The Road To Endgame – Part 8: Thor: The Dark World

God, this film is dull.

If you look up the definition of the word dull in the Oxford English Dictionary, you’d find the poster for this film right next to it. Nothing in this film excites me, not even Loki. And when a man isn’t excited by the God Of Mischief, then you know you’ve messed up your film really quite badly.

Eight films into the MCU at this point (including two Thor films) and they’ve still not worked out how to make the character interesting. Who’d have thunk it? But I digress. Let’s dive right in and work out what exactly it is that makes Thor: The Dark World such a dreadful addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For the offset, it seems Thor: The Dark World is doomed to fail. The plot isn’t very interesting in the slightest, but here goes nothing: this is about Thor’s quest to defeat the evil Dark Elf, Malekith.

That’s about as much as I can remember without googling the synopsis, and I finished the film a mere hour ago. Along the way, Thor must do some stuff on Earth (It’s so insanely bland I doubt you’d even want me to describe it to you, frankly) and, once again, passively flirt with Jane Foster.

As you can tell from my synopsis, it’s some really inspiring stuff, utterly perfect storytelling. I jest, of course, because it is frankly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

The cast is an utter catastrophe, and that’s putting it in the lightest possible terms. Chris Hemsworth goes from fun, uber-cool Thor in The Avengers to dull and boring Thor in this. Natalie Portman is very much just phoning in her performance here as Natalie Portman.

As you may have noticed in the review so far, the word of the review is ‘dull’. It’s the best way to describe perhaps every performance in the film other than Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith.

Jaimie Alexander, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hiddleston, Idris Elba, Kat Dennings, Zachary Levi, all of them normally pretty good actors, are all utterly wasted here. None of them get any real stand-out moments, meaning the film is lacking that something that every film needs. A memorable moment. The best thing I can say about the cast is that the make-up for Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith the Dark Elf is amazing, and he’s the only actor in the entire film feels like he’s giving the role his all.

The action isn’t even fun. The final battle between Malekith and Thor isn’t even exciting, and it’s the final bloody battle, it’s supposed to be the most exciting part of the entire film. If you can’t get that right, what hope do you have to make a vaguely memorable film in the first place?

Overall, Thor: The Dark World is the worst addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we’ve seen so far in The Road To Endgame. There’s a high chance it’ll end up being the overall worst MCU film by the time we’re finished with this retrospective. It’s dull, bland, grey and just awful in general. But hey, at least it sets up Guardians Of The Galaxy right? Right?

2/10