Hela looks like a witch, but she is a serious brawler, fighting with an endless supply of swords!! Loki and Thor get great action too, and all that training clearly went in. Hats off to the work behind these roles.
Bought the cinema programme and found one genuinely disappointing thing…
Every actor, and the ones playing Asgardians most of all, paid enormous attention to accent.
Asgard is a proper realm of high standing, so the speech has to sound noble. They were drilled hard in an upper-class British accent, and then shifted that accent further depending on the kind of life each character had lived.
None of that lands without English, and missing it is a real shame.
The secret hidden in the play honouring Loki (the cameos)
The real-life older brother of Chris, who plays Thor.
Playing Thor in the play.
Never expected the big brother to be in there lol
Hela, goddess of death
Cate Blanchett
Wow — astonishingly beautiful.
Wonderful.
A god-tier villain.
Unlike the comics and the myths, she is Thor’s actual older sister!
Long ago she ruled the Nine Realms alongside Odin as his goddess of war and executioner, and her appetite for slaughter got her sealed away.
Even an awakened Thor is an even match for her. She may well have won, that’s how colossal her combat power is.
Wondered whether Hela could raise or control the dead, but there’s no sign of it in the film — it looks like she’d need the Eternal Flame for that.
Less a goddess in the sense of death itself, more a goddess who deals out death.
Still, that body that gets run through again and again and refuses to die really does embody the death god.
Where Hela goes next
Asgard is destroyed at the end of the film.
Hela was on Asgard at the time, but the chance she died is zero lol
From Thor
In the first film Loki was thrown off Asgard exactly like this and survived, and went on to meet Thanos.
Same deal for Hela, surely.
In the comics Hela is of course the one Thanos loves.
It was for her sake that Thanos became obsessed with ruling the universe and started the Infinity War.
A reader pointed this out in the comments. Thank you!
Sorry!!!!! Had Death and Hela down as the same person! I cried
They are in fact different characters, and it’s Thanos and Death who were the couple.
Death’s profile below.
Death (Earth-616) | Marvel Database | FANDOM powered by Wikia
Death is the embodiment and personification of the end of life in the Marvel Universe, and the counterpart of Eternity (the embodiment of all life in the universe taken together). Her “sibling” Oblivion represents the end of existence. The Living Tribunal likened Death to “vengeance”. Death is omnipresent throughout the Marvel Universe. In War Is Hell she forced the soldier John Kowalski to bear countless lives and deaths as punishment for doing nothing to stop the invasion of Poland, making him an aspect of Death; in Ghost Rider she posed as “Death Ryder” to test Johnny Blaze. The Titan Thanos is smitten with her, and in the Captain Marvel storyline he lays out his plan to conquer the universe, intending to express his love for Death by killing every living thing in it. Having obtained the Cosmic Cube, Thanos succeeds in ruling the universe, but when Captain Marvel, Drax and the Avengers join forces and defeat him, Death abandons him. Unable to let go of his love for her, Thanos later sets off the Infinity Gauntlet saga. She is also romantically involved with Deadpool.
Powers and abilities
As a cosmic concept, Death has the power to bring about virtually any effect. Death is an abstract being with no physical form, and normally appears in a female shape so that lesser beings can perceive her. Death exists in a pocket dimension known as the Realm of Death.
Another reader came through with something new! Thank you!
Apparently there’s talk among fans that having both Death and Hela on screen would only confuse people, so the films may simply merge Hela and Death into one character.
Thor: Ragnarok’s Hela Just Kissed Thanos In The Comics: Is She Death? | moviepilot.com
With that in mind, a return in Infinity War is 100% certain.
Whether Thanos is acting for Hela’s sake in the films too is the thing to watch.
Hard to picture how Thanos would ever have met a Hela who was sealed away, though.
Before she was imprisoned, maybe?
Need to get properly into the comics lol
Thor(Chris Hemsworth)
That Surtur scene had me howling lol
Structurally the film does the same thing as La La Land. Open with a joke, or a dance, and tell the audience straight away what kind of film this is going to be.
Electrocuted, beaten senseless by the Hulk — he gets treated horribly this time lol
The haircut was apparently Chris Hemsworth’s own suggestion.
His reasoning being that the audience gets bored of the same hair forever lol
So the change lands at the arena, exactly where the story turns as well.
