Another key improvement: Chris Hemsworth, in his third attempt at playing the mercurial thunder god (following last year's mega-blockbuster The Avengers) is finally starting to grow into something like comfort with the part, shaking off some of the soap-operatic stiffness that made him so dully noble before. This undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the screenplay, and the degree to which Christopher Yost and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (and supposedly, an uncredited Joss Whedon, which is quite easy to believe) have upped the comedy in this film relative to Thor's previous outings;whereas even in the quip-a-riffic The Avengers, Hemsworth was mostly stuck with being the serious one who talked in a heightened way, The Dark World gives the actor a chance to be rather more playful and downright spunky in one or two spots.
These things are counterbalanced by what is probably the most defective story in any of the Avenger-releated films yet, a victim of the film's openly-publicised raft of re-shoots and editing duels (Taylor wanted a cut massively longer than producer and Marvel guru Kevin Feige was willing to let him have), but no less aggravating because we know where it came from. It's actually kind of spectacular how many ways the structure of The Dark World is able to go wrong in just 112 minutes, less the not-brief ending credits. There is, perhaps most notably, the psychotically bad cross-cutting between two levels of plot: on Asgard, the alien planet where a race of long-lived supermen content to be regarded as gods on Earth strive to keep peace in the galaxy, Thor, his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), and a whole mess of other people, are busy dealing with the aftermath of the wicked plot executed by Thor's adopted brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), now set to rot in magic prison for the rest of eternity; on Earth, Thor's love interest Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is trying to figure out where the hell he's been for two years, while her zany assistant Darcy (Kat Dennings), Darcy's less-zany assistant Ian (Jonathan Howard), and the brilliant but mentally unbalanced astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) bumble about. The first 40 minutes of the film are an absolute train wreck, particularly regarding the timing of Dr. Selvig's unfortunate nude episode at Stonehenge: the way the film is pieced together, it's impossible to form a reasonable chronology that unites everything, and some plotlines need to stretch out a few hours to fit into a day or two elsewhere, if time isn't just stopping altogether (a human interest news report is essentially repeated on what almost have to be two consecutive days, because our heroes weren't watching TV the first time, I guess). There's no reason for any of this, except to keep things as barbarically simple for the audience as possible, which is frankly not appreciated.
Even once this ungainly, hideous slurry of exposition and misshapen place-setting gets out of the way, The Dark World suffers throughout its entire running time from an ill-defined conflict: the stakes are that old popcorn movie chestnut, "the entire universe", but how we get there is foggy at best. And I don't mean the mystical pseudo-science, which is just good comic book movie hokum. The problem is bigger than that: it's the great problem of a vaguely-expressed villain whose backstory seems more full of holes than details, whose relationship to the protagonists remains fuzzy till the end, and whose motivations are never more specific than "to do ee-vil! Bwa-ha-ha!". Which is too bad, because the dark elf Malekith is a pretty terrific creation on the face of it: born out of primordial darkness (primordial darkness is always a promising start), buoyed up by the single best hair and make-up job I've seen in 2013, and played by Christopher Eccleston with marvelous severity and malice. But he's given so damn little to do (the more active villain is a visually impressive but impersonal giant thug named Kurse, played by the overqualified Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. But using overqualified black actors in small parts is nothing new for the Thor movies; just ask Idris Elba, whose role is at least tripled in size from last time, and who still gets nothing to do that even begins to tap his reservoir of talent). And a villain who sits around a gloomy space ship and glowers all the time really isn't a very proper villain, no matter how snarly the performance.
