Ragnarok - a film review

Magne (Thor) and his brother Lauritz (Loki)

When my father was a boy, he loved to tell me, it cost him fifteen cents to take in a movie: ten cents for the movie, five cents for candy. He didn’t live long enough to marvel at the fact that we now watch more movies at home than in theaters, and that, between Netflix and Amazon Prime and several other purveyors of modern-day films, we have something pretty close to movies-on-demand. That’s the good news.

The bad news is you still have to take the time to separate the good stuff from the shlock, of which there seems to be an endless supply. But I feel guilty even bringing that up. People who complain their luxuries aren’t luxurious enough should be ashamed of themselves, the scold who sits on my shoulder whispers regularly in my ear.

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OK. Got that out of the way.

“Twilight of the Gods” means something to anyone familiar with Wagner’s operas and his fascination with Nordic myths. It’s the title - Götterdämmerung, in German - of the last opera in his four-opera ring cycle. Less familiar is the fact that Wagner borrowed it from the Old Norse word Ragnarök, a term from a 13th Century Icelandic literary form known as the poetic edda. It’s an account of an end-of-the-world battle between the gods and the giants. The gods represent order, the giants, chaos. Nobody wins. The end isn’t pretty. We all die.

My idea of the most beautiful place in the world is Norway, known especially for its fjords where the mountains drop dramatically into the ocean. People travel from all over the world just to have their breath taken away. That’s a very good reason for renting this Norwegian series, Ragnarök. The story takes place in a town called Edda, and we're just getting started here with mythical references. The original conception is a brilliant one, I think, to infuse a modern-day tale with ancient Norse mythical characters and have them act out a battle between the forces of order and the forces of chaos where you never know from one moment to the next which side is winning.

Unfortunately, they don’t pull it off all that well. It’s kind of fun to watch, particularly if you have at least a bit of knowledge of Norse mythology. If your knowledge is, like mine, pretty much limited to the recognition that we have named four of our days of the week after Norse gods (sometimes called Germanic gods), to wit:  Tiusday (Tiu is the Anglo-Saxon way of saying Tyr, the son of Woden, the Supreme Deity), Wodensday, Thorsday (Thor is the god of thunder, strength and protection) and Freyasday (Freya is Woden’s missus), it wouldn’t hurt to get at least a Wikipedia article or two under your belt before diving in.

Ragnarok is the brainchild of screenwriter, playwright and restaurateur Adam Price, the creator of one of the very best TV series of all time, in my opinion - about the Danish political scene, Borgen. That the same person could do both Borgen and this piece illustrates nicely the Japanese saying, “Even monkeys fall from trees.”

It’s not that you can’t get into the story. And the acting is good. It’s not just the Norwegian scenery. But the plot is a complete mess. Characters change their behavior on a dime; you have no idea what motivates them from one minute to the next. The battle between good and evil is between environmentalist teenagers and an adult generation that failed them by choosing global warming over clean drinking water. But the sides are never drawn. The kids are never sure who their adult allies are, and after the kids demonstrate that the town's drinking water is seriously toxic, everybody in town shows up at church to mourn the CEO of the offending corporation. And when the hero - the hunk who plays Magne - the “Thor” character, learns that his girlfriend was actually murdered by the corporate weasels, he surrenders his powers because killing is wrong. His mother lives for her sons, but is so clueless about what’s going on with her boys you get angry at the writers for making such a sympathetic character so stupid. And then it turns out blood is destiny, not family; father’s blood, that is, not mother’s blood, of course.

Maybe if you’re a reincarnated Viking this makes sense. But the personality changes are way too frequent to make the characters believable.

The fact that the film is of the YA genre - a new concept for me - “young adult” as a genre - may be another reason for having a look. You might even call it a high school movie, with all the goings on about who’s into who and who’s still a virgin - if that sort of thing interests you. And if you’re LGBT there’s a bunch of both gay and lesbian relationships to make the point that Norway is an enlightened place these days. (But still tribal and Viking macho?)

The hero, the Thor character, is a hunky blonde handsome fellow, vulnerable (dyslexic) and kind-hearted. A hero chosen by the witch Wenche to become the modern-day Thor (throwing into confusion whether it's destiny which drives him or whether he's the chosen instrument of the gods). He stops needing glasses, his muscles grow and he busts out of his shirt, and he can suddenly throw a sledge hammer a kilometer and a half. But he remains the sweet new kid in the neighborhood who doesn’t want to hurt anybody. What’s not to love about that, I ask you.

Two seasons. The first is more high school drama, the second brings out the fact that these are gods and giants bringing on the apocalypse, and we're all going to die. (In Season 3 maybe?)

Not the worst thing on television.

 

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