Thor: The Dark World [2013]
Here we go with the unfavourite black sheep of the MCU movies. Infamous for probably being one of the worst-rated movies among MCU's otherwise crowd-pleasing track record, Thor: The Dark World is... well, it's a confusing run. And both this and Iron Man 3 kind of burnt me out of rewatching/reviewing MCU movies for a while. But hey, here I am talking about it. Honestly, The Dark World isn't even terrible. It's just... very dry. A lot of the problems I think the original Thor had is amplified here, and it's even more noticeable now that the cast is already defined and there's no excuse for the rather scattershot lack of focus in this movie.
One of the problems with Thor and The Dark World is that... well, frankly we're all here for the Norse god action. We want to see Thor fight against Malekith, lord of the dark elves, and his legion of shadow-wielding warriors. We want to see the backstory of the dark elves and how they relate to Asgard. But instead, half of the screentime is focused on the Earthen cast. And while the screentime division isn't quite as lopsided as Thor -- in no small part by bringing Jane Foster to Asgard -- any time we sit down with the Earth cast of Erik, Darcy and Darcy's intern it feels like the movie is grinding into a halt. And I realize that sounds pretty mean because Darcy is one of the funnier characters in the MCU and Erik Selvig is likable, but that's how the movie really feels.
There's also the problem in that Malekith is one of the worst executed supervillains in these MCU movies. We have had (and will have) some flat or uninteresting villains in other movies, but Malekith is probably the only one that isn't even allowed to be entertaining. At least characters like Aldrich Killian or Ronan the Accuser were allowed to really ham it up with grandiose dialogue. Poor Christopher Eccleston isn't really allowed to do much, and it's made worse because the movie Malekith also has one of the most drab page-to-screen translations (the comic-book Malekith was so colourful!). Malekith the Accursed really doesn't get too much depth beyond 'ancient enemy of the Asgardians, now he wants a doomsday weapon'. The fact that the Dark Elves went from being, well, elves into essentially Star Wars aliens with fancy technological ships also felt bizarre in a setting where the main hero wields a magic hammer that shoots out lightning bolts. Thor has had some moments where the 'magic' of Asgard does look like some super-advanced science, particularly with their design of the Bifrost Bridge, but here the aesthetic of the newcomers feel less like they belong in a Thor run, and more like they belong in Guardians of the Galaxy.
Malekith also has the misfortune in that he has to fight over screentime with the ever-popular Loki, who, of course, has became the fandom and the studio's darling after the pretty memorable appearances in Thor and The Avengers. And I don't blame them -- Tom Hiddleston's Loki is a great character and is very well realized. Loki's character arc is easily the best part of this movie, even! But that did come at the sacrifice of the movie losing its primary antagonist.
This movie (and the next one, Age of Ultron) apparently were some of the movies that went through some pretty heavy executive meddling in order to really market the next couple of movies, and there's definitely a slump in this phase of the MCU. I'm not here to try and dissect who dropped the ball, but I'm just thankful that they managed to pick it back up eventually.
Anyway, we'll talk about this movie's story. We get a flashback of an ancient war between Allfather Bor and the dark elves of Svartalfheim, led by Malekith. Malekith wants to unleash the mighty weapon called the Aether to destroy the Nine Realms, but his army was routed by Bor, who sealed the Aether. Malekith, his lieutenant Algrim and a ship manage to escape destruction and hid in the darkness of space. Flash-forward to present day, and Thor is leading his buddies Sif, Fandral, Hogun and Volstagg in beating up space villains in the realm of Vanaheim, pacifying the Nine Realms while the Bifrost Bridge is being repaired. Also, not that the Warriors Three ultimately matter, but Hogun is left behind on Vanaheim for essentially the entire movie.
In London, Midgard, Jane Foster goes on a disastrous date (which was funny but really added nothing) before Darcy Lewis drags her into an abandoned building. Turns out a weird magical space-time continuum breaking portal has appeared, in the form of a weird portal with inconsistent teleportation powers. Darcy and her intern get into some funny antics (those car keys!), but Jane gets teleported into the stone column where Bor sealed the Aether, and the Aether infects her like a parasite.
Jane disappearing into this realm causes Heimdall (who can't see her with his all-seeing vision) to finally send Thor to Midgard. And we get the reunion between Thor and Jane... and Jane's pissed about the whole 'you never called' thing, even after New York. Whoops! It's swept under the rug pretty quickly, though. The whole Aether thing causes Jane to unleash an explosion of energy that knocks back some policemen, and Thor brings Jane into Asgard where the magics medics of Asgard find that the Aether has bonded to Jane. Odin is also furious, not only because of the whole prophecy of the dark elves, but also because Thor has clearly fallen head-over-heels with a pretty mortal woman.
