Thor The Dark World Movie Review

Thor The Dark World picks up where last summer’s Avengers movie ended in the life of Thor. As the movie begins, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his Asgardian comrades are wrapping up their efforts to restore order to the nine realms after the Bifrost bridge was destroyed in the first Thor movie. Incidentally, the bridge apparently was fixed between the events of this movie and Avengers. Meanwhile, Loki (Tom Hiddelston) is found serving out his prison sentence for his actions from the first Thor and Avengers movies. While this is all happening, a once in a millennium cosmic event begins to align the nine realms, causing some kind of dimensional rift to form in London where we find Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and her scientific comrades. Jane stumbles upon some kind of pocket dimension and discovers an ancient power known as “the Aether,” which possesses her. Alerted to Foster’s temporary disappearance from Earth, Thor returns to Earth to see what has happened to his lover and obsession. The discovery of the Aether also awakens the Dark Elves presumed to be extinct. The Dark Elves, led by Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), are a race of beings who thrived in Darkness before Asgard’s beginnings and want to return the universe to Darkness.

The movie has a number of good comedic moments as well as some nice visual action scenes, some of which I found to be very reminiscent of the prequel Star Wars movies, mainly due to sound effects. For the most part, I think Hiddelston made the movie. This movie would really have been a dud without his contributions to the story, due mainly to the many instances where things seemed to happen more for convenience of the plot than actual remote logical plausibility. I found this most evident with the ending resolution for the main plot of the movie. Not only was it poorly explained, but I felt it really come off as just being downright silly. Despite the faults in the movie’s storyline, it was a step up from Iron Man 3 and I did mostly enjoy it. No Oscars are expected and you will need to suspend logical reasoning to some extent, but there are some good plot twists that take place as well as some good character interactions, again mostly all centered around Hiddelston’s Loki character which make the movie worth watching, and there is even an Avengers cameo of sorts.

Be sure to stay through the credits for this one as there are TWO after credit scenes to watch, one of which will definitely have implications for upcoming Marvel films.

Grade: B-