Taika Waititi Taking Over The 'Thor' Franchise Is The Best Move Marvel Has Made

THOR: RAGNAROK

At a time in which any new Star Wars film is sure to find its director relieved of their duties mid-shoot, it’s pretty amazing that Marvel gave a movie, wholeheartedly, to Taika Waititi. Nothing that the Kiwi director had done — from Eagle Vs Shark to The Hunt For The Wilderpeople — on NZ shores suggested he was built for making a $200mil blockbuster. But, here he is, evidently given enough freedom that Thor: Ragnarok has moments where it feels like a Waititi film: its cast finding old pals Rachel House and Cohen Holloway, even Waititi himself; the intergalactic saga shot through with a dose of his trademark deadpan humour, its dialogue scattering improv’d awkwardness amidst the weighty intonations of Marvelist mythos.

Waititi knows that a comic-book saga pillaging from Norse mythology is a preposterous proposition, and acts accordingly. Any time a dramatic speech is delivered, it’s undercut with mocking comedy, especially if delivered by a villain intent on planetary destruction. When a “volatile cosmic gateway” is found that can expedite a potentially-planet-saving mission, it turns out it’s called the Devil’s Anus. There’s a joke, spoken by Waititi, that goes: “the hammer pulled you off?” In short, the third Thor movie has — for all its sibling rivalries and stagey Anthony Hopkins monologues — little in common with the first two; losing the tragic gravity, and replacing it with absurdist levity.

The last film was literally called The Dark World; here, the worlds, plural, are wildly-coloured, shot through with lightness in frame and sensibility. Ragnarok may take its name from a prophesied apocalypse, but there’s nary a note of doom. The notes of its score, from Devo leader Mark Mothersbaugh, play up the video-game-ish notions of MCU CGI filmmaking, and the kitschy quality of the film’s visuals: kettle-drum bombast overlaid with chirruping flutters of chiptune plinks. Rather than off-the-rack compositions, Mothersbaugh’s work feels pleasingly bespoke; its collision of timbres matching the cacophony of Ragnarok. Dark this ain’t: it’s bright, batty, and pleasingly ridiculous; cavorting through lurid landscapes with a sense of giddy joy.

The 17th movie in the Marvel monstrosity largely takes place on a Gilliamesque planet called Sakaar, a literal junkheap on which the refuse of distant planets is dumped. Crawling over the mountains of waste are a wake of scavengers, hooded and masked in wackadoo costumes that look pulled from deep-storage of the old Mighty Boosh wardrobe. Out of the rubbish rises a city whose high-rises have the higgledy-piggledy look of unplanned building; towers tacked on towers, in dirty reds, lurid beetroots, bottle blues. Inside the Oz-like edifice of its self-appointed ruler, the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum!), the interior design is pure chaos: jagged patterns, sharehouse-worthy hard-rubbish couches, red-and-white-striped sci-fi corridors, eye-popping glass bottles, neon-lit nightclubs, each eyesore clashing with everything around it.

This collision of bad-taste stands in contrast to the gilded palaces, regal gardens, and ren-faire outfits of the homeland of Thor, Asgard. There, Chris Hemsworth’s titular God has, after sitting out Civil War, returned to find his thought-dead brother —Tom Hiddleston in way-Goth wardrobe and Tommy Wiseau hair— sitting on the throne; bro Loki’s faked-death retold in local-theatre-level pantos starring Sam Neill and Matt Damon.

After nipping off to Earth for a contractually-obliged Dr. Strange cameo and a quick pop-in with pops (Hopkins), the brothers meet a new sister: Cate Blanchett arriving in Maleficent antlers and bondage-club leatherware and gleeful villainous hammy-ness, a Goddess of Death ready to lay fiery waste to this whole Middle Earthy mise-en-scène. She shows up, shatters the symbolic phallus of Thor’s Hammer, and sends her siblings scattering out of the bubblegum-psychedelia of an interstellar-travel-beam’s rainbow lightshow.

Crashlanding amidst a planetary trash compactor, Hemsworth’s taken prisoner by Tessa Thompson’s scavenger-babe, a defiant drunk whose booze-imbibing blots out the pain of her tragic past as member of Asgard’s Valkyrs, a fleet of female warriors once charged with defending that planet. Now, as the sole surviving Valkyrie, she collects virile specimens to be thrown into a kooky Thunderdome, where the Grandmaster — in true decadent-Roman fashion — sits and watches gladiators tearing each other limb from limb. The reigning champ turns out to be fellow Civil War benchee the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), this toddler-esque monster cultishly-worshipped by local fans in street rave-ups part Hare Krishna, part Burning Man, wholly dowsed in neon green.

With Goldblum’s Wonka-esque dandy intent on keeping our Avengers captive, and Caty B threatening to burn down the house back home, Hemsworth must recruit a cast of unexpected allies to get out of this jam; calling them, in a great moment of cutesy mockery, “the Revengers”. The film inevitably ends with this once-uneasy alliance of rag-tag heroes —Thor, Loki (whose fondness for double-crosses becomes recurring gag), Hulk, Valkyrie, Waititi’s Kiwi-deadpan CGI-rock-monster Korg, Idris Elba back in dreadlock wig and contacts — standing side-by-side, united as a team, ready to head off to be amongst the hundreds of cast members of Infinity Wars. This is the favourite, perennial theme of the MCU: the banding together of individuals, the great fantasy of its fantasy-worlds merely the dream of friendship.

There’s a similar side-by-side tableau near close, of a spaceship pulling away from Asgard, that serves as open homage to one of Waititi’s most obvious influences, Wes Anderson. As the ensemble gazes out the ship’s viewing-deck window, it’s effectively a recreation of a climactic shot from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Waititi shares many of Anderson’s predilections: the deadpan delivery, the marriage of sincerity and irony, the symmetrical framing, the characters facing front-on to the camera, Goldblum, the Mothersbaugh score, the foregrounding of musical cues. Whilst it’s unlikely that Anderson will ever submit to helming a corporate popcorn-picture — leaving, instead, only the internet’s unfunny ‘what if Wes Anderson directed _____’ parodies — Thor: Ragnarok is a fine example of what happens when an oddball auteur is given free-rein to helm an MCU extravaganza in his own wonky fashion, with his own cockeyed vision.

Watch our interview with director Taika Waititi below.