Thor - The Dark World (2013)

Giving Thor a second solo movie made perfect sense. I do still wonder why The Dark World didn’t come out before the, in my mind, unnecessary Iron Man 3 (I’ll stop talking about it now, I really need to build a bridge. I didn’t realise how much I disliked that film until rewatching and reviewing it).

Anything that followed The Avengers was going to be a hard act to follow and The Dark World suffered from a few problems. Chief among them being striking a balance between what takes place in Asgard and what takes place on Earth and how could they link the story of a standalone film into the overarching one that began with the discovery of the Tesseract in Captain America?

Weird thing about doing a wildly popular franchise is that actors fall over themselves to be in them, and if they’ve already scored a gig then they’re happy to hang onto it, at least for a while. That makes the job of casting the film way easier.

The list of actors that returned to reprise their roles from Thor in Thor – The Dark World is fairly lengthy: Chris Hemsworth in the title role, Natalie Portman as his love interest, Tom Hiddleston as the duplicitous Loki, Anthony Hopkins as Odin, Kat Dennings as comedy relief Darcy, Stellan Skarsgard in his 3^rd appearance as Erik Selvig, Ray Stevenson reprised Volstagg and Jaimie Alexander donned her Sif gear again, Rene Russo was Frigga for the second time and she had a bigger role and did something other than stand around looking serene. Idris Elba was Heimdall again.

There was a change of actor in Asgard, with Zachary Levi (best known as Chuck and the voice of Flynn Rider in Tangled) replacing Josh Dallas as Fandral.

Other notable smaller roles and cameos included: Jonathan Howard as Darcy’s hapless intern Ian. Comedian Chris O’Dowd as a hopeful and ultimately unsuccessful boyfriend of Jane’s. Stan Lee’s obligatory cameo was as an inmate of the asylum that Erik finds himself in after a nudie run at Stonehenge. Chris Evans also appears briefly and quite funnily as 'Captain America'.

The villain of the piece is a dark elf by the name of Malekith, played by former Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston. Malekith left me kind of cold and he was a rather generic villain. His main function really was to introduce the aether into the storyline and it is the 3^rd of the infinity stones. The first was the Tesseract, the second the one in Loki’s sceptre. There are 6 in total and we still haven’t seen them all, 4 years later and quite a few films on. The post credit scene where Volstagg and Sif deliver it to The Collector gave Benicio Del Toro a cameo.

The director was another odd choice. I assume, despite being successful with Thor, that Kenneth Branagh had left to pursue other interests. The job went to Alan Taylor, who has mostly worked in 

TV, not film.

The standout performance and the best thing about the film was Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. He plays the character so well. Most of the characters in the MCU films are either heroes or villains. They choose sides. Loki isn’t either and the only side he chooses is himself.

Hemsworth was also very good and his understandable fury when Thor finds his slain mother is one of the film’s best dramatic moments.

In contrast I felt Natalie Portman’s performance lacked fire, despite slapping Thor and attacking Loki when she encounters him again.

There were a few misteps in the film. One is Malekith, another is the decision to turn Erik nto a figure of comic fun. Difficulty was still experienced with balancing the two stories; the one in Asgard with the one on Earth and I can foresee significant difficulties with the relationship between Thor and Jane. Asgard was wonderfully realised, though, and I liked the contrast of futuristic modernity (energy guns, spaceships) with the city’s classical aspect.

It was a fun film and significantly better than the preceding MCU film, but still felt there was something lacking, and a feeling that it was just a little too light.