6 / 10
Official trailer
I’ve watched Thor: Ragnarok twice. The 6 is for a film that’s funny in its individual moments but is a structural betrayal of the Thor character, the MCU’s mythological commitments, and the seriousness that the first two Thor films had earned. Taika Waititi’s tonal pivot toward comedy worked as a discrete creative choice and damaged the franchise as a long-term proposition. The film is the moment when the MCU began treating its own mythology as material to mock instead of as material to honor.
The damage builds across every later Thor-adjacent film and informs the wider collapse that defined the franchise from this point forward.
The film is funny, well cast and competently directed, and I laughed through most of it. By the end credits I was also annoyed, because every laugh is paid for with something the Thor character had been built to be. A good time and a bad idea can live in the same film, and the 6 is my attempt to score both of them.
The Setup
Thor returns to Asgard to discover that his father Odin is dying and that his older sister Hela, the goddess of death, is about to be released from imprisonment when Odin passes.
Hela proves immediately more powerful than both Thor and Loki and exiles them to a junk planet called Sakaar. A scavenger named Valkyrie captures Thor and sells him into gladiatorial combat overseen by the Grandmaster. Thor’s gladiator opponent turns out to be Hulk, who has been trapped in Hulk form on Sakaar for two years.
Thor recruits Hulk, Valkyrie, and Loki to escape Sakaar and return to Asgard to confront Hela. The climax involves the deliberate destruction of Asgard to defeat Hela, with the surviving Asgardians evacuated to seek a new home.
The Tonal Betrayal
The previous two Thor films (Thor in 2011, Thor: The Dark World in 2013) had established the character as a Shakespeare-adjacent prince of a mythological world, complete with formal speech patterns, family drama scaled to operatic tone, and a commitment to treating Asgard as a real place with real history. Kenneth Branagh’s direction of the first Thor grounded the franchise in classical theatrical tone. Alan Taylor’s Dark World maintained that tone with diminishing returns.
The Thor character was the MCU’s connection to mythological seriousness that the rest of the franchise’s contemporary settings couldn’t provide.
Ragnarok abandoned this entire position. Taika Waititi’s direction treated everything the earlier films had established as serious as material for comedy. The film destroys Thor’s hammer in the opening act. His long hair is cut off in the middle act. The film mocks his Shakespearean speech patterns through the rest of the runtime. His relationship with Loki, previously the franchise’s most emotionally weighty sibling dynamic, becomes a series of comedy beats. His connection to Asgard, previously the central setting of his films, ends with Asgard’s deliberate destruction.
The choices are defensible as discrete creative decisions. Each individual choice has comedic potential and Waititi executes most of them well. The result is a film that disassembled everything the previous Thor films had built without replacing the disassembled elements with anything of comparable seriousness. The Thor character emerges from Ragnarok as a different protagonist than the one who entered. The change isn’t character development. The change is character replacement.
For Writers
Thor: Ragnarok shows the long-term cost of tonal pivots that abandon established character commitments. The Thor character had been established across two previous films and multiple Avengers appearances as a Shakespearean prince operating in a mythological tone that gave the MCU its connection to classical drama. Ragnarok’s pivot to comedy treated that established character as material to subvert. The subversion worked as individual moments and damaged the franchise as a long-term proposition because the Thor character couldn’t return to the previous tone after Ragnarok had made fun of it.
Later Thor appearances in Infinity War, Endgame, and Love and Thunder confirmed this. The character became a comedic figure whose dramatic moments no longer landed because the audience had been trained to expect comedy instead of seriousness. The lesson for writers working in serialized fiction is that tonal pivots aren’t free. The work the previous installments did to establish character is cumulative capital that the current installment is spending.
If you spend the capital on comedy that contradicts what was established, you can’t recover the dramatic tone the previous work built. Ragnarok spent the Thor character’s dramatic capital on one film’s worth of comedy and left the later films unable to recover the character’s seriousness. The franchise paid for Ragnarok’s individual creative success with the collapse of the Thor character’s long-term viability.
The Degradation Of The MCU’s Other Characters
The damage extended beyond Thor. The Hulk’s Sakaar storyline established that Bruce Banner had been trapped in Hulk form for two years, which the script treats as a comedy premise instead of as the body-horror tragedy it describes. The film plays Banner’s eventual return as Banner for laughs instead of for catharsis. The Hulk character emerging from Ragnarok was a more comedic version of himself that later Avengers films built on with the Professor Hulk concept in Endgame. Most viewers found it unsatisfying.
