Day 8 of 11 Days of Marvel is here! In this project, Bill and Erin go through every single extant film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and write their reactions to them! The project started here, with Iron Man, or you can click here to see all the articles in the project so far. Today is about:
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Bill’s Response: Malekith, the Accursedly Uninteresting
The team behind Thor: The Dark World should be commended for managing to make a movie about ancient evil, fraternal betrayal, lost love and mysterious portals into a dull and dreadful slog.
Nothing about this movie works. Hemsworth and Portman have lost what chemistry they had in Thor. The greenscreened landscape of Svartalfheim is drab and brown. I imagine they were going for a desolate look, littered as it is with the ruins of ancient Dark Elf spaceships, but it just looks like a placeholder for a more interesting landscape. Jane Foster is only in this movie to serve as a vessel for the Aether, some mysteriously boring Ancient Power that was Buried Forever that she Discovers Randomly because of the Convergence (which is sometimes called the Alignment), which Blurs the Boundaries between Worlds and so on and so forth and I don’t care, I don’t care, please stop it, I don’t care. Jane makes precisely two decisions in this movie: she decides to investigate the weird readings Darcy found in London, and she helps teleport some dark elves around in the final showdown. Otherwise, she exists purely for Thor to brood over her. Oh, and she slaps people, universal terrible writer shorthand for a woman being “spunky” which is inevitably followed by the villain saying “I like her.”
Loki is back, but this new team has no idea how to write him. His dialogue is neither as grandiose (“I am burdened with glorious purpose”) nor as witty (“Are you ever not going to fall for that?”) as it could be in Thor or The Avengers. Instead, they write him like a bored, rebellious teenager. (“It’s not that I don’t love our little talks, it’s just that I don’t love them.”) He literally says “ta-da” at one point. He’s not the brooding, conflicted younger brother of Thor, nor the monomaniacal Trickster of The Avengers. He adds nothing to this movie. He’s just here because Tumblr is in love with him.
But worse than Loki, worse than Foster, worse than the not-at-all funny comic sections making fun of Erik Selvig’s life-shattering trauma, worse than all of these, is the film’s villain, Malekith the Accursed. Christopher Eccleston, who was the 9th Doctor once upon a time, can be a very charismatic actor. Here, he is given about twelve lines and delivers them all (half of which are in an utterly unconvincing Elvish) in a vague, monotone mumble. His plan? To do some magic that destroys All of the Universe, because his people came from a time Before the Universe, and he wants to restore the Not-Universe.
Blowing up the universe is the most boring villain-plan in the world, you guys. It particularly doesn’t work when your villain is flat and unmenacing. I suspect they were trying to create a villain who cared nothing at all for the petty squabbles of Asgard and was hellbent on its annihilation, who viewed the Asgardians as little more than ants beneath his feet. That might potentially have worked. But we spend so little time with Malekith that what was probably intended to be quiet determination reads as apathy. Malekith is the Designated Villain of the Week, there to be a catalyst for other, more interesting things to happen. And that might work if the other things that happened were at all interesting. Loki serves a similar purpose in The Avengers, though he’s about a thousand times more charismatic. But everything else in this movie is also flat and drab, which draws even more attention to the fact that Malekith is a cardboard cutout of Christopher Eccleston, pacing awkwardly around the set while he waits for his check to clear.
This is a bad movie, but it’s not even bad in an interesting or hammy way. It’s completely rote, made just because they felt like there ought to be another Thor movie.
Although I guess the Dark Elf spaceships are pretty cool.
Favorite Moment: The scene between Frigga and Malekith, one of the only vaguely interesting action scenes in the movie and one of three brief moments of characterization for Malekith1. She says she’ll never tell him where the Aether is, he looks at her for a moment, and says “I believe you,” before ordering her immediate death. This could have been a menacing villain: coldly practical, uninterested in theatrics, and not going to waste time monologuing. But that would have required better writing everywhere else, a more convincing performance, and some more time spent with this guy instead of watching Loki mug for the camera.
Least Favorite Moment: Ah, but there are so many. Probably the line “Have you come to see the end of your universe?” Which, just, good grief, guys.
