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Thor: The Dark World
| Released |
30 October 2013 |
| Director |
Alan Taylor |
Starring
|
Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgard, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Rene Russo, Anthony Hopkins, Chris O'Dowd |
Writer(s)
|
Christopher L. Yost, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely |
| Producer(s) |
Kevin Feige |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
112 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, adventure, fantasy |
| Rating |
12A |
|
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Hammertime (2).
Whatever happened to Christopher Eccleston? From such promising (and menacing) beginnings in his breakthrough film Shallow Grave, Eccleston seems to have made a career out of putting in solid, if unmemorable performances. I’d even forgotten that he was Doctor Who for a while. Well if I didn’t rub my eyes when I saw his name in the credits of Thor: The Dark World. So well hidden is he under prosthetics and make up and so absent is his character, Malekith, from a large swathes of the movie, that I’d defy anyone to pick him out of a line up of creepy, light averse elves. He certainly doesn’t have the tongue in cheek campness of Ben Kingsley as Mandarin in Iron Man 3 or the gravitas of Ian McKellen as Magneto in X-Men.
In the great tradition of casting British actors as baddies in superhero films, Eccleston is faced with a problem. That being that the Thor franchise already has a baddie, (one also played by a British actor) and one who is refusing to go away. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Thor’s wayward adopted brother who takes sibling rivalry to a whole new level, steals the movie out from under Eccleston’s pointy nose. Having been defeated in the previous film, he is given a dressing down by his father (King of Asgard, Anthony Hopkins) and thrown into the dungeons of the palace, to think about what he did. He’s not long there though, when as fortune would have it, he and Thor have to form a grudging alliance to defeat the Elvish ones.
The problem with this film is that it’s all over the place, literally. We jump from world to world, to outer space (hang out with Stringer Bell for a while), then we’re off again, hurtling through space into another of the nine realms. We have no time with any of the other characters, other than Thor (the ever muscular mallet wielding Chris Hemsworth). Even his love interest Jane Foster, (a very underused Natalie Portman), doesn’t really get to do more than whine about him being gone for two years until the end of the movie, and even then her biggest contribution is twiddling a few knobs in an effort to thwart evil incarnate.
There are some good action sequences, as you would expect with a CGI fest like this, but the film suffers from setting everything up for two long and then squishing all the action into the final set piece. Game of Thrones’ Alan Taylor has taken over from Kenneth Branagh for the second outing. Perhaps transferring from the long form storytelling of Game of Thrones, where you can jump around between the different er realms (?) for three episodes before anything really happens - to presenting a neat three act structured action film has proved problematic for him.
Then again, the roots of the film’s problems lie in the script. The humour is too gentle, the pacing wrong and the development of the supporting cast nonexistent. And it’s too long. A victim of the difficult second blockbuster methinks.
- Bridget Deevy |
