Saturday, November 11, 2017

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Thor and Loki, with a little help from Dr. Strange, locate Odin just before he passes away. Why he passes wasn't clear to me but he seemed to be ready to go. Thor's older sister, Hela, shows up soon thereafter. Thor and Loki try to fight her but she is way too powerful for them. She destroys Thor's hammer, Mjolnir. Loki tries recalling them to Asgard but something goes wrong. Hela makes it back to Asgard. Thor and Loki wind up halfway across the universe.

Thor is captured by a woman who (later turns out to be an Asgardian, Valkyrie) and sells him to the Grandmaster, the ruler of the planet. He is forced to fight the Grandmaster's champion who turns out to be the Hulk. Thor is happy to see the green behemoth but Hulk does not recognize him. Eventually Thor gets Hulk to change back to his human form, with a lot of help from a recording of Black Widow. Bruce Banner remembers who he is but can't remember the last two years since the end of Age of Ultron. I really need to see that movie. Even if it wasn't very good it will help to fill in some gaps.

Thor, Valkyrie (whom he has finally convinced to join him), and Banner steal the Grandmaster's personal spaceship. They fly back to Asgard to battle Hela and her zombie army. Loki comes back with some other inhabitants of the planet and joins the fight against Hela.

There's more to this story, like Heimdall and Executioner but their parts seem a little more tangential to the main story.

I thought there were a few too many jokes early on. There was a little too much of a lot of things. The movie probably should have been longer or broken into a couple films. It felt like I was supposed to care about Odin's passing but it all happened so fast that I didn't feel anything at all. Jeff Goldblum was great as the Grandmaster. I'm not sure how faithful his representation of the character was to the comic book version but I liked the movie version. He reminded be a little bit of Aku from Samurai Jack. Gladiatorial contest made me think of Samurai Jack 2.03 (Jack and the Smackback).

On the whole I liked this movie but I think that Captain America: Civil War is still the high water mark for me.

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