Finally got around to watching “Thor: The Dark World” after having Tivo’ed it a while back. And even by comic book movie standards, I thought it was a rather sub-par hack job.
a. The movie begins with exposition. In the beginning were the Dark Elves, yadda, yadda, yadda. That seems both lazy and insulting to the movie-goer. Not only that, but the exposition didn’t even make any sense. At various times during the movie, the Dark Elves seemed to have existed before the universe was created, or maybe just a few thousand years ago, or maybe even just a few hundred years ago. It was sort of hard to tell.
b. There’s a stupid MacGuffin, energy cloud, nano-tech infinity stone thingy that just so happens to crawl into Thor’s girlfriend. What are the odds? Apparently the Asgardian notion of “Hide it so no one can ever find it.” is not “Encase it in unobtanium and drop it in the sun”, but rather, “Put it in a pillar in an unguarded cavern really close to where the pivotal battle was fought and call it a day.”.
c. In the exposition, the Asgardians defeated the entire Dark Elf realm by, among other things, using their rainbow bridge dimensional shifter to teleport the Aether away at the critical moment. But it doesn’t seem to occur to them to do that again. Even though their victory over the Dark Elves was recorded, you know, books. Which I’m beginning to doubt Asgardians know how to read because…
d. Despite being an advanced race whose technologies are nigh onto magic, the preferred Asgardian battle method is to attack, with swords, the bad guys with the nuclear power-ups and black-hole grenades. I dunno, but if I were effectively immortal except for catastrophic physical damage, I’d try inventing battle techniques that didn’t involve getting whacked by mutants with clubs.
On the same note, the Dark Elves have been in limbo for somewhere between a couple of thousand and 8 billion years. And the Asgardians still haven’t figured out how to deal with their technology. One ship is enough to fling them into a full panic. That’s just not time well spent.
e. Which brings up another point – how tough are Dark Elves and Asgardians? It seems inconsistent. Thor and the Boss Dark Elf fling each other through walls and land punches that would take out battle tanks but do no apparent damage (Thor gets a couple of picturesque forehead gashes.) But a couple of Dark Elves have a car dropped on them, and it’s all she wrote.
f. The cinematography was murky and depressing and green.
g. Loose ends? Lots. Aether still out there. Odin? Loki? What the hell?
