Welcome back to yet another edition of our re-watching MCU films series, where we break down every MCU movie. The whole series can be found here. Today, we look at a very low ranking movie in the pre-watch, Thor: The Dark World. This movie is often referred to as one of the worst in the entire MCU. So let’s see if it stays that way, or if it is better the second time around.
Thor: The Dark World Review
The Good:
Loki’s Fake Death Scene
This was one of the very few ups in this entire movie and it is a big up. The Loki fake death scene was awesome from start to finish. It appears in the beginning that Loki has once again betrayed Thor and that Thor would be given up to the Dark Elves. However, it ends with Loki using his Dark Magic to fake the whole thing. It also brings an emotional moment where we think Loki has died just for him to fake that as well.
Now, this does lose some points because of the number of fake deaths he has in the MCU. However, this one was still incredibly fun to watch. It was one of the few scenes in the whole movie that makes you sit on the edge of your seat wondering what comes next.
Frigga’s Death
Another decent moment in this movie is when Thor’s mother, Frigga dies. This sparks an emotional reaction from Thor and gives him and Loki a reason to bond. It also gives Thor more motivation than just to save Jane, which in the first movie, felt completely forced.
The death in front of Thor enraged him and made him want revenge more than anything. So much so that he felt he had to turn to his brother, Loki, even if he had betrayed him in the past. It also fuelled him so much that he once again decided to go against his father’s words and left Asgard to go find the Dark Elves himself. This was a good way to drive the plot along and made fans feel something, as Frigga was one of the few likable characters in the first two movies.
The Bad:
Odin
Thor: The Dark World is similar to the original Thor in many ways. This is an issue because the original one wasn’t a great movie either. One reason why was the character of Odin. In both movies, the role of Thor’s father is just lazy writing to set the plot forward.
His saying no to Thor so often don’t make sense. Asgard was left unprotected, leaving the Dark Elves ready to strike at any time, yet Odin wanted to sit back and let them attack anyways. Seeing how this worked out the first time when they almost were destroyed immediately, he wanted to try the same plan anyways and forbid Thor to do anything.
It is this kind of logic that just felt so lazy when watching the movie. The writing felt empty and it made the movie feel less important because of it.
Plot
The plot of this movie also felt like it kept in trend with the lazy aspect. Never really giving a motive for the Dark Elves other then they are bad just didn’t draw the viewers in. The leaps and bounds they had to take to make everything work ruined so much of the movie.
From Jane being the one to have the Aether in her, to Thor and Jane magically finding a portal to Earth super conveniently and right when they needed it, and everything on Earth just feeling like nonsense. The whole intern has an intern plotline was nowhere near as funny as Marvel intended and everything with Erik Selvig fell short too. They failed to really explain how most of the portals worked and it just didn’t turn out well when it came to the final sequence of events.
Action
It’s a major red flag when a movie that has Thor, one of the easiest characters to make look amazing in combat, still finds a way to make the action scenes boring and uninspiring. Everything felt like the same two or three types of hammer throws and Thor just kind of flew around and hit people.
They tried making a few of the scenes slow motion but it just felt like it was taking too long to see a very normal hammer swing. At the end of the day most of the action scenes, including the final fight, just didn’t have much action or excitement in it. When this is the biggest selling point of a movie it becomes a very big problem.
Malekith
To contribute to the trifecta of the plot, the action, and the main villain being unsatisfactory, we have Malekith as a down as well. The character seemed fine, but the down comes from his complete lack of development. Again, he was just kind of bad because he wanted to be bad.
There was seemingly no motivation behind him. On top of that, it was barely explained how his (or any of the Dark Elves) power works. He is drawn to the Aether, but the film never really explains why. Or why, or how, they made weapons out of it. There were so many plot holes left uncovered with this villain that it was impossible to try and buy into the fact that he was a main part of the movie. Nothing he did made sense or had much of an explanation.
The Bottom Line – A VERY Dark World
Overall, Thor: The Dark World was a very poor movie. Just about every main point to it was a down and it wasn’t at all exciting. There are much better ways to spend almost two hours of your life, including watching just about any other movie in the MCU.
This movie was full of nonsense, boring action, and pointless villain actions. Unless that is up your ally, stay away from this movie.