Director: Taika Waititi
Writers: Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba, Jeff Goldblum, Tessa Thompson, Karl Urban, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Hopkins, Taika Waititi
Runtime: 130 mins.
2017
The Marvel Cinematic Universe here enters its 17th entry, and for at least the last ten of those it hasn't been able to shake a particular debate: Are all Marvel movies the same?
For my part, I tend to be impressed by the malleability of Marvel's formula. Ever since the anonymous Thor: The Dark World, every new film has very explicitly staked a claim to its own genre identity. The Winter Soldier is a political thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy is a space opera comedy, Ant-Man is a heist movie, Iron Man 3 is a Shane Black movie. These movies have gotten to a comfortable enough place that they can take aesthetic risks, and visually each film seems more differentiated than the last, a trend that is set to continue if the entrancing footage from Black Panther is any indication.
That being said, there are commonalities between the films that are worth paying attention to. Cameos, post-credit scenes, regrettable forgettable set-ups for future movies, weak villains, generic CGI portal-based action climaxes. By themselves these surface-level resemblances do not make the franchise samey, but they are interconnected with some deep tissue storytelling tendencies that I suspect are the major factor in making audiences feel like they are watching something they've seen before. Chief among these are a lack of consequence and character arcs that slyly cut corners in order to perpetually sustain the regressive status quo.
Ragnarok is very much a Marvel movie in that it yet again features all these issues in some measure. Despite being played by one of the most talented actors in film, Hela (Cate Blanchett) is somehow yet another underwhelming villain. The climax is trying its hardest to enliven the cliches, and it is admittedly badass eye candy, but remains a CGI throwdown with faceless villains and portal macguffins. The themes and character motivations are present throughout, but often occluded. Fortunately, just like Guardians of the Galaxy before it, Marvel found a director uniquely suited to exploit the shortcomings of the Marvel model.
