Thor: Ragnarok brings a few twists into its final chapter of the first Thor trilogy and changes the character and his world in many ways.
Thor 3 is built around the event of “Ragnarok,” which is a driving force of this story. But connecting how the Ragnarok prophecy relates to this outcome of the movie may be a bit confusing.
A King’s Power
In the final battle against Cate Blanchett’s Hela, Thor finds himself outclassed. Within seconds, Hela has Thor beaten down and on his knees, and adds injury to insult by slashing out his eye.
While Hela is going for the kill, Thor enters a vision where he meets Odin in a field in Norway where the All-Father had died. Odin then reveals to Thor that his broken hammer Mjolnir was a power conduit and not a source and it awakened Thor’s true powers as a god of thunder.
With that power, Thor becomes stronger and can fly without the Mjolnir’s help and call down lightning in many ways. While the new power is not enough to defeat Hela, it sets Thor up to be a living weapon.
Welcoming Ragnarok
When Thor’s awakened power is not enough to defeat Hela, he again searches his vision of Odin and has another realization: he needs to think less as a superhero and more like a King of Asgard.
As Odin had explained, Asgard is a people and a culture, not a place. Thor had spent 2 years after the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron trying to stop the Ragnarok prophecy. But as he is watching Hela and the undead soldiers slaughtering the Asgardian people, Thor realizes that sacrificing Asgard to save the people is the real choice to be made.
While Thor distracts Hela, he sends Loki into Odin’s vault to place The Crown of Surtur on The Eternal Flame, which had been a prophesied cause of Ragnarok that Thor had worked so hard to avoid. When Loki then puts the crown on The Flame, it restores Surtur to a giant and the fire demon lays waste to Hela.
Thor, Loki, Hulk, Valkyrie, and Heimdall escape Ragnarok with a spaceship with surviving As gardians. Their destination is a Norwegian site where Odin had died. The journey is not really underway before the sons of Odin run into a huge problem, during a post-credits button scene:
Thor: Ragnarok is now in theaters. Other upcoming MCU movies include Black Panther on February 16, 2018, 2017, Avengers: Infinity War on May 4, 2018, Ant-Man and the Wasp on July 6, 2018, Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming on July 5, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.
