Thor: The Dark World

Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?

We’ve done it. We survived. Congratulations all around for enduring the pain.

Thor: The Dark World is the last bad Marvel Movie. Sure, there are some less-than-awesome ones ahead, but this is the last one that’s actually bad.

It’s funny, the first time I watched this (2015), I remember thinking, “This isn’t so awful. It’s just really generic and forgettable.” and I’ve been making that argument for the movie ever since. Now I realize how stupid I look.

So, before I dive in to the parts that I hate (read: the whole damn thing), let’s highlight what I enjoyed.

• There was this one part where Thor was in Asgard and he called his hammer to him and it came and he flew off and that looked really cool compared to all his other takeoffs
• Some of the portal-fighting scenes were really great
• The concept of Asgard being a weird mix of sci-fi and fantasy where they use swords and also lightning-spears is really cool… poorly executed, but great idea!
• It ends

Thor: The Dark World takes everything bad about Thor and amplifies it to the extreme. About half the characters do next to nothing to advance the plot, and are just boring on screen. Chris O’Dowd got big big credits and had about 3 seconds of screen time where he did nothing. 4 or 5 of the side characters could (and should) have been combined into a single composite that fulfilled the plot obligations. And that character should have been Dr. Selvig, and he should have died. Why do I say that? Because I liked Dr. Selvig in the first movie and his death would at least add some emotion into this garbage fire.

There were some really great visuals. Some of the effects were great! Most of them were… not. There’s an issue with cinema in general that I’ll discuss later in my Black Panther review where visual effects companies bid for the contract to work on a certain film. The result is that the production company (in this case Disney) goes with the lowest bidder, and then the company doesn’t have the budget they need to do the job well. I hope that’s what happened here, because I’d rather blame Disney than a team of hard-working artists for all the visual failures.

There are a million other comments I could make, but during the movie I kept returning to a single thought: It really felt like the editor didn’t care. They didn’t have any passion for the project at all, and handled it with no grace or competence. There are so many cuts where I just think “Wait, what just happened?” or “Hang on, how did we go from this location to that location?” or “Why did this turn into a heist movie for 3 minutes and then go right back to being a fantasy action movie?” There’s a visual language to making sure the audience knows what’s up, and the editor just made it really confusing to follow.

This is the first, and so far only, Marvel movie that you could simply skip and not miss out on any of the story of the greater franchise. Nothing changes in the MCU, or even in individual character’s lives. Thor’s mom dies, but the only person who really cares is Loki. I definitely don’t.

Rather than drone on for another 500 words about why The Dark World sucks, I’d rather discuss what’s going on in the MCU in 2013 when it was released. This was around the time that mainstream audiences started to notice that one can’t simply say “I like Thor, but don’t really care about Iron Man” and watch only the Thor series. After the Avengers, the audience kind of needs the context of every other movie in order to make sense of what’s going on. To hardcore watchers like myself, this isn’t an issue. Duh, all the Marvel movies are part of a single series. But to less-interested and less-obsessive fans, the massive shared universe suddenly becomes less accessible, and I take issue with that.

Not everyone has the time to invest in a series of movies about colorful people punching each other in the face endlessly. Some people just want to go to the theater and be like “Oh yeah, Thor looks cool. Let’s go!” without being completely up-to-date on all things Marvel. And those people deserve to enjoy movies, too. It’s a great money-printing scheme, to make everyone watch every movie, but the art, I think, suffers for it.

What’s the solution? I’m still working on that part. Plot synopses, like the opening crawl of Star Wars, only do so much in conveying the context of what the audience needs to know going in. At the same time, if you haven’t seen Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back is still a great film. Writing accessible art is difficult, but in my opinion, necessary. Not all art is for everyone, but everyone should be given the opportunity to enjoy all art.

Thus ends my review which turned into a rant about art and what I think art should be. Thanks for sticking around.