Today is November the 11th, alongside other, much more important events it is also the UK release date for Pacific Rim on Blu Ray (mine is en route courtesy of Sainsburys, as Amazon didn't have the steelbook version available), so I thought that now was as good a time as any to return to my lapsed blog (apologies for that, I got busy with work, then went to America for a fortnight, then just got really lazy).
Last week, I took a trip to the cinema to go see Thor: The Dark World, I'm currently 50/50 on Marvel's "phase 2" offerings, Iron Man 3 was a supremely well written character vehicle designed to extract the best performance possible out of Robert Downey Jr (they even got Shane Black in, to attempt to generate some of that Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang spark, which worked) while Agents of SHIELD is a badly written, woefully cast extended advert for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (rendered particularly redundant by the fact that seemingly everyone on earth watches the Marvel films now, they don't need 40 minutes of prime time TV each week to mention words like "tesseract", "gamma radiation" and "asgardian" for no reason").
I mentioned back when I previewed Guardians of the Galaxy that it seemed like a big risk for Marvel, away from the safe bosom of the Captain America and Iron Man films and could easily be too weird for much of the current core audience...
Enter Thor: The Dark World, your gateway into Weirdness 101.
One of these men is the best piece of casting in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the other is pretty OK as well.
I'm not going to straight up review Thor, suffice to say that it's good, probably better than the first one, with some wildly inconsistent acting (Tom Hiddleston > Everyone Else > Kat Dennings > Anthony Hopkins), seeing Stringer Bell as a Marvel god is still awesome, and, for anyone who got hot under the collar watching Mama Mia!, there's a surprising amount of Stellan Skarsgard running around in the buff for you to enjoy.
For me, the most important job of Thor is to hold audiences just close enough to the waters of what I like to refer to as "ridiculous cosmic Marvel shit" that we'll all be willing to jump in headfirst by the time Guardians rolls around next year. In this job, Thor executes beautifully, starting with a montage showing Thor fighting over a number of different worlds (stone monsters in feudal Japan anyone?), introducing the film's bad guys, actual freaking Dark Elves(!) lead by bad guy de jour Christopher Ecclestone, ok, so they look like the bad guys from 300, but at least they're some alien baddies who talk, scheme and have a plan, unlike the mindless soldiers in The Avengers.
There's some more cosmic power, this time it's the "aether", an ancient force of destruction which decides to hang out with Natalie Portman for most of the film, before emerging to become the usual power source of doom. If this all sounds incredibly similar to the first Thor, it's deliberately intentional, as indicated in the fantastically weird mid credits scene (which I'm not going to talk about or spoil) which asks plenty of questions to be answered in phase 2 and beyond.
Some critics have attacked The Dark World for only showing glimpses of the worlds outside of Earth and Asgard, although, for me, that is the whole point. By teasing us with morsels of these worlds, Marvel are building our anticipation for Guardians of The Galaxy, and for director James Gunn to (hopefully) throw back the covers and show us that, although Earth will probably play home to the final scenes of Avengers 3, the story has plenty of interesting places to take us to on the way there.
No comments:
Post a Comment