Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Directed by Alan Taylor (Terminator Genisys, 1 to 3 middling episodes of every HBO series ever)

Written by Christopher L. Yost, Christopher Markus, & Stephen McFeely (this is the Captain America team plus Yost, who mostly wrote Marvel TV shows before this)

Let me pitch you a movie: It’s a sequel to a profitable and moderately critically acclaimed movie made a few years previously. It features the return of an astonishingly popular breakout character with a broad fanbase. It features a meaningful character death, and takes place in a multiverse of nine realms, each with their own particular flavor of science fantasy. The conclusion involves a battle that ranges across all of those realms through a series of unpredictable portals, drawing the residents of these diverse dimensions into the fray. Sounds great, right? Too bad, it’s Thor: The Dark World, a movie so bafflingly badly executed that it manages to squander all of that potential I just described to be one of the most drab, boring, miserable entries in the entire MCU. The plot, like that of Iron Man 3 before it, attempts to deal with the fallout of Avengers while also serving as a sequel to the previous entry in this franchise. Loki is returned to Asgard in chains to face justice. At the same time, an ancient army defeated by Odin’s own father and led by despotic madman Malekith (an unrecognizable Christopher Eccleston) has come back with a powerful doomsday McGuffin in an attempt to end all life as we know it across all of the Nine Realms. Due to a staggering coincidence, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, sleepwalking for the duration) is contaminated with the doomsday weapon and must be carried around the plot by a series of people with more agency than her in an attempt to stave off destruction.

If it already wasn’t clear from my tone, this movie is a bit of a train wreck. It somehow manages to ruin one of the coolest premises of any movie in the MCU, and that almost takes willful effort to do. I think it would be best to take the issues that this movie has in rough groups, the first and most damning of which is the characters. The very first thing this movie does is bench its best character for over half of its runtime. Not in any way that creates dramatic tension or excitement, of course. They just throw Loki into a jail cell for a full hour of the movie with nothing to do, no schemes to execute, and almost no dialogue. This decision is so inept as to stagger the mind. Then, after that, they bring Jane Foster back when she so very clearly doesn’t want to be. Natalie Portman is visibly miserable throughout this movie, her every smile seeming hollow and desperate. She is brought into the plot through coincidence, and is immediately reduced to an object of it, bandied about by the characters with actual agency until the very end of the movie. She is, in every way, even worse than a typical damsel in distress. In her very first scene (an awkward date with a totally extraneous character), she can’t even leave until the man she’s with tells her to. She makes no real decisions throughout the entire film, just being moved from scene to scene by real characters. It’s incredibly disappointing. Darcy (Kat Dennings) is back, and has been changed from a chipper fool (in the classic sense) of a character to a brutally annoying and never funny imbecile who gets a love subplot for some ungodly reason. The villains are completely devoid of any personality other than being angry and violent, and don’t even have an interesting origin story. The Warriors Three have nothing to do, and almost no lines in the movie. And that’s only the beginning.

This movie has the most diverse and interesting potential setting of any Marvel movie ever. It has the ability to go to any of Nine mythical realms, for which there are no rules or parameters established by previous canon. They could have done anything with them. What did they do? Svartalfheim is so visually boring that you literally cannot distinguish features of its landscape. It is monochromatic and miserable. There’s one that’s kind of generic Eastern-flavored fantasy realm. Those are the only ones that they do. This waste makes me so angry I can barely express it. They had the wonders of a multiverse to play with and they gave us a grim expanse of brown nothing and a generic mildly fantasy setting. Even setting significant portions of the film in Asgard can’t save it, as they do nothing with that setting, either. Nothing surprising happens in the entire beginning of this movie. Anthony Hopkins is tasked with dumping the entire plot in a single long, convoluted speech filled with technobabble, and not even he can manage to make it interesting.

Perhaps the worst thing of all, though, is that this movie is never exciting or intelligent. It will never do something creative or visually interesting if it can possibly do it in a drab and boring way. This movie has a superhero jailbreak in it. This should be amazing. They literally just walk in, take the people, and then a bunch of the jailbreakers stay behind to fight their pursuers. It is the most boring heist/scheme I have ever seen in a movie. They wrote a finale when all of the passageways between worlds are open and a gigantic fight breaks out, rampaging through all of them. At one point there is a monster that gets out into London. The monster looks like a big rock lion thing. This is the only thing they do with this premise. In addition, a couple of fighter jets end up in generic fantasy land, where they do nothing. The lack of creativity displayed by this finale beggars belief. They could have had any number of creative jokes, scares, or action setpieces, and they just do none of it. The final fight takes place in a tornado that obscures most vision and nuance from the performances (not that there was much to begin with). It’s the most thoroughly mediocre execution of a brilliant idea that there has ever been. It makes the Iron Man sequels look like brilliant narrative masterpieces.

There are a few things I like about this movie. The Chris Evans cameo is lovely. Once Loki actually gets to do things (far, far too late to save it) he’s got some cool scenes. Some of the weird science anomaly stuff is cool. There. That’s it. That’s all I like about it. There will never be a reason to revisit this movie. It is boring, dumb, frustrating, and seems to deliberately attempt to squander any potential that its premise may have given it. Avoid at all costs.

Overall:

Stray Thoughts:

• Malekith’s henchman in this is terrible, the worst kind of villain. He has no personality, he is just big and strong, and he is completely unkillable until he isn’t.
• I am glad that Frigga gets a sword fight before she goes out like a punk, but her noble sacrifice didn’t even work! That’s terrible storytelling.
• The design team forgot that complicated does not necessarily mean interesting. The design of everything in this movie is busy and stupid.
• Loki’s speech as Odin at the end makes no sense from a character standpoint. It’s either the most convoluted doublethink ever or completely out of character for him.
• They can’t even make a Viking funeral cool, and that’s the coolest kind of funeral!
• I didn’t even get into all the hilarious mental health jokes in the movie. They’re not at all problematic!
• Thor’s dramatic return to Earth was either filmed terribly or edited terribly; it’s hard to tell which. It lands with no emotional or visual impact whatsoever. “Huh? Oh, Thor’s here, I guess.”
• Post-credits scene 1: I like Benicio Del Toro, I like Guardians, I like this scene.
• Post-credits scene 2: I do not care at all. The emotion is absent and the joke is dumb.
• Stan Lee cameo: This one is funny. It got a smirk out of me.