The MCU film that broke me

Rating: 1/10 (30 August 2018)

It's been a long road for me these past 10 years, keeping up with all these random MCU films for better or worse. With such a diverse set of characters, concepts, and settings, I guess it was always inevitable that this would be a franchise where the movies would either be great, terrible, or somewhere in between. Personally, my favorite has always been the first Thor film. My least favorite has always been Guardians of the Galaxy. In other words, I'm clearly in a specific minority in the MCU's audience. All the same, regardless of the film or its quality, I felt I could always take consolation in one thing: that I would always love Chris Hemsworth as Thor and that I could always count on him to just be the good old-fashioned God of Thunder that I knew and loved.
How wrong I was. That cozy myth was completely shattered for me after watching Thor: Ragnarok. I had always known in the back of my mind that there were a number of tiny little things about the MCU and its overall execution that bothered me, but this was a film that took all those flaws, made them exponentially larger and more noticeable, and placed them on a big, shiny pedestal for everyone to see. At first, my biggest concern for the MCU was that all of its future standalone hero films would just be wastes of time like Antman or Dr. Strange; in other words, mindless clones of the first Iron Man. Ragnarok, of course, has given me a bigger concern: that sooner or later, all of these films, regardless of their type, will just be mindless clones of Guardians and all the protagonists will just be red-clad quip machines like Tony Stark, Peter Quell, Antman, Dr. Strange, Spiderman, etc.. Can't a guy say he's had enough?
As biased as I may be, I still feel that Ragnarok, even on the technical level, is a flat-out terrible film. Besides the fact a dead serious warrior demigod clearly wouldn't completely change his personality overnight to that of a guffawing, blonde-haired Jar Jar Binks for no reason, the movie suffers from a multitude of other problems as well. First off, objectively speaking, the events of the film include Thor's father dying, his three best friends getting killed, his hammer getting smashed to pieces, his right eye getting torn out, and his home-world getting blown to smithereens. Also objectively speaking, practically none of the characters ever acknowledge these events; they just drunkenly stagger from scene-to-scene, improvising idiotic, irrelevant dialogue, and generally trying way too hard to treat the movie like a comedy instead of an epic tragedy.
Unfortunately, as Taika Waititi so painstakingly proves, you really can't make something this dark, terrible, and traumatizing into a comedy. The incessant stabs at cutesy or inappropriate humor at unfitting moments gets really old, really fast, especially when more than half of all these forced jokes involve either contrived slapstick or references to sex or genitalia. Arguably, the true tragedy here is a movie that's supposed to be a comedy, but didn't once make me laugh or smile during its two-hour runtime. All I could do was sit there staring at the screen, wondering if the movie was trying to be funny, serious, both, or neither?
All the characters in a nutshell:
Surtur-Clancy Brown as Mr. Krabs as a towering devil creature. Surely his member is the biggest, most flaming one of them all, yet Thor makes no mention of it. Talk about a HUGE missed opportunity.
Hulk-While I do appreciate Hulk finally being a character for once (and not just a big green deus ex machina), why DOES the sight of his anatomy upset Thor so much? I get that you're "trying to be funny", Thor, but you've been all over the galaxy, you've seen far bigger, veinier things on bigger monsters multiple times; get over it.
The Grandmaster-Jeff Goldblum as himself in an MCU film... and he has an orgy ship... and a big portal in the sky of his world called "the Devil's Anus". Clever stuff.
Valkyrie-An apathetic, knife-wielding broad with a drinking problem. So... Tony Stark and Gamora rolled into one? Clever stuff.
Hela-A generically evil woman who somehow gets far less screen-time and character development than Jeff Goldblum... even though he's not the main enemy. Girl power!!
Scourge-Yet another vehicle for contrived jokes that adds shockingly little to the story. Are we really supposed to feel anything when he dies shooting a bunch of cgi skeletons in the face with a couple of assault rifles? Was that supposed to be funny too? I'm so confused.
Korg-The insensitive clod that makes fun of Asgard being blown to kingdom come while its once-proud people look on in sorrow. Yeah, this guy is SOOOOOOOOO funny.
Miek-Korg's simple-minded, cgi best friend. Unfortunately, the only thing he ever says is, "I am Miek." Spoiler alert: he dies at the end, but also miraculously survives.
Having said that, there are plenty of other grievances I have with this film (like the main plot of Asgard's endangerment and the subplot of Planet Hulk literally having nothing to do with each other), but I think you get the idea. I wanted to see Thor going through this dark chapter in his life as exactly that-a dark chapter in his life. Instead, I got Chris Hemsworth skipping around everywhere and giggling like a little girl for two hours straight, falling over himself and talking about how he always wanted to be a woman... all while his family, friends, and homeland get torn to bloody shreds all around him.
To Thor: Ragnarok, I give 1/10 stars for singlehandedly ruining Thor's character and, by extension, the entire MCU. I now understand how utterly pointless it is to pay attention to what exactly any of these characters are; sooner or later, they'll all devolve into uncreative, cackling zombie clones of Tony Stark and Peter Quell. And that's just not funny.