‘Thor’ a galactic good time
Marvel's exhilaratingly fresh nostalgia trip brings the thunder
NINE years and 17 films into the Great Marvel Project, it’s clear this franchise has changed how blockbusters are made. Cinematic universes are Hollywood’s new normal, from the fanatically micro-managed Star Wars and Fantastic Beasts lines to scragglier also-rans and wannabes like Warner Bros’ DC Comics cycle, or Universal’s Dark Universe, in which the studio’s roster of classic monsters will lumber off on an interconnected series of “new and modern adventures”, whether anyone wants them to or not.
What seems increasingly likely, though, is that they’re also changing the way we watch.
Cinemagoers’ uncertainty over Blade Runner 2049’s downbeat worldview and meditative pace comes down at least in part, I’d suggest, to the entrenchment of Marvel’s winning formula of star power, pop spectacle and rewardingly busy plots.
Thor: Ragnarok won’t change that. It’s one of their best films to date, largely because it works so many of your taste receptors simultaneously: it’s funny, charming, dazzling, gorgeously designed and full of actors you already like.
Through an ongoing process of micro-recalibration, and with the near-bottomless resources Disney ownership seems to afford, Marvel has become – and I mean this as nothing but praise – the Heinz tomato ketchup of cinema.
The stuff is ubiquitous, but most of our weekday evenings could be brightened with a squidge of it.
The better Marvel films are so much fun not because of what happens in them, but because of the ways their stars, directors and craftsfolk find to wow and innovate within the series’ now tightly circumscribed formal limits. Thor: Ragnarok is a model case.
It was directed by the New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, who honed his comic style in sparky Kiwi productions like What We Do In The Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and which proves surprisingly apt for Asgard and its pantheon of feuding super-hunks.
As the returning God of Thunder, Chris Hemsworth gets the joke immediately, which is handy given his character is invariably the butt of it. Sibling bickering is a pivotal dynamic, both between Thor and Loki (a welcome return from Tom Hiddleston), and also both brothers and Hela (a preening Cate Blanchett), the goddess of death and their long-lost elder sister, whose arrival heralds doom for all Asgardians.
In exile on an urban junk-heap planet called Sakaar, Thor is forcibly recruited into a gladiatorial tournament presided over by the Grandmaster: a supreme being who looks and behaves exactly like, and in fact is, Jeff Goldblum in a golden dressing gown, turquoise pyjamas and a flash of sapphire lipstick.
Other films would nervously swathe such a character in CGI, but Waititi’s camera eyes the outfit with an amusing beady deadpan, while Goldblum cranks his trademark half-suave gabbling to uproarious full blast.
Throw in a Hulk-gone-AWOL (Mark Ruffalo), a boozy, bounty-hunting Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and various alien oddballs and Thor: Ragnarok is only getting started. The film is baggy and daft by design, with bits hanging out all over the place, and vast tracts of it feel like half-remembered excerpts from a fun-but-weird blockbuster you dreamt about.
But much of its charm lies in watching the characters bounce off each other, verbally and physically, when they could be making themselves useful.
Childish is one word for it, and more of a compliment than it might at first sound – particularly as the film’s oddly beautiful scuffed-plastic aesthetic gives it the look of a 1980s action play-set.
Ruffalo has cracked the Banner character in a way his forerunners ever quite managed and of course there’s more than enough “Hulk Smash” to be going on with. The showpiece scrums here are as stylish as any in the Marvel canon, and come turbo- charged by Mark Mothersbaugh’s score.
The greatest trick this studio wants to pull at this point is to make more of the same feel either exhilaratingly fresh or sufficiently retro-inflected to qualify as a nostalgia trip. – The Telegraph
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