Scene Which I Used to Like, But then The X‑Men Did It Better: I had remembered enjoying parts of the last fight in a “now you’re thinking with portals” kind of way, and I guess it’s still fine. The fact that Mjolnir is constantly trying to find Thor as he and Malekith get kicked through to various worlds by the Convergence is kind of neat. But in our post-Days of Future Past world, it takes some better Portal-style trickery to make me happy. Seriously, though, how cool was Blink in X‑Men? She was so cool.
Bill’s Rankings:
1. Captain America: The First Avenger
2. The Avengers
3. Iron Man
4. Iron Man 3
5. Thor
6. The Incredible Hulk
7. Iron Man 2
8. Thor: The Dark World
Erin’s Response:
To echo my esteemed colleague, I cannot believe that people pick on Iron Man 3 when this movie exists. Not only does it fail to live up to the smashing fun that was the first Thor, it fails to make any sense at all. The strange love-triangle/bromance between Thor, Loki, and Jane falls flatter than bread at altitude without the extra flour (this is very important – trust me).
Thor, we are lead to believe, has been watching Jane on Earth for two years without going to see her. Let me say that again: two years. During this time, he has failed to come and visit her even once. Now, as we all know, the Bifrost grows at a rate of 20 feet every month, and since when Thor broke the bridge he also broke the round globe thing, we’ll add 3 months for construction, which equals about a year and GO SEE YOUR GIRLFRIEND ALREADY. If this movie was about Jane, she would have found another guy in this time and Thor would have been the one that is “just not that into her.”
As you know if you read my last post on the subject, I don’t really buy the romance between Jane and Thor, partially because it was never fleshed out, and partially because they don’t seem to show much actual warmth or physical affection towards one another. So, rather than this mess, I can think of two very similar scripts that would have had much more interesting ramifications:
1. Jane and Thor realize that they were thrown together by chance last time, and in this movie, they start to really consider what it would be like for him to so drastically outlive her. There is a reason the Aragorn/Arwen story is so good, and part of the reason that you root for them is that they both know they shouldn’t be together and yet can’t fight it. For those Marvel Movies Writers out there, this is call romantic tension. Please consider adding it to your movies.
OR
2. Jane and Thor realize that they were thrown together by chance last time, and perhaps they don’t actually like each other as much as they thought they did. Not that their third movie couldn’t resolve this into a more traditional romance, but how fun would it have been for Jane to enjoy Loki’s company more than Thor’s? How fun would it have been for Thor’s he-manning to get on Jane’s nerves? Jane, left on earth for TWO YEARS, could have been mad at him, and distrustful of giving him her heart lest he leave her again. They wouldn’t have even needed to re-film the end of the movie for this.
If you are wondering why this whole post is one long rant about romance, that is because their crappy romance is the only halfway interesting storyline in this movie. BOOM.
Favorite Moment: Portman’s date with Chris O’Dowd. Their chemistry was miles better than Portman’s and Hemsworth’s.
Least Favorite Moment: Every moment the villain is on screen. I can’t remember his name or what he wants, which, you know, is probably a bad sign.
Least Interesting Stripshow: Why is Selvig always naked? Why is he in these movies at all? Why isn’t Portman a bad ass scientist? I am going to repeat this point until we actually get a bad ass female scientist in these movies.
Erin’s Rankings:
1. Captain America: The First Avenger
2. Iron Man
3. The Avengers
4. Iron Man 3
5. Thor
6. The Incredible Hulk
7. Iron Man 2
8. Thor: The Dark World
And Now, A Conversation
Erin: This is a pretty crummy movie, huh?
Bill: Yup.
Erin: Easily the worst in the franchise so far, right?
Bill: Yup.
Erin: Not even Idris Elba can save this movie.
Bill: Nope.
Erin: I don’t have anything else to say about this movie.
Bill: Me neither.
This Has Been A Conversation
Thank You For Reading
Well, thank goodness, that’s it for Thor: The Dark World! Come back tomorrow for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie we both really enjoyed the first time we saw it!
- The other two being when he pettily blows up the throne and when he puts his head next to Algrim in a show of brotherly solidarity. [↩]