I really need to remember that Marvel isn’t going to be able to hit everything out of the park. I mean, I definitely trust them to make a good movie over most comic book companies, and Iron Man 3 was definitely a great way to excite me for the future, but no one is infallible, and it certainly makes sense that Thor: The Dark World isn’t very good when it’s the follow up to what is probably the worst of the Marvel Universe first wave.
Thor: The Dark World is the follow up to the 2011 Thor film that helped to set up for The Avengers. Coming directly after The Avengers, Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, is now going through the 9 Realms in order to restore them to order after his brother Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston, made a mess of things in with his alliance with the Chittauri. A force known as the Dark Elves has come about to destroy Thor’s home of Asgard, and now he must work to defeat the evil Dark Elf King Malekith, played by Christopher Eccleston. While all this is happening, he needs to continue working on developing his relationship with Jane Foster, an Earth scientist played by Natalie Portman.
So I’m not going to play around this time, because I’m scratching at the bottom of the barrel to be able to say anything. It was just kinda boring. The movie never really takes the time to make the audience care about the characters in the film, because it really just kind of meanders around without a care. How does is manage the fact that most people don’t know who the Dark Elves are? Doesn’t care. How does it try to make Jane Foster an interesting character when the original left he bland? Doesn’t care! How does it try to make any of the action that occurs through the film have any character or plot impact? It does not caaaaaaaaaaaaare!
Thor was always the least interesting of the Avengers anyways, and this movie kind of just kind of solidifies with me that he’ll never be engaging, because he’s just a big, strong, semi arrogant hero who wants to be heroic on his own terms, Jane is just a boring lovey dovey love interest, who really is just brutally dull, and Thor’s Asgardian companions are….are they…named? ….Dear me, its suffering from Hunger Games Syndrome. Everyone is just there, I either don’t know why I should care about these people, or I don’t know who they are. This is especially seen with the villain Malekith. All that was interesting was his makeup work, and even that’s kind of generic. He’s just a villain, a very basic, very boring, and very bland villain who I honestly can’t tell you had any particular features that made him interesting. He was just a dark, angry bad guy, who I never found reason to be scared of or sympathize with.
Okay, do I need to talk about Tom Hiddleston as Loki? Because I think that we’re all on the same page as to the fact that outside of Robert Downey Jr.’s career resurgence, he is the best thing to come out of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. The man is just having so much fun in the role, and Loki continuously steals the show throughout the film, coming in with so much personality and power in the role that you have to question if there is a way that the series can be as appealing without him. He just manages to give out so much energy and power to the role that the whole time I was just waiting for him to come on the screen and save the dull mess that was before me.
On the rest of the positives, I will say that the action scenes are mostly good. Well, they are when they’re more focused on being interesting than just being big. For example, all the wild things going on in the final fight scene are far more interesting than one in the middle of the film, and while it should be expected for the final fight to be the better of the two, the one in the middle isn’t even interesting. The final one is really the only truly original of the many in the whole film, so it was hard to get engaged in the rest of the film. But I will admit that the script had a lot of good jokes and points of humor, so it’s at least a witty movie.
I wanted to like this movie. The trailers had me really excited, and the Marvel films are usually really good, but this all it did was get me to want next year here sooner so I can finally see Captain Amercia 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy. Still, if your invested in the Marvel Cinematic universe, it’s worth seeing for the post credits teases.
Final Rank: C-
+ witty and humorous script, great final action scene, Loki
-mostly bland characters and story, unengaging
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