The short hair makes him look like a real fighter.
And it gives the film that part two begins!! feeling you get in Japanese manga. Great sense of rhythm.
Knew the late-film scene was coming, but the arena as well — never expected him to unlock it there and wreck the Hulk.
The hammer being nothing but a tool for controlling Thor’s power, and that exchange — what are you the god of? The god of hammers? — brilliant.
With no hammer he can’t fly any more, so how does that get solved?
Once he does unlock it, though, he’s throwing out wide-area attacks and is absurdly strong.
With more training he could surely go past Hela too.
Which makes Thanos, who is stronger still, something to really look forward to.
He loses an eye (the right one), just like his father!
The director says he was given a lot of freedom, because if they ever want the eye back they can explain it with Tony’s tech and do whatever they like lol
He officially becomes king this time, but can he actually govern? Probably not lol
One thing that caught my ear: sometimes the subtitles say Thor Odinson and sometimes Thor, son of Odin, and I wondered whether there’s a nuance in there.
Hulk(Mark Ruffalo)
The duality is drawn strongly, like Jekyll and Hyde, and the character of Hulk / Bruce Banner is dug into more carefully than ever before.
He’s spent two years fighting as the Hulk, and maybe that raised his intelligence a little, because he can hold a simple conversation now.
Less a monster looking for a fight, more one looking for somewhere to belong. Proof that he isn’t just a monster, and that was lovely to see.
Wanting to stay on Sakaar because nobody persecutes him there came through strongly.
That moment in the Quinjet where he sees Romanoff’s face and that violent Hulk goes teary and turns back into Bruce Banner hit hard.
He goes toe to toe with Fenris, the giant wolf monster, and nobody in the arena can touch him — the Hulk really is the strongest.
He fights Thor too, and who actually won is open to debate lol
The shirt he’s wearing is apparently a Duran Duran album tee.
Robert Downey Jr., who plays Tony Stark, is a huge Duran Duran fan, which is why that T-shirt got picked. Tony comes up briefly in the film too, which was a nice touch.
Calling Thor a surfer boy and letting a mean streak show lol
Set Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy aside and he’s the first in Marvel history to have been to another planet lol
There’s even a tourist quality to him here — a brighter Bruce Banner with his shoulders down.
He ends up travelling on the ship with Thor, so where does that go next?
Odin(Sir Anthony Hopkins CBE)
Played by the great Anthony Hopkins, and the reason he took Odin on was apparently that Kenneth Branagh — famous as Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter, among other things — was directing.
Away from Asgard, the source of his power, the spell holding Hela presumably weakened, so she was freed, his own power faded, and he dies — a shocking turn to put in the opening stretch.
He tells Thor and Loki at the end that they were good sons, so the bad blood is settled and nothing is left hanging.
Being exiled to Earth clearly changed him a great deal.
Stern up to now, but this time a good father.
He seems to have had dealings with Doctor Strange, and what on earth they talked about is a real curiosity.
He was hiding the dark fact that he took the Nine Realms by force alongside Hela.
Thor refusing to agonise over it was very cool.
Anywhere can become Asgard — that line matters a lot lol
Loki(Tom Hiddleston)
Wondered what kind of rule he’d run while posing as Odin, and it turns out he was living a life of decadence — Loki’s ambitions are small, is what I thought.
Betrayal after betrayal, and Thor sees through every one — the god of mischief really can only manage mischief now lol
Expected him to fight with magic, so watching him fight with his body was a surprise lol
A character you can never quite hate, one whose death would genuinely hurt.
The back-and-forth with Thor was wonderful.
Thought he might die this time, and glad he didn’t.
Want plenty more comic double-acts like this with Thor in future.
The “Get Help” routine, for one, was the best joke in the film.
Then there’s him being terrified of the Hulk. Getting smashed around at the end of the first Avengers clearly left a lasting trauma.
Valkyrie(Tessa Lynne Thompson)
Valkyrie’s comics background is as follows.
[Hero] Real name: Brunnhilde / Samantha Parrington. God / female / Asgardian
Powers: stronger than the average Asgardian god. Immeasurable strength, speed and stamina, and a highly experienced warrior. She can also sense when a person is about to die.
Teams: the Avengers, the Defenders, the Avengers Initiative, the Secret Avengers and others
The strongest female warrior in Asgard, riding the winged horse Aragorn and wielding the enchanted sword Dragonfang.
