
I also disagree (thanks in large part to @illwynd‘s insightful comments) that TR constituted a “repair” of Thor and Loki’s relationship. Here’s some commentary from @foundlingmother and me in response to someone who accepted the movie’s intended interpretation of Thor’s actions (that he was taking the healthy move of “stepping back from an unhealthy relationship” to reestablish it on healthier ground); here’s a discussion involving me and some other people on both sides of the issue in direct response to Taika’s claim that the film sees Thor and Loki reach “understanding and resolution,” which also goes into the issue of TR’s reduction of Loki’s motivations to “mischief/lulz.”
Loki is the Philosopher King 