Taika Waititi Sucks, Ask Me How
Majority of quotes pulled from this article by Screen Rant.
And here are some things Taika Waititi, the so-called “saviour” of the Thor franchise (*vomit*) has said about the indescribably complex God of Mischief, and about his own role in “reinventing” the franchise.
Having absolutely no respect for the source material is always a good place to start when making a film, right? Good fight, Marvel.
Oh boy. Let’s break this down. What have we got here?
Inability to empathize with others
Stigmatizing of mental illness
Openly insulting your target audience
Having no clue what a character having “dimensions” means
I’m not being nitpicky here. I’m genuinely clueless as to what he means by Banner having “dimensions” in Thor: Ragnarok. In prior movies, Banner was intelligent and empathetic. He cared about who he hurt when he would transform into the Hulk. By contrast, in Ragnarok, he walked around chronically confused and was not the least bit fazed about having killed people for sport.
It’s very, very interesting to me that Waititi refers specifically to “feeling guilt about our behaviour”. That’s literally the exact opposite of what Waititi portrayed in this film. Every character does horrible things and none of them shows an iota of regret for their actions. Was this man high while he was filming? Did he not watch his own movie?
Again with the inability to empathize with Loki and Thor solely because they’re rich. This is how you know he didn’t watch the previous films. He chronically has no idea what he’s talking about.
We shouldn’t empathise with Loki finding out he was kidnapped from a race that he’s been brought up to believe are subhuman—because he’s rich? We shouldn’t empathise with desperately trying to prove his worth—because he’s rich? We shouldn’t empathise with feeling invisible and unappreciated—because he’s rich? We shouldn’t empathise with Thor’s quest to become a better person— because he’s rich? We shouldn’t empathise with the emotional abuse both Loki and Thor endure at Odin’s hands—because they’re rich? We shouldn’t empathise with Loki having a mental health crisis that ends in committing suicide because that’s preferable to disappointing his father yet again—because he’s rich? What on earth is wrong with Taika Waititi?
Alongside Waititi’s inability to empathise with rich children, he seems to have a bizarre problem with orphans. Thank god there are no orphans in real life; they might get offended.
► Taika Waititi: “Well, I wanted this little thing, and maybe if we ever do a Thor 4 we can have it, but I wanted to do some flashbacks where Thor was a kid, a fat little kid. There was like an 80s version of Asgard where everyone had massive shoulder pads, and everyone had mullets. Our idea was Thor and Valkyrie meet and he’s like, ‘Hey I know you,’ and she’s like, ‘Ha, I remember you,’ and then it cuts back to this thing and he’s just this pudgy little kid walking around with a mullet and being picked on by other kids. And Loki’s like this little emo goth hanging out by himself. He was like the kid in Harry Potter, [Malfoy].”
Just a reminder—as established at the beginning of this article, Thor (2011) literally opened with a scene of Thor and Loki as kids and this is what they looked like:
Also, has Taika Waititi even watched Harry Potter? When has Draco Malfoy ever hung out by himself? Dips#*&.
There’s a bizarre trend in cinema as a whole wherein a woman can only be considered “strong” insofar as she inhabits certain stereotypically masculine virtues. Being intelligent makes a woman boring. Being pretty makes a woman boring (Side note: I’m not sure what he’s intending to say about Tessa Thompson here? Is she not pretty?). In Taika Waititi’s world, a woman can only be strong insofar as she’s “more of a guy than the guys”. Please tell me again about how “woke” this man is. I’m being serious, I truly can’t see it. Citation needed.
All of this is not even getting into the grotesqueness of using Valkyrie’s alcoholism as a punchline. Yet more ableism from the oh-so-“progressive” Waititi.
Additional examples of Waititi’s “respectful disrespect” of previous canon, with a specific focus on Loki (the majority of quotes provided here come from this Empire Film podcast).
► “Not to really want to humiliate Loki all the way through the film, but because he was definitely overpowering in the other films in terms of his presence and his story… it was nice to just switch it around.”
► “You really see that Thor has given up on trying to save Loki, and doesn’t give a shit about him anymore. And once you take away that—which, to be honest, gets pretty boring when you have to listen him say to Loki, ‘Oh, stop this madness’ while Loki’s just being a little shit for the entire film—it’s nice to turn the tables a bit.”
► “I would just feed them lines and feed Chris ideas for stories. I’d say, ‘Do another one, in this one say: ‘I was walking through a field, and I saw a lovely Turkish rug in the middle of the grass, and I love Turkish rugs, so I went to stand on it, and it was Loki, and he turned back into Loki and there was a hole and I fell through the hole and was impaled on a whole lot of spikes.’”
► “[Thor’s] brother [has been] trying to kill him his entire life.”
► “My favorite performance is Chris’s performance because just knowing how fun he is and funny and charming, and he often is the kind of person who makes you feel like, ‘Oh, man, if you actually were Thor, I would totally come on an adventure with you.’ I just love having the opportunity to give him free rein to just be himself and to be charming and to be the favorite character.”
There you have it. By his own admission, Taika had two agendas: making sure Thor was the favourite character and letting Chris Hemsworth play himself instead of playing—I’ll say it again—the character he was hired to play.
► “We basically just destroyed everything that went before[…]The play scene in the film was meant to be our message to the audience, saying, ‘Whatever you’ve held onto, whatever you fell in love with in the last films, allow us to respectfully disrespect that stuff.’”
Some Loki fans have taken to calling this the Ragnarok Cinematic Universe, which in my view is not at all unfair. It gives no regard to anything that came before it; it freely and gleefully rewrites previously established canon. For fans of the first two Thor movies and of The Avengers (2012), it is its own universe. No matter how hard you try, you cannot reconcile them. I’m sorry, but that’s just a fact. That’s not me saying that, it’s the source material saying it. It’s Taika Waititi saying it. The amount of mental gymnastics required to reconcile these films into one universe—to accept all of the movies as canon—is not possible to achieve. You have to give precedence either to the original films or to Ragnarok. You cannot accept both as canon, because they exist in direct contrast with one another.
In conclusion, Taika Waititi is a selfish sack of trash who doesn’t give a damn about artistic integrity or respecting continuity and/or basic logic. His movie is full of countless plotholes, and he doesn’t care. The only thing he cared about was making the cheap comedy he felt like making, whether that fit the franchise or not and no matter who he and Chris Hemsworth had to throw under the bus to do it. But hey. No respectful disrespect to either of them. That makes it better, right? I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure out how all this works now.
Just imagine if he’d done this with a female cast member. I don’t have to like Chris Hemsworth to be disgusted by his objectification.
ellievsbear
vaporwave
dededos
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
