Marvel's Funniest Movie Is Now on Netflix

It’s been nearly exactly four years since the powers that be at Marvel forced Edgar Wright off his eight-years-in-the-making project Ant Man. At the time, it seemed to announce that the future of their ambitions involved homogenized movies adhering to a standardized in-house style and toothless humor. Then, just months later, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy exceeded expectations and the studio seemed to again reassess: What if these movies were… fun?

So far, the greatest and most fully-realized attempt at a great film may be Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, the third in the God of Thunder’s solo arc, though it really doesn’t matter what you have and haven’t seen before you hit play. It’s streaming on Netflix right now, and it’s essential viewing for everyone from the hungriest Marvel completist to the kind of person who doesn’t “do” superhero movies.

When the MCU was populated by only a handful of recognizable faces, Thor was already the “lesser” franchise next to the immediate heavy hitters like Iron Man and Captain America. Ragnarok’s effective prequel, Thor: The Dark World, is currently the lowest-ranked MCU movie EVER on Rotten Tomatoes, even one percentage point below Louis Leterrier and Ed Norton’s ill-fated The Incredible Hulk. (Dark World is actually a pretty good film, and certainly better than a great deal of other MCU movies, but that’s a conversation for another time.)

That it’s a superhero movie is barely the point of Ragnarok, which finally understands the humor potential in a self-serious character like Thor, and an anything-goes setting I can best describe as “space but magic.” Very early in the film, Waititi strips Thor of his most iconic affectations: His hammer is destroyed and [gasp] his hair is cut. Waititi dares Thor, and us, to ask: Who is this dude, really?

A supporting role for Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/The Hulk—Thor’s most begrudging ally within the Avengers—makes for great foil, and Waititi finds a satisfying and (thank God) final spin on Loki’s constant double-crossing his brother. Cate Blanchett as Hela, the Goddess of Death, helps Waititi solve Marvel’s boring villain problem, at least for this movie, and Tessa Thompson is a welcome addition as alcoholic bounty hunter, Valkyrie.

The movie is fast and affecting enough to work as one of the MCU’s best entries regardless, but Waititi’s adherence to his own voice (literally, at certain points in the film) makes this easily the funniest entry in the MCU so far. In a movie that features the Incredible Hulk fighting a giant undead wolf on a rainbow bridge, the film’s most memorable moments are its truly funny asides. When every last one of these fucking movies is about saving the world/a world/the universe, the finer points can get lost in the shuffle or, God forbid, get relegated to Whedon-style jokes that stopped working before even Buffy ended. Waititi, who cut his teeth on the hyper-specific humors of What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, knows this better than anyone. A small anecdote Thor shares from his childhood about snakes belongs in the movie monologue hall of fame.

While the Infinity War discourse rages, Thor: Ragnarok is a colorful, low-stakes oasis that serves to underline just how good superhero movies can be. It’s also a blueprint of how incoming filmmakers should approach the genre going forward, the lesson itself the stuff of superhero movies: just be yourself.