Thor: Ragnarok reminded me of Iron Man 3, the similarity being that to close out the trilogy, Marvel Studios decided to bring in a very stylistic director. Both movies suffered because of this but they also gained a lot in bringing some freshness to the property.
I would advice anyone, fan or not, to watch the first two movies, as well as the Avengers movies, prior to watching Ragnarok. This is to ensure maximum enjoyability with any references made to the older movies.
And that is also credit to director Taika Waititi's style of storytelling and humour. A lot of that came from him but they lived and breathed inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Especially when it came to the sequence with Doctor Strange, that was Waititi having a lot of fun with these Marvel characters.
But he brought in many new and lovable characters. Cate Blanchett left nothing behind when portraying Hela, Jeff Goldblum's Grandmaster was the most offbeat, Tessa Thompson was kick-ass as Valkyrie, and Waititi himself as Korg really grew on me by the end of the movie.
The colours and the tone really differed from the past two Thor movies, in a very good way. We are already very familiar with Chris Hemsworth as Thor and now we get to see where else Marvel wants to take this character.
Humour seemed to be one major part, which also, as a fanboy of the franchise, I thought went a little overboard. Thor is the God of Thunder, not a character I would see cracking jokes and pulling faces every chance he got. But that was what happened here. While I could appreciate a lot of it, but sometimes a few of them made me hesitate to follow through with what I was watching.
Also, I thought the characters of Fandral and Volstagg, played by Zachary Levi and Ray Stevenson respectively, were not handled well enough. Even Anthony Hopkins' Odin should have had made a bigger impact in the story. Especially when all of them were introduced to us so well by Kenneth Branagh in the first movie.
And for all the talk about how this would be a buddy-cop type of movie with Thor and Hulk, there was barely any of them going around together. This was more of the "Revengers" than just the duo.
But what Waititi did fantastically was knowing when to blast the "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin to achieve full effect, marrying the music and the visuals. And to finally see Thor in his lightning glory brought tears to my eyes once again.
And he also brought great action sequences with him. The first battle with Thor and Surtur's minions, the way Hela decimated the Asgardians, Hulk versus Thor in the arena, and the final battle on the rainbow bridge; these were all some of the best we have ever seen in Marvel movies.
If I was not such a fanboy, I may have ranked this higher. But because Thor has been humanized too much and just was not the direction I expected him to go, that kind of disappointed me slightly. Maybe watching it a second time would bring a better experience without the expectations.
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