Sitting in a press screening for Thor: The Dark World (after waiting on a long line, which is all but unheard of for press screenings), it’s easy to remember what being a fanboy is like. We have to give credit where credit is due: for all the bank-breaking, louder-than-thunder effect and circumstance of these superhero ‘event’ films, Marvel has succeeded, more often than it has failed, in providing good old escapist fun by way of that standard fanboy text: the comic book.
Sure, a film about an intergalactic Viking warrior-god is one of the tougher sells to come out of the still relatively nascent movie powerhouse Marvel Studios, now that effects can all but match the whimsy of comic book creators. But thanks to director Kenneth Branagh, the first Thor never took itself too seriously and managed to dazzle both visually and performance-wise. A sequel to a film about an intergalactic Viking, of course, is an even tougher sell, and although the storyline is grade-A filler (more like a nice bland grade-B), the actors are game for some fun (yay Kat Dennings!) and, in true fanboy form, the flying scenes are just so cool it’s hard to say no to enjoying this film.
After an extremely exposition-heavy opening involving ancient evil and a maiden in peril (those clunky comic book plots don’t just explain themselves), the action truly gets underway, but nothing really sticks until Tom Hiddleston’s tortured and mischievous Loki, the quintessential Misunderstood Son, resurfaces. Like in the original film, the brotherly rivalry between Chris Hemsworth’s Thor (who is increasingly like a chiseled show pony with lots of cooler stuff happening around him) and Loki is more than compelling, the only thing keeping the very long-feeling second act afloat here.
But then the sheer technics of this film succeed in picking up the slack, where in most other genre films they are not nearly enough to make up for gaping holes in character or plot. Here, character and plot are thin, but they are there. As the resident maiden-in-peril Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, who surprisingly signed on for a much meatier role in this second go-round) discovers strange anomalies in the physical world, we go along for the ride as she and her team discover—and play with—gravitational inversions and mini-wormholes. Later, there are those remarkable bad-guy flying machines, which manage to reinvent the aerial battle scene yet again, and added on top of that are some amazing anti-matter bombs that literally suck victims right out of existence. Fanboys rejoice!
It’s hard to believe, but we are already coming to the end of ‘Phase 2′ of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—the honchos over there were smart, mapping out their strategy for blockbuster domination—and without revealing too much, the wackiness of Phase 3 awaits us next year with Guardians of the Galaxy.
—DH