The Ragnarok treatment of Hulk informed the later failures of the character.
Ragnarok reduced Loki, who had been the MCU’s most successful villain through The Avengers and the most emotionally weighty supporting character through the Thor films, to a series of comedy beats opposite his brother. The film sacrificed the complexity that had made Loki interesting in earlier films to give Hemsworth and Hiddleston comic chemistry. The reduction informed the Loki Disney+ series and the character’s later appearances, all of which struggled to recover the dramatic tone Ragnarok had abandoned.
Ragnarok destroyed Asgard itself at the end of the film.
It wiped out the setting that had been the visual signature of the Thor films across two previous entries as a third-act consequence the film treated as comedy until the final scenes. The MCU lost a major piece of its visual identity in service of giving Ragnarok a memorable conclusion. Every later Thor-adjacent project that no longer had Asgard available as a setting paid the cost.
What The Film Gets Right
Cate Blanchett as Hela is commanding. The performance gives the film an antagonist with actual screen presence and real menace despite the surrounding tonal lightness. The character’s introduction sequence on Earth and her arrival at Asgard are among the film’s best craft achievements. Blanchett brings classical theatrical training to a role that could have been generic and raises the material considerably. The film doesn’t deserve her.
Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie is one of the more successful MCU character introductions of the late 2010s.
The character has her own backstory, motivation, physical capabilities, and relationship to the wider Asgard mythology. Thompson plays Valkyrie with the kind of edge that the character requires without falling into either generic toughness or generic vulnerability. The performance is one of the film’s important achievements.
Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster contributes the Goldblum quality that the franchise was clearly trying to extract from him. The character is a galactic dictator played for absurdity. Goldblum delivers the material with the verbal hesitations and rhythmic peculiarities that define his late career persona. The performance is one of the film’s clearer comedy beats and works on its own terms.
Mark Mothersbaugh’s score combines synthesizer textures with orchestral elements to give the film a 1980s-inflected sonic identity that contributed to its tonal distinction from previous Thor films. The “Immigrant Song” needle drops for the opening and climactic sequences are some of the most effective musical moments in MCU history. The score work is consistent with the film’s broader creative ambitions.
Those two “Immigrant Song” sequences are my favorite minutes in the picture. When that song kicks in, the film finally lets Thor look like the god of thunder, and I wish Waititi had trusted that feeling for longer than a needle drop at a time.
The Sakaar Sequences
The Sakaar planet introduced a new visual aesthetic to the MCU that owes considerable debt to Jack Kirby’s late-1970s comic art. The garbage-color palette, the disposable architecture, the gladiatorial arena: all of this is competent world-building executed at high technical level. The Hulk vs Thor combat sequence is one of the better MCU action setpieces. The escape from Sakaar through the wormholes is visually inventive.
The problem with Sakaar is structural instead of aesthetic. The entire planet exists as a detour from the actual plot.
Hela has taken over Asgard and is murdering the population. Thor’s response is to spend approximately half the film’s runtime trapped in gladiator games on another world while the genocide proceeds. The detour is fun but tonally wrong for the situation the film has established. A serious version of this story would have Thor returning to Asgard immediately or sooner.
The Sakaar detour exists because the film prioritizes its individual setpieces over the urgency the main plot demanded.
For Writers
Thor: Ragnarok’s Sakaar detour shows the cost of prioritizing individual setpieces over plot urgency. The film establishes that Hela is taking over Asgard and killing the population. It then sends Thor to another world for half the runtime while the genocide proceeds. The audience is being asked to enjoy the gladiator games while the established stakes deteriorate. The disconnect generates audience patience problems even when individual scenes work well. The lesson for writers is that stakes establish urgency and urgency demands proportionate response from the protagonist.
If your protagonist is delayed from addressing the stakes you’ve established, the delay must be plot-necessary instead of authorial-convenient. Thor’s detour to Sakaar is authorial.
The film wanted the gladiator sequences and built the plot around having them. The audience reads the construction even when the construction is hidden well. If you’re writing serialized fiction with established stakes, the protagonist’s actions must remain proportionate to those stakes.
Sakaar is where the film wanders off. The detours play like the writers took a vacation from the plot, and I felt it even while the jokes were landing. Shorter Sakaar sequences would have kept the urgency. The film chose to stretch them and paid the cost.
The Comedy Register
Taika Waititi’s specific comedic voice dominates the film.
