Film review: THOR: THE DARK WORLD **

By Preston Wilder

Is it just me, or does a giant hammer make a hopelessly inefficient weapon in the heat of battle? I mean, think about it: you throw the thing, it pulverises whatever target you were aiming at, then whooshes back boomerang-style. All well and good – but you can’t really hold another weapon, like a sword or something (your hand needs to be free for the returning hammer), so for a few seconds you’re just standing there, all but unarmed, surrounded by enemies and waiting for your hammer to come back. How is that helpful?

I assume it worked in the Marvel comics where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) started out, because comics have panels: one panel shows the hammer flying off, second panel shows destruction being wreaked, third panel shows it flying snugly back into Thor’s palm. No-one wondered what Thor was doing while the hammer was at work – but films are more literal so we do wonder, just as we wonder why, for instance, Asgardian soldiers in the prologue decide to dispose of the indestructible, all-powerful Aether by burying it deep “where no-one will ever find it” instead of, say, taking it back to Asgard and guarding it carefully. (People on the internet have made a list of such yeah-right moments – that’s what people on the internet do – which you can find by Googling ‘Thor the Dark World plot holes’.)

Needless to say, burying the Aether doesn’t work. It re-emerges, many millennia later, and attaches itself to Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), an ordinary London-based scientist who finds herself in the wrong dimensional portal just in time for “the Convergence” which only happens once every 5000 years. This awakens the evil Malekith, who needs the Aether for his diabolical plans – and also brings Thor into the picture, Jane being his squeeze from the first movie (though he hasn’t seen her in two years). And of course there’s Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor’s ambitious half-brother – now in the Asgard dungeons, with a touch of Hannibal Lecter as Thor reluctantly comes to seek his help.

Clearly, the plot is generic and implausible; clearly, that’s not important. This is part of the Marvel masterplan, aimed at spinning lots of parallel franchises with The Avengers as the hub. The first Thor, in 2011, was a formulaic outing memorable only for its flashes of humour, and the same might be said of this sequel – with the caveat that it over-milks snarky Loki, giving him too many zingers and allowing Hiddleston to indulge himself. “It’s not that I don’t love our little talks, it’s just … I don’t love them,” he tells Odin (a hammy Anthony Hopkins), and that mid-sentence pause is so long it seems to stop the whole movie.

Loki is used as a plot crutch (his convenient ability to shape-shift gets the writers out of trouble more than once) and is also employed for Avengers jokes, it being part of the marketing strategy that all these films make reference to each other. He mentions Thor’s “new companions” and even pretends to be Captain America, just as Jane earlier brushes off our hero’s talk of having been too busy up in Asgard for the past two years with “I saw you on TV! You were in New York!”. Then again, no-one else seems to recognise the Norse warrior when he gets on the Tube – though one girl pretends to stumble so she can touch his manly chest – so I guess that TV coverage of the wholesale destruction of New York must’ve clashed with The X-Factor or something.

Bottom line? Daft plot, scads of pompous dialogue (“Unleash the Aether!”) leavened by a streak of snarky humour – Loki up in Asgard, Jane’s sardonic assistant (Kat Dennings) here on Earth – and an overall impression of amusing moments in a sea of superfluous filmmaking. We didn’t need a Thor sequel, but it’s part of the business plan so here it is, wasting two Oscar winners and a passel of very good actors; even Hemsworth, who seemed no more than beefcake in the first Thor, has since proved his acting chops in Rush – and in fact gets the sequel’s sweetest moment, Thor hanging up his hammer on a coat-rack as if it were an umbrella (it’s Hemsworth’s dainty, rather hesitant movements that sell it). Speaking of which, the film’s special effects – which are much more important than its plot – include quite a nifty gadget, a kind of grenade which, when thrown, opens up a black hole behind one’s enemy, sucking them in and carrying them away to god-knows-what dimension. Memo to the muscled Norse warrior: This is much more efficient than a giant hammer.

 

DIRECTED BY Alan Taylor

STARRING Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston

US 2013                        112 mins