A Watered Down Husk

Rating: 1/10 (28 November 2019)

I really don't want to hate this movie.
First of all, the characters personalities have been neutered, to the point where they're basically bad joke/self referential one liner vending machines.
And I hate to use an overused joke considering the movie I'm reviewing, but...
Take a shot of alcohol every time there's a joke that doesn't add to the plot or characters, try and make it through the first half, in fact, forget that, try and make through the first fifteen minutes, you'll be very drunk.
Also, for a movie with such a colourful poster, why does the movie itself look so dull? Asgard in the first two movies looked so grand, and shiny.
In this movie, while there's technically more colour, it feels more flat.
It's like the cinematographer turned the brightness up to the absolute maximum, and the contrast down to the absolute minimum so instead of the colours standing out, the picture looks mostly white and grey.
One of the more stranger things I felt with this movie, is that it feels like the filmmakers hate all the characters, except for maybe Heimdall.
Thor and Loki are constantly falling over, getting hit in the head, and getting electrocuted, which in Thor's case doesn't make sense, since he can shoot lightening at the end.
Volstagg, Fandral, and Hogun are just killed off in their first scenes, and Thor doesn't even react or find out.
Sif isn't even mentioned in this movie.
Hela's the villain, so yeah I'm not surprised there.
Valkyrie is just an alcoholic who kidnaps people for money, and yeah that's about all there is to her character, yeah the villain killed her wife but at the end when she's fighting Hela, she doesn't say, "That was for my lover" or anything related to that, that little bit of back story just felt pointless.
Skurge, he basically has no character, he's just fed info by Hela, turns good again at the end, then dies.
Bruce Banner, he's just here so the producers could put The Hulk on all the posters and in all of the trailers, other then that, he doesn't have a character ark, he just falls over a lot, gets hit in the head a bunch, and he says unfunny one liners, basically the same as Thor and Loki.
And finally Odin, what really surprised me with this specifically, is how the writers added a bunch of backstory to Odin's character, to just ignore it.
Basically Odin and Hela went around conquering and committing genocide on different worlds.
You'd think being Odin's son, Thor might have some sort of emotional response to this, but just like with Volstagg, Fandral, and Hogun, he doesn't even find out, so it's just as useless.
And last of all here's a question I bet even people who like this movie can't answer, What is the theme/message of this movie?
Because I can name the themes/messages for the first two movies just fine.
The theme/message for Thor (2011) "Killing people just for disagreeing with you, only creates enemies"
The theme/message for Thor The Dark World "Forcing your people to give up their lives for their land is no less brutal then mass genocide"
The theme/message for Thor Ragnarok, after weeks of thinking "Forcing people, to do things against their will is fine, as long it's the good guys who are forcing them"

It's a shame when a series starts off by simply being, and doing its own thing.
But then the producers start listening to the people who weren't even fans to begin with, and they turn it into an obnoxious, cynical, condescending, self parody, that I didn't walk out on, because I still like the MCU.