887. Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Natalie Portman

Director: Alan Taylor

Running Time: 112 mins

Thor: The Dark World is an American film and the eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After Dr. Jane Foster becomes infected by a mysterious object, a powerful alien warmongerer sets his sights on her, leaving only Thor to defend her.

This sequel is a real drop from the first film, which wasn’t particularly spectacular in itself anyway. Basically, this is even more void of proper emotion, however it loses one of the best things about the previous film, the humour, and replaces it with more dull action and even more irritating alien politics and wars that keep making me think of Lord Of The Rings, leaving this as a much more boring and frustrating film.

The one improvement of this film over the first is that it doesn’t have to spend so long on a boring origins story, meaning that it can get straight into the proper plot, and by the time everything was just getting going in the first film, you’re already right into the meat of it all here.

However, the improvements stop there. Sadly, the plot is even more dull and lacking in excitement than what I thought was a pretty dry film before. Here, with the relationship between Jane Foster and Thor becoming even cheesier, despite two strong performances again from Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman, I was feeling less and less interested in the characters, which had a huge impact on how excited I was about the plot, because this plot in particular is all about keeping relationships intact and saving individuals, rather than just all of Earth.

What’s worse is that the fighting and action here is even uglier and more boring than the first time round. I felt that it all went on way too long in the last film, but this film, after the first 40 minutes or so, is just one long fight scene all strung together, and it really failed to keep me at all interested or excited, not helped by the fact that I was really turned off by the very ugly visual effects.

I know all sequels are meant to be darker, especially one called ‘The Dark World’, however I really missed the humour that shone so brightly in the previous film here. Now that Thor’s accustomed to Earth, there’s very little of that to laugh at, and although there are various attempts at recreating that throughout, it’s on the whole just not as fun to watch, so that’s why it gets a 5.7 from me.