As the strikethroughs have probably clued you in, I'm not the biggest fan of the really sci-fi feel of a lot of the aesthetics of this movie. I don't mind having pragmatic adaptations like the Bifrost in the first Thor movie, but a lot of these feel like they should be in Star Wars or Star Trek or Guardians of the Galaxy instead of a Thor movie. It feels like a bizarre disconnect, and unlike Thor: Ragnarok we don't even have the excuse that these are aliens instead of Nine-Realms-related people.
Also awakened by the Aether's activation is Malekith, who unleashes an invasion on Asgard with his spaceships. Malekith's minion Algrim infiltrates the prisoners from earlier and frees transforms into a 'Kursed', a super-powerful warrior. Loki is among the prisoners that were freed, and out of mischief, gives them some directions to allow them to cause the most havoc.
This sequence is actually pretty cool, from an action movie perspective. Heimdall detecting a stealth ship and managing to single-handedly blow it up, only for the mothership to decloak; the CGI for the black hole grenades; Loki's little moment of mischief... and the final stand of Frigga. Frigga, Thor's mom, got a fair amount of screentime in this one talking to Odin, Thor, Jane and especially Loki, and she shows off that Loki's magics are inherited from her. As Frigga protects Jane, she ends up getting killed by Malekith. We get an actually well-done Viking funeral, before Odin orders everyone to defend Asgard.
Thor, meanwhile, wants to take the fight to Malekith, and goes off to recruit Loki (who knows the 'secret ways' between realms) to do this. And I really do love this scene. Before, Loki is shown to be a pouty bastard in his cell whose only recourse is Frigga occasionally visiting him. And we get so many good scenes for Loki after Frigga's death. The voiceless sequence of a guard informing Loki, and the calm look he has -- which turns into him unleashing a telekinetic blast in his room once the guard is gone. Then him using an illusion to appear confident to Thor, before he dispels it to show him disheveled after clearly unleashing his frustration in the room... Thor notes that he doesn't trust Loki, but he trusts in his hatred and his desire for vengeance against Malekith.
And this part is pretty fun, as Thor and Loki bicker all the way from Asgard to Svartalfheim. Sif, Fandral and Volstagg buy them time as Thor and Loki take Jane away, and we get a pretty cool sequence where it seems that Loki has betrayed Thor to Malekith, slicing off his brother's hand. Malekith uses his dark elf powers to extract the Aether out of Jane... but this is what Thor is banking on, and the two brothers fight against Malekith. It's kind of weird that they were so sure that the process wouldn't kill Jane, but... okay. During this battle, Loki actually jumps in the way of a blow meant for his brother, and gets stabbed by Kurse, but manages to kill Kurse with his black hole grenade thing.
And it's a pretty dramatic scene that almost makes you believe that Loki dies here. Him telling Thor that he did it for his brother but not Odin is even a pretty good way to go out -- he's had some huge daddy issues in Thor, and throughout this movie I think he's learned that he has some people in his family that he's not ashamed to fight and die for. Well, not as ashamed, anyway. It's honestly pretty neat, since we've seen that while Thor isn't the best brother, he was very adamant at trying to give Loki a second chance in Avengers, so Loki recognizing that enough to die for his brother is pretty well-done. Except that, well, we know Loki is the god of lies and mischief. You could almost believe it, though, since Loki has had his moment in the sun as the primary antagonist of two movies. The movie makes it pretty clear that Loki survives, as we see a scene of him disguised as an Asgardian scout, and later on he shows up in the final scene.
But the rest of the movie goes off towards the rather... by-the-books finale, which drags on for a while. I really don't have much to say here There's also a sub-plot of Darcy getting Erik Selvig out of an asylum, and them just sort of plodding along talking about the Convergence. Thor and Jane meet up with them, and they basically manage to come up with these pillars to disrupt the Convergence, or something? Malekith shows up on Earth and is about to use the Aether to infect the Nine Realms, and then we get Thor and Aether-Malekith fighting through the portals. Malekith has huge cloud-manipulating powers thanks to the Aether. It's... it's neat to watch, and I won't disparage the action sequence, but ultimately Malekith is just kind of generically proclaiming doomsday stuff, and the humans teleport Malekith to Svartalfheim where he gets finally crushed by his own ship.
