Hey there, internet. How are you today? I’m doing well, thanks for asking. What’s new with me? Not much, really. I recently went to see the film Thor: The Dark World, and I’d love to take a second to talk about it with you if you’re not too busy. As superhero movies go, it was fairly average. Explosions, turbo punches, and gratuitous CGI all made their token appearance on screen. I’d rate its overall memorability as on par with Spiderman 2 (the one with the Frodo-lookin’ dude and Dr. ‘Japanese-Porn-Stereotype.’) I’d probably have left the theater without any lasting impression of the film at all if not for a few key points. Fair warning, there may be spoilers in this next bit. Fuck off until Friday if you’re not into that.
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Loki’s pretty rad. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the first film or The Avengers, but I feel that it’s worth mentioning anyways. He stands as pretty much the sole interesting character in this movie for me by having an alignment other than lawful good or chaotic evil. The bad guys in this film want to destroy all matter in the universe; there’s not a lot of moral ambiguity in that. The good guys want to prevent this while simultaneously fighting for true love and acceptance of people who are different than you. Only Loki has some unpredictability to his actions, making him the only one worth paying any attention to.
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The antagonists of the film, one-dimensional though they may be, are also worth discussing. As previously stated, they seek to wipe out not only all life, but every single atom in the universe. Why? Because they’re dark elves, so they like things to be dark. That’s not me being flippant, that is their expressly stated motivation. They do, in fact, appear to be made of matter though, so I’m not sure if they really stopped to consider an actionable exit strategy for this operation.
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To its credit, Thor:tDW has my new favorite cameo appearance of all time: the core gameplay mechanic from Portal. The storyline itself is tenuously held together by the use of spontaneously appearing, plot-advancing wormholes that do everything from introducing the doomsday device, to disemboweling the primary villain, to making Natalie Portman’s character seem useful. The term “god machine” feels a little too on the nose for a movie that takes place in Asgard for like 43% of its screen time, so I’ll just refer to it as bullshit.
Overall I guess I’d say that Thor was alright. If you’re deeply invested in the character, and you can suspend your disbelief hard enough (possibly by performing some sort of gruesome self-lobotomy on your skepticism cortex before going to the theater) it’s probably worth your time.
WNV Rating: Thor: The Dark World gets 2316 stars. Due recent star devaluation brought on by inflation, we actually have no idea if that’s a good score or not.