Natalie Portman does Marvel

This is the film review for Thor: The Dark World, Marvel superhero Thor returns to the big screen; following the Avengers Thor has been settling the 9 realms to peace, but the ancient race of Dark Elves threatens to disrupt that balance with the mystical Aether and bring darkness over everything. As always, 

Spoilers

Long ago in the way back when Odin's father, Bor, thwarted the evil plot of the Dark Elf Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), attempting to destroy the universe with the powerful Aether. The war lead to the assumed extinction of Malekith's race and the Aether was hidden where noone would ever find it.

Flash forward to the present and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is ending the uprisings that have followed in the wake of the Avengers, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is imprisoned, the rainbow bridge is rebuilt and "the convergence" is approaching, when all nine realms will be aligned. As a result portals that connect the realms are opening, down on Earth Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) find one of these portals and slips between the realms, inadvertently finding, and absorbing, the Aether. Thor retrieves her to Asgard where the Dark Elves, reawakened by the Aether, launch an assault, killing Thor's mother and leaving Loki incredibly sad.

Thor, Loki and Jane hatch a plan to remove the Aether from Jane and destroy it as well. In an incredibly pulled off trick, Loki gets Malekith to remove the Aether and it is almost destroyed. But Malekith escapes, killing Loki in the process. Jane and Thor head back to Earth to prevent Malekith from destroying everything and after some multidimensional fisticuffs they succeed. Thor returns to refuse the throne of Asgard, which is currently seated by a shape shifting Loki, the Aether is delivered to "The Collector" and Thor kisses Jane.

It sounds better than it is. All in all I didn't expect much coming in to the cinema and I wasn't disappointed, this installment in the Marvel universe is darker than the original, a trend that is beginning to show in this set of films. The tone itself is grittier and more mortal than the previous too, as is fairly standard for film series, each being progressively more serious. Unfortunately for Marvel the jovial nature was something that made their films stand out, Thor was, if anything, Man of Steel painted a different shade of super.

Whilst the cinematography was beautiful the score was empty, with no particularly memorable moments. The casting though was again a high point. Hemsworth, Portman, and Hiddleston play the roles beautifully, particularly Hiddleston's performance of Loki. Even some smaller roles such as Hopkins' Odin were played brilliantly, the only negative comment would be Eccleston's villain being rather bland. Granted given the plot of the film there did not appear to be much else to do with the character.

Overall I give it a 5/10, if you want to keep up for the sake of knowing what's going on in the series then that's fine otherwise I would say it's not worth the watch, the positive moments are far outweighed by the monotone grim theme. And the few positive moments are mostly childish humour, with very little cleverness in the jokes.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981115/