After centuries of fighting the sorceress Enchantress, she came to modern-day Earth.
A master of the thrown spear. Dragonfang, the sword that can never be broken, is said to have been made from a dragon’s tooth.
She travels on the winged horse Aragorn, a gift from the Black Knight.
In the aftermath of Fear Itself she fought alone against every hero on Earth who opposed her, in order to seal away the eight hammers left on the surface.
In AvX she was a member of the anti-Phoenix unit, with Thor as leader.
More recently she formed the all-female hero team the Fearless Defenders. She lets the soul of Annabelle, the archaeologist member who died, possess her.
There’s a hint of something starting with the Hulk, but Romanoff is in the way, so no. Or maybe something with Loki lol
Played by someone so charming that this character became an instant favourite.
Surtur(Clancy Brown)
The villain Surtur.
A fire giant standing over 300 metres tall, who existed before Odin and the Asgardian gods and became a threat to Asgard through wicked cunning and enormous power. Odin imprisoned him in the Earth’s core, but he has been released several times. The first release was by Loki, to bring disaster to Earth; he flew about as a ball of fire before shooting out of the atmosphere and being trapped on an asteroid in another galaxy. The being who killed Odin.
Surtur : What divine creatures!! A round-up of the Thor villains — NAVER Matome
The king who rules a place called Muspelheim.
Thor treats him with utter contempt and he goes down easily, but the Eternal Flame that is the source of his power turns him into a demolition device for destroying Asgard lol
Absolutely hilarious. He finally gets to wipe the place out and there’s nobody left in it lol
Stan Lee
This time he’s the one cutting Thor’s hair on Sakaar lol
The Warriors Three
Volstagg — played by Ray Stevenson
Fandral — played by Zachary Levi
Hogun — played by Tadanobu Asano
#594 Thor (Ito P’s blog)
Tadanobu Asano and the Warriors Three return in Thor: Ragnarok | Cinema Frontline
The Warriors Three, with us since the very first film, are all killed.
Maybe giving them a proper final moment like this is better than quietly writing them out.
Asano gets a long fight and a death the camera really stays on, so good treatment for the Japanese member.
Skurge the Executioner(Karl Urban)
Scary-looking, but a good Asgardian underneath.
Des and Roy coming back long after you’d forgotten them — a great payoff.
The death flags were flying.
Went out looking incredible.
Heimdall(Idris Elba)
The one who noticed something was off about Loki’s Odin and got out early. Could have told Thor a bit sooner lol
His sword is the key item of the film.
Hela can probably move around wherever she likes on her own, so was she after the sword to stop the people escaping?
He has everything a king needs to hold the fleeing people together. Why not just leave the governing to him? lol
His eyes can see anywhere, which is a wonderful ability, and a story that really uses it would be great.
He hates the word slave and seems to have some sense of decency, and then turns out to be a complete psychopath lol
Comes with living for centuries, clearly. Although centuries is our reckoning, so maybe it’s nothing much over there?
Loved this character so much, laughing all the way through.
Very different from the comics version in personality, but this one is great too lol
Looking forward to him sharing the screen with the Collector. And to Topaz, his attendant, played by Rachel House lol
Doctor Strange(Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch)
Astonishing that he has become enough of a sorcerer to play Loki like a toy.
He can pull all kinds of things off with no gestures at all now, so who knows what he’ll be doing in Infinity War.
He’s holding the Time Stone, one of the Infinity Stones, so Thanos taking it off him is a certainty…
He seems to be guarding Earth constantly, set up to know whenever something alien arrives.
He lives in New York, the same as Spider-Man, so a team-up with him would be great too.
The ship at the end
The enormous ship that appears in front of Thor’s ship at the end. Personally it comes down to these two.
1. The Thanos ship theory
As mentioned in the Loki section, Loki has stolen the Tesseract. And the one hunting the Infinity Stones is Thanos. So Thanos is hardly a wild guess.
In the Infinity War trailer Thor is drifting through space, and gets picked up by the Guardians of the Galaxy by chance.
Escaped from Thanos’ ship by the skin of his teeth, maybe.
The ship is long and wide though, and while it does look a bit like the ship belonging to Ronan — the villain of the first Guardians of the Galaxy who was allied with Thanos — there are also touches of Adam Warlock’s pod in it. Which is why the Adam Warlock theory goes on the list too.
