Watched: Thor: The Dark World
Oh. I mean, this was fun and all, but otherwise it was honestly a bit of a mess. It establishes a Bad MacGuffin (the Aether, a dark form of energy that somehow has the ability to destroy the universe), a Bad MacGuffin-wielder (Christopher Eccleston in a woefully underused bad-guy part), and then explains a) why they haven’t yet used the MacGuffin and b) why they might soon. All in a ten-minute sprint. It’s a bewildering opening.
The first Thor film had a problem with this too - taking place as it does across an entire galaxy, with impossibly rich settings (Asgard, in particular, looks magnificent in this film), there is so much lore and mythos to soak up and only two hours in which to do it. It can be joyously mind-bending at times, but at others it feels a lot like you’re being told, rather than shown.
Not that it’s terrible: the comedic flourishes in this film are at their best on Earth - Kat Dennings and Jonathan Howard as an intern and the intern’s intern are a wonderful odd couple, and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is as rogueish as ever (and at times even gets in on the action). The final showdown is gloriously inventive, too, but too much of this felt like it was conforming to a familiar template - a crisis, a chase, some political dealings, another chase, and a big destructive battle to wrap everything up. Chris Hemsworth lacks the charisma of Tony Stark or the period aesthetic of Captain America, and Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster is a character who too often feels like she exists for the other characters to bounce off.
Maybe asking for something more gripping is a tall order for this sort of blockbuster fare, but this felt less Avengers, and more Green Lantern. A little tighter plotting, and it could have been so much more.