If Days Inn ever includes multimedia in their motel art displays, they could do worse than "Thor: The Dark World."
Dry, soulless, and coldly calculated to avoid offending anyone, it boasts all the makings of those paintings hanging over their never-washed comforters. It doesn't make the room worse, and you immediately forget it upon departure. And if it delivers what it promises, that's only because it doesn't promise much beyond showing up.
Do me a favor. Go to Rotten Tomatoes and scan this movie's reviews. As of this writing, it stands proudly in the high 70s. Not bad for a genre that is traditionally critic-proof anyway. But why? Does it really have the spirit, the humor, the excitement, the fun you'd expect from these movies?
I'm no prude. Superhero movies can be entertaining, and I don't even require they be much more than that. There just comes a point when "If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all" fatigue crashes down. We know the gist of these movies by now. We know which characters must survive, which schemes must fail, and how successful our heroes must be. The great mistake of "The Dark World" is presuming we give a damn. Never does it create characters greater than the cogs they represent. Never does it spin a story whose stakes feel real.
"The Dark World" walks down the aisle with an audience it never even wooed and expects us to say "I do." This isn't special effects linked by story. This is special effects linked by special effects, all the latest product of the Disney/Marvel machine fueled by the weeping of your increasingly empty wallet.
If it seems like I've waited a while to describe what the movie is about, that's because, well, your guess is as good as mine. It's all a bunch of arms-thrown-in-the-air nonsense; Marvel obsessors might be able to explain it better than I can. Things kick off eons ago with Malekith, apparently our bad guy in the movie, fighting with some other people. He wants to return the universe to its state before creation using some powerful red goop called aether, which is Latin for "MacGuffin." He fails, but escapes into suspended animation, only to return in the present day to complete his universe-ending quest as Thor stands in his way, and Thor's evil brother Loki from the last movie factors in, and this can all only happen because all nine worlds in the universe align for one moment, and the rest of the movie shall be represented by an ellipsis...
I dunno. It all feels like a game of Telephone where one screenwriter is fed a seed and he whispers it on down the chain, the movie stopping one step short of "purple monkey dishwasher." Maybe it started coherent. That sure ain't how we ended up.
Want a fun experiment? Approach any audience member after their screening, give them any major character - Thor, Loki, their father Odin, Malekith, Thor's returning love interest Jane - and have them describe this person without resorting to physical traits or their role in the movie (hero, villain, girlfriend, etc). These aren't people you quote afterwards. They aren't distinguished from each other. Thor is Thor, he does this is in this scene to keep the plot moving, and so on.
When kids play with their Thor action figures this holiday season by saying, "Boom boom," that will not be children being children. That will be an accurate impression.
Remember "The Avengers"? After seeing "The Dark World," this question adopts a more wistful tone. But remember the four distinct leads in that movie, all with unique, clashing personalities, involved in a story with a through-line and clearly defined stakes causing us to care about the outcome, all tied together with a whiz bang "Can you believe we're making a movie!?" sense of joy? By the end of "The Dark World," no less than the fate of the universe up for grabs. We know this because the movie tells us. Malekith intends to unleash the red MacGuffin stuff, which will bring it all down. We know this because the movie tells us. Our gang of heroes can only stop it using some series of wormholes through the different worlds. We know this because the movie tells us.
I'll grant "The Dark World" this: Not since "Ghostbusters II" has so effective a climax been built around the act of throwing red slime on the ground. But think about it. The entire universe as we know it will soon cease to exist while a Norse god and some evil orc thing dash around space through multiple wormholes. This should be goofy fun underlined by a pervasive sense of danger. Instead it plays like watered down Doctor Who fan fic with cheesy special effects. Not to mention the screenwriters' ambivalence to creating any functional rules regarding these wormholes, allowing the climax to deescalate into a free-for-all. Everything's made up, and the points don't matter!
There's still a good movie itching to be made from this character. I just know there is. A movie striking a whimsical balance between the dry Asgard mythology and the Crocodile Dundee weirdness of seeing a god in full Norse regalia walking among Earth. Instead we're left with a movie that has dozens of fingerprints, but no soul.
Chris Hemsworth's chest is more expertly crafted. And you can just Google that.
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