His personal performances as the rock-creature Korg deliver many of the film’s most quoted lines. The improvisation Waititi encouraged across the production gave Chris Hemsworth room to find the comedic version of Thor that later films would build on. The “He’s a friend from work” line delivered by a child during the Hulk reunion was improvised. Multiple sequences across the film contain improvised material that the production kept because the moments worked.
The comedy tone is well-executed within its own ambitions.
The issue is whether the ambitions matched what the character and the franchise required. The previous Thor films hadn’t allowed Hemsworth to be funny because their writers had written the character as classical and serious. Ragnarok recognized that Hemsworth had real comedic capacity and built the film around extracting that capacity. The decision improved the actor’s individual performance range. It also disconnected the character from what the earlier films had established.
The comedy is also not always honest. Several sequences treat real emotional moments as setups for jokes. Surrounding comedy undercuts Odin’s death scene, which should have been one of the franchise’s most affecting beats given the character’s importance across multiple films, and prevents the audience from absorbing the weight. The film can’t have it both ways. Either Odin’s death matters and the film treats it seriously, or Odin’s death is plot-clearing convenience the film handles briskly. Ragnarok wants both and gets neither.
Odin’s death is the scene that fails worst. I wanted the film to sit still for thirty seconds and let the old king go, and it couldn’t manage even that before reaching for the next gag.
Craft: The Tonal Pivot That Broke The Franchise
Craft Note
Thor: Ragnarok is the inflection point at which the MCU began treating its own mythology as material to mock instead of as material to honor. The decision was creative instead of accidental. Marvel Studios brought in Taika Waititi to pivot the Thor films toward comedy after the Thor: The Dark World performance had disappointed both critically and commercially. The pivot worked in commercial terms (Ragnarok grossed approximately eight hundred fifty-four million dollars worldwide, considerably above its predecessor). It also began a tonal trend that would define the franchise’s later decline.
The Whedon-era MCU had used humor as a counterweight to real emotional and dramatic stakes.
Tony Stark’s snark in Iron Man worked because the underlying situation was dangerous. Peter Parker’s awkwardness in Spider-Man: Homecoming worked because the underlying responsibilities were heavy. The Whedon model treated comedy as a tone that lived alongside seriousness instead of replacing it.
The Waititi-era MCU treats comedy as the dominant tone and treats seriousness as material to subvert. Ragnarok began this. Captain Marvel continued it. Thor: Love and Thunder accelerated it into the disaster of 2022. Quantumania pushed it past the point of audience tolerance. The Marvels confirmed the audience had had enough. Every entry across this trajectory shares the same problem: the films treat their own mythology and characters as ironic material instead of as material that earns belief.
Comedy isn’t the problem. The problem is comedy that arrives at the expense of the seriousness the franchise had previously established. Audiences will accept tonal pivots that benefit the material. Audiences will reject tonal pivots that strip-mine established dramatic capital for short-term laughs. Ragnarok was the first major MCU film to do the second thing at scale. The audience response was positive at the time. The response across the later films that adopted the same approach has been catastrophic.
The lesson for franchise filmmakers is that tonal continuity is part of the contract with the audience. Break the contract once and the audience tolerates it.
Break it repeatedly and the audience leaves. Ragnarok broke it the first time and the franchise has spent the later decade breaking it repeatedly. The collapse of the late MCU is largely the consequence of the choice this film initiated.
Is Thor: Ragnarok worth watching?
A 6. Thor: Ragnarok is a funny film that achieved its individual creative ambitions while damaging the longer-term franchise the film was part of. Cate Blanchett’s Hela, Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, and Mark Mothersbaugh’s score are all real craft achievements. Taika Waititi’s direction is competent and his Korg performance contributes several of the film’s most quoted moments. The Sakaar visual aesthetic introduces a successful new tone to the MCU’s cosmic side.
The film is also the moment when the MCU began treating its mythology as material to mock instead of material to honor.
The Thor character emerges from Ragnarok as a different protagonist than the one who entered. The film destroys Asgard as a third-act consequence. It reduces Loki from dramatic antagonist to comedy partner. It plays the Hulk’s body-horror tragedy for laughs. The choices were defensible individually and disastrous in aggregate.
I’ve watched it twice. The first time it played exactly as Marvel intended: fast, loud, funny and full of surprises. The second time the jokes had lost their snap and the damage underneath was all I could see, so the film got worse for me on rewatch. That’s why it can’t climb above a 6. I enjoyed most of its running time and I resent what it cost the character, and everything the franchise did with Thor afterward has only hardened that opinion.
