Thor- Ragnorak

I don't really love this film. I maybe don't even really like it. Mostly I just don't care.

The problem is that here the Marvel behemoth feels like it's busily dragging a few of its many feet forward as it lurches toward the_Infinity Wars_ extravaganza where it plans to (and wants us to know it will) emit a thunderous bellow. And I find that exhausting. As I've said before, this massive studio-as-story-world is fascinating from a film history perspective and I'm curious about the technical aspects of project development and coordination, but the films themselves often feel like a burden, something to keep tabs on lest you miss a set-up or fail to grasp a winking reference to what's come before, but mostly they come across as just fastidious and stale.

Without being anti-genre, anti-superhero, anti-sci-fi or -fantasy, I'm tired of them and wish they'd stop tying up talent that I'd rather see doing other work.

(Or maybe this is a better way of thinking about it: in this film, we watch Thor's iconic hammer be destroyed, watch Odin die and Thor become King of Asgard in his place (after killing Death herself), watch the complete destruction of Asgard and the migration of its survivor's to Earth. We also bask in the happy-making fanboy scenes of Thor and Hulk engaged in a battle royale and of Jeff Goldblum in high form. And yet, all of this—every last bit of it—is really just set-up for the only 30 seconds of the film that matter: the post-credit encounter with the purple guy's space ship as it heads to Earth. When your entire film experience is demoted to a footnote by an ad in the final moments of the film, you've wasted your time watching.)