Notes on 'Ragnarök'

[Spoilers ahead for God of War: Ragnarök and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania]

Last night, I finally beat God of War: Ragnarök even though the game came out back in November. As someone who adored the previous entry, 2018’s God of War, I don’t know why I dragged my feet on playing it, but I agree with criticism that it’s a bit slow to start. And yet by the end, the emotional core of the game was so strong that I felt that any critiques I may have had paled in comparison to what I had experienced.

Video games are a funny art form because they’re so dependent on technology. Some even hesitate to call them art, not because they think they’re “good” or “bad”, but because its interactive nature makes it more in line with games, which we typically don’t call “art.” For example, a chess set may be artfully designed with all the pieces and board loving crafted and realized, but the game itself would never be called “art.” It’s an interesting distinction, but for video game in particular, it’s curious because they’ve evolved so quickly.

Technological limitations also put barriers on the kinds of stories that could be told. There’s not some deep character arc in Super Mario Bros. You’re Mario. You’re a plumber. You have to save a princess who’s being held in a castle by an evil turtle/dinosaur guy named Bowser (or King Koopa, depending on your preference). That’s it. That’s the game. There’s no story about how Mario is trying to atone for the death of his wife after she was crushed to death by a T-Rex statue at the Museum of Natural History.

But in the almost 40 years since that game came out, we now have stuff like God of War and The Last of Us that are trying to find the space to make fun, exciting games that still rest on an emotionally captivating story. They don’t always succeed, but it’s an option that’s now on the table whereas in past years the best you could have done would be a text-based adventure game with limited graphical capability.

Even relatively recent games lack the storytelling heft of new releases. To compare the God of War series to itself, the first three game in the series, released for the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, are incredibly fun, but the protagonist, Kratos, is a bit one-dimensional. Angry at the gods for tricking him into slaying his own family, he goes on a rampage through the Hellenistic world and slaughters everyone who gets in his way. 2018’s God of War is a sequel but also a drastic reinvention where Kratos (Christopher Judge) now lives in the world of Norse mythology (as opposed to Greek), and he’s a single father trying to raise his son Atreus (Sunny Suljic) after the death of his wife. There’s still a lot of slaying of mythological creatures, but it’s a game with a heavy reliance on its story, specifically how a man driven by rage and violence can be a good father to his son.

God of War: Ragnarök picks up about three after the first game. Atreus has moved from pre-teen to adolescence, and he’s trying to find his way in the world. While the first game benefits from being driven by Kratos and his journey, Ragnarök attempts to expand the canvas, telling not only Kratos’ story but also Atreus’ journey. The game builds on the first with Kratos continually trying to figure out what it means to be a “good” father, but Atreus’ journey is also a coming-of-age story where he wants to figure out what kind of man he will be. The game also brings in more supporting characters and attempts to give them all depth and coloring.

It feels odd to critique Ragnarök when you can see so much work up on screen. I don’t know if younger players can appreciate how far we’ve come, but it’s not just that gameplay is fun and the story is good. There’s incredible touches like how Atreus’ little mohawk blows in the breeze. There’s a level of realism from the mo-capped animated characters that makes the emotional power come alive. We have exited the Uncanny Valley, and so the emotional bond between Kratos and Atreus really lands. So while I can say that the story is a little slow to start and the broader canvas drains some of the narrative’s momentum as we hop between different characters, these feel like minor qualms when the game is doing so much right.

Yes, Ragnarök is an absurdly violent game. I would not let a child play it (or any of the God of War games for that matter), but somehow that doesn’t detract from the story’s emotional stakes. If anything, the game wrestles with how violence changes a person and the will to find a better way forward. Part of Atreus’ journey is thinking of war as just a way to stop a bad guy but in the middle of the fray realizing that it’s messy and there’s a huge cost where innocent bystanders get trapped in the middle. Even though there’s a clear good guy (Kratos/Atreus) and bad guy (Odin, played by Richard Schiff in a genius bit of casting), the game still finds time to find the shading in between to reach its emotional crescendo.