↑ Ronan’s ship
And from Thanos’ point of view, going after the Tesseract first, since it controls space, makes perfect sense as a means of transport.
According to that very thorough piece above, the ship at the end is apparently the Sanctuary II, so it’s confirmed as Thanos’ ship!
2. The Adam Warlock ship theory
The Thanos theory is the strong one, but if it were Adam Warlock’s ship things would get pretty interesting lol
Adam Warlock turned up in the second Guardians of the Galaxy. Not the man himself, only the pod, and the ship at the end of this film felt to me like it carried that pod’s design language, hence the theory.
The flow of the second Guardians of the Galaxy makes him look like the villain of the third, but Adam Warlock is a central figure in the Infinity War story in the comics, so my guess is he shows up in Infinity War rather than in the third film.
Superhuman strength and physical ability, plus the power to fly through space unaided energy manipulation magic a genius intellect and every other ability besides
The Frost Giants’ Casket. It appears in the first film.
More detail in this article
The small cube
That’s the Tesseract, an Infinity Stone.
Related work below.
Loki uses it in the Infinity War trailer, so he definitely stole it.
The Gauntlet
There was a lot of talk about the Gauntlet being in the vault in the first Thor, with people saying Odin was the mastermind and so on, and it turns out it was a fake. Obviously lol
What’s interesting is that the Gauntlet existed in the first place.
You can read it as an object that already existed rather than something Thanos built.
So who made it? The Cosmic Beings? The Celestials?
Personally I’d go with Eternity.
Eternity was born when the universe formed (together with Death, Oblivion and Infinity) and every living thing within it naturally came to be thought of as a collective consciousness. He is every living thing, and every living thing is him. He therefore controls everything on every plane of existence apart from the Living Tribunal, who maintains the cosmic balance of power. Eternity is the physical incarnation of time, while his sister Infinity represents space. Also, should Galactus ever die or cease to exist, Abraxas, Eternity’s opposite number, would be born. Eternity is protected by Captain Universe. The origin and exact nature of the abstract known as Eternity is unknown and unknowable. It is the sum of the collective consciousness of every living thing in the universe, the embodiment of their lives, with Death as the embodiment of the end of those lives.
First time seeing it, the horns looked like Hela’s headpiece, so I thought she might be coming back through it. Nope lol
The planet Sakaar
All that clutter felt a bit like Akira and a bit like Blade Runner, which was fun.
So much Jack Kirby design in there — a city built out of pure respect for the man!
Korg — played by Taika Waititi
The revolution failed lol And that high-pitched voice (in the subtitled version) apparently belongs to the director himself.
Killing his insect mate (who survives) and all the rest — a very funny guy lol
Will he be back, and if he is, will the director play him again?
Asgard
Asgard is finally gone.
Odin said anywhere can be Asgard, but it really being destroyed still came as a shock.
In the comics Oklahoma became New Asgard, so are we heading the same way?
Not many citizens left, as expected.
Probably because their lifespans are so absurdly long that there’s no need to grow the population.
Immigrant Song
“Immigrant Song” is apparently a song about the Norse Vikings.
Here’s the remarkable part — Led Zeppelin normally say no to their music being used like this in a film.
And this time they allowed it. A miracle!!
On top of that, the theme is migration.
By the end of the film Thor, the people who were on Sakaar, the Asgardians — huge numbers of them have become migrants.
No question that it’s the song that sums the film up.
On the film as a whole
Loads of small references, like Xandar from Guardians of the Galaxy!
The original plan was for a very short film at 90 minutes.
But after a lot of editing they added far more comedy and it came out at 120 minutes.
A proper Marvel film on a comedy track, and the story and the digging into the characters were both good.
Thor is not just a big idiot here but a real character, full of life, and Loki shows a new side too.
The colours are vivid, and the respect for Jack Kirby was wonderful.
It uses Norse mythology well, blends in the source material from Planet Hulk and Thor: God of Thunder, and pulling that many things into one film is a work of genius. Enormously satisfied. Marvel films keep getting better and better, so Black Panther, Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp all have a huge amount to live up to.
Deleted / re-edited scenes
Covered in the Hela section, the Odin’s vault section and the ship at the end section above! lol