Review of Thor: The Dark World (2013) by Erik A — 22 Apr 2015

While and entertaining action flick, The Dark World suffers from a weak script.

The dialogue is unimpressive and is not representative of the characters who speak it. For example, a lot of Asgardians use common modern idioms, and each time I had to wonder how they knew what the phrase actually meant. Other times, the humor got in the way, whether it was simply uncharacteristic of the speaker or it was just ill-timed. I will, however, admit that have of the jokes did make me laugh.

Speaking of which, Loki's purpose in the middle of the film seemed to be that of a joke machine. Upon the onset Thor and Loki's team-up, Loki did nothing but crack jokes for about ten minutes straight - jokes that might have been funny decades ago but by now are so overused. I wanted Thor to knock him out just so I didn't have to listen to him anymore. That being said, Hiddleston did the best he could with what was given to him, and the majority of his lines were delivered quite charmingly. However, I do feel that the movie would have been fine without Loki and he was included only because of Hiddleston's rise to popularity - so they have him a top hat and can and told him to dance about the stage a bit.

My biggest complaint lies with the characterization of Jane. For someone so smart, she carried out rather dumb conversations with other characters. I hated that she was rude to Odin when in fact any scientist brought to a new world would be in awe of it, especially if that world was Asgard and you were the first human there in a very long time or possibly ever. Then, when the writers wanted to remind us that Jane was a scientist, she would rattle off some nonsense that hardly meant anything; she would simply list some scientific concepts as if the writers looked up one of them on wikipedia and then wrote down five other topics from the "see also" section. If that wasn't bad enough, Jane was simply a weak female character who sat around just missing Thor as if she was nothing without him. It's one thing to show how much she loved him, but The Dark World completed did away with everything that was interesting about her in 2011's Thor.

On the flip side, the excuse for involving Jane so deeply into the story was one of the film's greatest strengths. I won't spoil how that was done, but it made sense and was effective.

The other great strength from this film was showing how much Thor had developed as the protector of the nine realms, much more mature and complex than the start of his first movie. Hemsworth gives a noteworthy performance, one in which you can always tell what's troubling his character just by looking at his face and body language.

The overall story was fine, but forgettable. Brief pseudo-spoiler: the plot revolved around a villain who took advantage a rare event that takes place when worlds align. It's not a bad story, it's just one that we've seen so many times before. The villain himself might have been interesting, but we don't really know since we were never really given insight to his motivations.

There started to be a side-story on the relationship (or lack thereof) between Thor and Sif. It was touch upon multiple times in the first third of the movie, then simply abandoned. In fact, we didn't even see Sif or the Warriors Three in the second half of the film (except for a three-second shot of Hogun in the middle of the climax), which was disappointing because those characters represent the best of Asgard (not just its might, but it's culture).

In conclusion, the acting was good, that directing was fine, the action and effects were fun, but none of that was enough to make up for the weak writing. To be honest, that's quite surprising since the writers have proven themselves to handle superhero material quite impressively in the past. Having said that, I'll admit that the movie was still amusing to watch (the first time; I have no desire to see it again).