Thor returns to Asgard, where he declines the offer to take the throne (which is another running subplot in the background) and talks about Loki's great sacrifice. 'Odin' allows Thor to return to Midgard to be with Jane -- which he does in the post-credits scene -- before revealing himself to the audience as Loki. Also, because we are really hammering home the Infinity Stone stuff, Volstagg and Sif later visit an alien called the Collector to deposit the Aether with him so that the Aether and Tesseract -- two Infinity Stones -- aren't cloes to each other.
And ultimately, again, the movie itself is just unfocused. The Malekith, Aether and Convergence plot takes up the majority of the movie's focus, but Malekith himself isn't interesting at all and apparently a lot of backstory was left at the cutting room floor. The B-plots of Thor's romance with Jane is just barely competently done (Jane herself honestly isn't that interesting of a character), whereas the rest of the Midgardian cast is pretty much distraction. Meanwhile, the movie's strongest parts -- Frigga's sacrifice and Loki's eventual character development -- is basically sequestered to the second act and is only tangentially relevant to the Malekith/Aether plotline. Which, as I repeated multiple times... is kind of generic and the movie doesn't do a lot to elevate it above being a generic 'destroy the world' plotline. And, well... toss in that rather unmemorable final act which is essentially just a more muted version of Avengers but with portals, and it is kind of no surprise that The Dark World ends up feeling like a sub-par movie. There's a lot that I feel they wanted to do here, but it's all just boiled down to the bare bones. I wouldn't call the movie 'unwatchable' or 'terrible', because I still had fun with it, but I was definitely exhausted by the end of it.
- Post-Credits Scene: This one has multiple. The mid-credits scene shows Sif and Volstagg putting the Aether as safekeeping with the Collector. The post-credits scene shows Thor arriving and reuniting with Jane; while the Jotunheim frost-beast chases some pigeons in London.
- Stan the Man: Stan Lee is a patient in a mental ward who wants his shoe back from Erik Selvig. In a fun little gag, Stan Lee is listed as playing himself in the credits.
- Chris Evans shows up as a cameo when Loki briefly transforms into Captain America to mock Thor.
- Future Movies Foreshadowing: In addition to Loki impersonating Odin (which will be followed up in Thor: Ragnarok), this movie is perhaps the first that really sets off the Infinity Stones saga, identifying the Aether and the Tesseract as Infinity Stones and noting that it's dangerous to keep multiple stones close together. The Collector also makes an early appearance before his more major role in Guardians of the Galaxy.
- Past Movie Continuity: Loki's behaviour that ended him in prison is, of course, the events of Thor and The Avengers. Erik Selvig was also driven insane in the events of The Avengers, and the Tesseract was brought to Asgard at the end of that movie as well. The destruction of the Bifrost in Thor is also briefly brought up a couple of times. Jotunheim's giant frost beast from Thor makes a couple brief cameos as the Convergence happens, and shows up in the post-credits scene. Volstagg does the "Another!" scene that is often-meme'd from Thor in the Asgardian banquet hall, showing that it's actually not impolite to do that in Asgard.
- Movie Superhero Codenames: Malekith's 'superhero name' is just his name. Algrim is mostly referred to by his name, though his transformation into 'one of the Kursed' is mentioned several times. I don't think he's ever actually called 'Kurse', though.
- Favourite Action Scene: Jeez, I don't know. I guess Thor and Malekith tumbling through portals? The two of them sliding off a glass building was particularly memorable. Heimdall one-shotting the dark elf ship is also very cool.
- Funniest Line: "GOD BLESS AMERICAAaampphgh!"
- A Kronan shows up and gets shattered into rocks in the prologue. Kronans (or "Stone Men from Saturn") are the first-ever villains fought by Thor in the comics, and MCU fans would recognize them as the race that Korg from Thor: Ragnarok hail from.
- During Erik's asylum rambling about the Convergence, "616 Universe" can be seen in the blackboard. Earth-616 is the designation of the mainstream/original comic-book Marvel universe.
- Another thing written on that blackboard is "The Fault", a space-time rift formed in the War of Kings which connected Earth-616 to the 'Cancerverse'.
- Thor and Sif mention the 'Battle of Harokin'. In the comics, Harokin was a warrior that served under Hela and fought Thor, before eventually betraying Hela.
- The helmeted prisoner in Kurse's prison cell seems to be a nod to Kurse's comic-book appearance.
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