The plot doesn't take shape until a mid-film action scene focuses the drama from the loose "save creation from darkness" ideas that drive the first half, replacing it with something much more personal and domestic, and critically, letting Loki out of his Hannibal Lecter phase to be a much more active participant in the action. This proves something that was obvious in Thor and then really fucking obvious in The Avengers, which is that Tom Hiddleston is pretty much the best thing the Marvel universe has going for it right now, and when he gets to do interesting things and have fun, the movies around him improve geometrically. It's not that the rest of the people in The Dark World aren't good (though it's increasingly clear that Natalie Portman, whatever her talents, was woefully miscast), but none of them hold the camera like Hiddleston does - Jaimie Alexander, who gets an expanded but still pretty small role as the girl warrior who has a name but "the girl warrior" is really all the more that the film cares about her, probably takes second place, and I look forward to watching her career from here on out - and the self-amused, bored villainy that he brings to every line and every gesture is absolutely glorious. Loki is the catalyst for snapping this whole muddy fantasy/sci-fi/action meander into place, and if the plot-destroying reshoots were, as it is said, mostly designed to increase his screen time, then it was effort well spent.
There's other stuff that works, especially a climactic, physics-defying battle between Thor and Malekith that easily takes the title of the second-best action setpiece in the franchise, after the unlikely-to-be-bettered New York war in the third act of The Avengers. But the overall balance is towards not making much sense on a narrative level (nor on a world-building level, but at this point, the jargony, in-jokey nonsense that makes up the Marvel universe is like background noise - even so, the first of two post-credits scenes is a particularly strange, alienating affair), and towards an inconsistent tonal mix between the soaring high fantasy that this film does much, much better than Thor, and the joshing humor that it does much, much worse than The Avengers (the second post-credits scene ends with an obvious, and terribly ineffective, attempt to replicate the shawarma scene from that film). It moves fast enough to be a reasonably inoffensive distraction, but it doesn't earn the emotional highs it thinks it gets from a mid-film death and a late-film romantic clinch, and if it's not remotely as brittle in setting up the rest of the franchise as Iron Man 2, it still feels like busywork: giving Thor something to do in between "real" movies, rather than telling a complete and compelling story that demanded to be told.
6/10
Reviews in this series
Iron Man (Favreau, 2008)
The Incredible Hulk (Leterrier, 2008)
Iron Man 2 (Favreau, 2010)
Thor (Branagh, 2011)
Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston, 2011)
The Avengers (Whedon, 2012)
Iron Man 3 (Black, 2013)
Thor: The Dark World (Taylor, 2013)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo Brothers, 2014)
Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015)
Ant-Man (Reed, 2015)
Captain America: Civil War (Russo Brothers, 2016)
Honestly, "not a complete turd" is more than I had expected from this; since I'm being dragged to see it later this week, I'll take that a an excuse to be optimistic.
ReplyDeleteMarvel has such an ability to make their characters likable and to play them off each other so well. And their ambition - to be a serial movie series that spans genres (this one was high fantasy, some are sci-fi, Cpt. America was first historical drama and soon political thriller, etc...) while maintaining the same continuity so that the stories and characters can reference, interact and intertwine with each other - hold us in awe.
ReplyDeleteBut really people don't much like the individual movies themselves. And with good reason: they are lousy. I remain convinced that when all phases are finished, someone is going to be able to tell the story by combining the series' best character moments and leaving out all the tedious action bits, which have been terrible since the very first Iron Man and now feel essentially like filler.
That movie would be something of an epic play, and would be much, much better.
I really, really enjoyed this Marvel outing, sloppy narrative be damned. I'm probably one of the few people who consider Thor 1 as my favourite of Marvel's first phase but the sequel bested it in every way; there was humour, action, emotion and an entirely convincing world rendered in amazing CGI.
ReplyDeleteThere were times when I was watching it and I thought to myself "well that's a HUGE coincidence" but it kept the plot moving so I shrugged it off. It rarely happens that I'll forgive shoddy plotting (outside of Italian horror cinema) but I love the package it came in so much that I really didn't care at all.
MAJOR SPOILERS:
I'm still highly skeptical of the post credit tag. I got a Lynchian vibe from it I enjoyed but anyone trying to do David Lynch that isn't David Lynch usually screws it up terribly so I'm still dubious about the quality of Guardians of the Galaxy.
This was very similar to the first film, in that every second Tom Hiddleston was on screen, it was amazing, every single thing Kat Dennings did was hilarious, and then the rest of the film was just, you know, there. Although I do think it was slightly better than the first Thor.