Over on Letterboxd, I wrote a review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania that got far more attention than my Letterboxd reviews typically get. Some commenters took issue with my statement that protagonist Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) doesn’t have a character arc and that I must not have been paying attention or even “lying” (to what end?!). But look at the movie: after a prologue of Kang’s (Jonathan Majors) crash-landing, you have Scott happily going through his life. He’s then confronted by his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who says that ever since he helped saved the world in Avengers: Endgame, he’s not doing much for other people. Scott doesn’t really argue this point, nor does he have time to because he, Cassie, Scott’s partner Hope/Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), mentor Hank Pam (Michael Douglas), and Hank’s wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), are all sucked into the Quantum Realm. And from there, the stakes of the story simply become, “We need to escape and make sure Kang doesn’t get out because he’s a bad guy.”

But nothing in the film challenges who Scott is or what he believes. Cassie’s criticism at the beginning of the movie is basically that Scott hasn’t helped anyone lately. But once he’s sucked into the Quantum Realm, he helps people because that’s who he is. There’s some very minor tension between Scott wanting to keep Cassie safe and helping the locals, but that tension is quickly resolved when we see Cassie has her own Ant-Man suit and he quickly teaches her how to throw a punch. The film mostly avoids tension because Scott loves his daughter and wants to help people, and she also wants to help people, so most of the time they’re just helping people. When they’re captured by Kang, Kang threatens to kill Cassie if Scott doesn’t retrieve this movie’s MacGuffin, and Scott agrees because he loves his daughter. And then it’s just a bunch of plot shenanigans where nothing is really sacrificed, but the world is saved and Kang is defeated for now. Even the feint at a sacrifice—that Scott may be trapped in the Quantum Realm, separated from Cassie yet again—is quickly reversed so that the film ends by comically replaying the opening scene of Scott happily going through his life. There’s a little bit of fake drama with Scott wondering if he did the right thing by stopping Kang, but then the film ends on a joke with Scott eating cake he doesn’t like. The end.

Characters don’t need to be radically changed by their stories, but typically the whole point of an adventure narrative is that the character does change in some way. It can even be something relatively minor. You could argue Luke Skywalker is the same guy at the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope as he is at the end—a guy who wants to get away from his boring life. But even here, the film plays against Luke’s expectations where he discovers that going on an adventure has its costs (he loses his aunt, uncle, and Obi-wan) and that he can use The Force.

In Ragnarök, the culmination of the story is Kratos learning that his son’s deep well of empathy makes him a stronger warrior, not a weaker one. He also accepts that while he will never be truly ready to let his son go, that is what all parents must do. It’s a universal story with the tension of protection and letting-go permeating the story. Compare that to Quantumania where Cassie is like, “Dad, you should help more people,” and Scott is like, “You’re right,” and then they help more people. Scott is protective of Cassie, but never in a way that causes significant tension between them. There’s not even tension over how different they are with the film throwing in a joke between Scott and Cassie where they compare how many times they’ve each been to jail.

This comparison isn’t to say video games are getting better than movies, but rather that it was nice to see a different medium take its storytelling seriously enough to give me an emotional experience and make me feel invested in the characters. Yes, they both have some silly action trappings. One has a guy hacking draugrs to pieces with his magical axe, and the other has giant ants coming in to help save the world. But Ragnarök doesn’t just shrug its shoulders, say, “This is all silly, so we don’t have to try too hard.” Instead, it works diligently to nail the emotional core of its story. Even though Ragnarök has more time to tell its story (games like this tend to be tens of hours), that doesn't excuse Quantumania for its slapdash approach.

We now live in an age where there’s far more competition for compelling narrative storytelling in visual mediums. TV upped its game in the 2000s and now video games have reached the technological maturity to do the same on a consistent basis. Overloading your film with CGI spectacle and quips from charming actors isn’t going to be enough to cut it anymore. Studios like Marvel are going to have to up their game.