MCU Rewatch: Thor: The Dark World
Get ready for possibly my most contrarian take in the whole MCU: I legitimately love The Dark World.
I mean, yes, okay, Malekith is probably the single worst-realized villain in the entire shared universe, a character for whom âI want to destroy the universe⌠BECAUSE IâM EVIL!!!â is not even slightly an exaggeration, and who has a truly ridiculous power of Being Wherever It Is Convenient For The Plot Regardless Of Plausibility Or Established Rules About Interplanetary Travel. The Aether is also one of the all-time ill-defined McGuffins, although honestly post-Infinity War itâs significantly less so â understanding that itâs the Reality Stone and seeing how Thanos uses it both makes its various effects in Dark World less arbitrary and does in fact explain why Malekith is after it.Â
Also, yes, Jane Foster continues to be a giant empty space where an actual character should be. I am bothered by that less in this movie than the first Thor because, this time around, she is given zero agency, and just kind of pushed around the game board by the other characters! Yes, it would probably have been better to just, you know, characterize her, but at the cost of some awkwardly regressive gender politics the film is at least able to make her stop being an active problem with the storyâs believability (and it does some genuinely great things with Darcy to earn back some of its feminist cred).
So yeah, this movie is by no means perfect. But do you know what it is?
Seriously, from the word Go, every single part of this movie (that isnât one of Malekithâs solo scenes) is just immensely clever and entertaining. Even as it lays out a pretty unexciting plot, the dialogue sparkles, the actorsâ timing is across-the-board excellent, and both the editing and sound design are working in concert to throw a constant stream of gags at you. The movie as a whole isnât âshot like a comedy,â but there are absolutely sections of it that are, and they are just delightful â we were laughing out loud most of the way through.
Special mention has to be given to the final battle, which is the funniest fucking Big Action Movie Fight Scene I have EVER SEEN. Seriously, watch this:
It starts out so hyperserious and dramatic, and then⌠the cuts, the foley work, the absurd sequence of events, the framing (those cars crashing into the hillside on SvartalfheimâŚ), even the facial expressions are perfectly pitched to turn what is simultaneously a hugely dramatic confrontation into a genuine farce.Â
But aside from⌠well, actually no, as part of that cavalcade of comedy, the other reason I love this film despite all its flaws is that it finally fixes Loki. For as much as Ragnarok is a reboot of Thor, this movie reboots his brother, and actually gets him right. It throws away all the shitty, nonsensical âmotivationsâ and âplotsâ he had before, gives him a new central drive and characterization that makes a shit-ton more sense, and finally lets him be funny.
Prior to this, if we ignore the Unbiased Reviews, Loki wanted to rule Earth, because⌠heâs mad about Odin concealing his true heritage, and now that he knows he wasnât born heir to a king he wants to rule a random backwater planet because he deserves to as an Asgardian, which he isnât, and so since he wants power heâs going to ally with an alien army who will somehow get way more power than him, and⌠yeah.
New Loki: heâs lost his adoptive mother, the one person he actually, genuinely believed cared about him as a person (even if he would never admit that), and in his grief he is desperate to earn the love of Asgard (and maybe even his idiot brother, too, whom he now sees not as an obstacle but a fun plaything). Yes, it absolutely sucks that they fridged Frigg (har!) to get there â although to be fair, she absolutely did deliberately sacrifice herself to save her home â but now Loki a) has a genuinely sympathetic motivation, even as it still pushes him to act like a dick at times, and b) is free to have fun, since heâs no longer trying to Screw Over Literally Everybody.Â
Hiddleston in this movie is goddamned hysterical â you can feel Lokiâs manic glee at being freed from prison (although the surprise of Chris Evansâ cameo is definitely a huge part of why that scene works so well). This movie finally gives us the Loki I didnât realize I was waiting for through the first Thor and The Avengers, and itâs another one of those things where itâs just so good that it retroactively colored my memories of his first two films.
(side note: Anthony Hopkins does an incredible job playing Loki playing Odin; the way he mimics Hiddlestonâs body language is so perfect and subtle that I realized âoh hey thatâs Lokiâ even before I consciously noticed what the actor was doing to communicate it.)
So yeah. Thereâs really not much âthematic depthâ to this movie to analyze, but Iâll be damned if it isnât the single most fun movie to watch out of the whole MCU up to this point. Even now, itâs still only really surpassed for sheer joy by the two Guardians films and, of course, Ragnarok.
Just a pity about the plot, you know?