ReplyDeleteThis pretty much lines up with my thoughts exactly. Fun despite being a complete mess, which by my reckoning puts it ahead of the first film, which was neither of those things.
ReplyDeleteBrian M- Take my thoughts with a grain of salt, perhaps; I never expected anything as bad as a complete turd, just a soullessly homogenised piece of corporate output. Which it pretty much is.
ReplyDeleteHayley- I LOVE the idea of a Marvel supercut, though I lack your optimism. "All the phases are finished" isn't a state I think they're ever going to reach; my guess is that they'll keep trying to force Phase 4 and Phase 5 to happen despite the collapse of the comic movie marketplace that will surely happen after RDJ decides that he's done being Iron Man.
Travis- You've reminded me that I forgot to mention the VFX, which is some of the best I've ever seen in a Marvel film. It had the requisite shot or two that is so profoundly amateurish that I don't know how they left it in, but on the whole, I was really impressed.
As far as GOTG goes, my hope has always rested solely on James Gunn, at least in part because I don't know the comic book at all; after that tag, I'm now terrified at Benicio Del Toro's performance, which seems incredibly misjudged. "Sub-Lynchian" seems just about right.
Brian- Kat Dennings is absolutely not my favorite, but she was so much better in this one. I agree, she is a source of some kind of liveliness, and the film was in dire need of such things.
Thrash- Perfectly phrased. More fun and messier than the first movie, and the two things are intimately yoked.
"...it still feels like busywork: giving Thor something to do in between "real" movies, rather than telling a complete and compelling story that demanded to be told."
ReplyDeleteThis, to me, is the ur-problem with "Thor: The Dark World", indeed with a disappointing majority of Marvel's films. It has great effects work, it's anchored to decent-to-good performances, but all too often there is a marked lack of interest in telling an actual STORY, and much more in setting up a whole bunch of other stories, thus rendering the film proper more a necessary chore than anything particularly important. "The Dark World", as you say, suffers from this worse than any other Marvel film to date save "Iron Man 2" (and "The Incredible Hulk", but that movie just sort of sucks balls on EVERY level, and it is my personal pick for Marvel's weakest film to date by far), with even story beats that feel like they should have an awful lot of impact (in particular one that directly informs the movie's unforgivably incomplete ending) instead passing by far too breezily to really matter. It is also worth noting that, when looked at in sum, VERY little of the story's conflicts have actually been effectively resolved, or even all that much CHANGED from when the damned thing started.
I'm hard-pressed to call it "bad"; lord knows I enjoyed it more than the original, which may be damning with faint praise but at least means the movie has SOMETHING going for it, and there is something genuinely admirable about its commitment to presenting all this patently-absurd, fiercely creative imagery with such a straight face and genuine respect (the peculiar combination of Futuristic and Medieval that informs Asgard's every facet especially). But it also feels very much like a Marketing Gimmick more than a movie, and at this point I think Marvel's attempts to tease us at their Next Big Thing are starting to wear more than a little thin.
I enjoyed the movie, even if it did have a slow and sloppy start. The second and third acts are where the movie is at its best, and I found them fun and funny in a way I haven't seen since the first Captain America. It embraced the inherent silliness of its premise without being entirely too tongue-in-cheek about it.
ReplyDeleteI also loved some of the little touches, like how the minor characters celebrate the battle near the beginning of the film. Fandrall has not one, but two women on his arms while Volstagg eats and drinks merrily while surrounded by his massive brood of children.
I'll agree that the first after-credits sequence felt very out of place, but I've heard that that was a studio mandate. In any event, it's a setup for Guardians of the Galaxy, which will either be amazingly fun or amazingly awful. Though how anything featuring a sharpshooting space raccoon and a 12 foot tall talking tree-man could be awful is beyond me.
Also, this film might have one of the lowest-impact climaxes in regard to collateral damage and loss of civilian life in any recent superhero movie. If this had been Man of Steel, London would have been reduced to a crater before the end.