It’s a dark, dark, dark, dark world. How dark is “Thor: The Dark World”? So dark that when the Hammerin’ Hunk stops by Earth, someone asks, “So, how’s . . . space?” “Space is . . . fine,” he says. It’s as if someone asked Batman how often he gets rubber wedgies.
Actually, I think that line did appear in “Batman & Robin,” and if that (or “The Mummy Returns,” or “The Fantastic Four” ) is your idea of a superhero movie, Thor’s combination of half-hearted action and dim jokes is exactly what you’re looking for. If “The Lord of the Rings” was ancient legends sifted through the sensibility of an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon studies, then “Thor: The Dark World” is grand Norse myth run through the minds of 9-year-olds. “Hey, what if Odin lowered his staff and laser bullets came out?” “Yeah! Blam! Blam!”
This time, after the events of “The Avengers,” Thor’s girl, Jane (Natalie Portman), has been left sighingly behind on Earth, and evil Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is in prison on Asgard, while Thor (Chris Hemsworth) fights a series of wars to unite the Nine Realms. These aren’t the kinds of epic battles where you have to break a sweat: A giant rock-monster approaches Thor and, with one swing of the Magic Mallet and a couple of snarky one-liners, it is reduced to gravel.
Asgard’s ancient elfy enemies, seemingly defeated eons ago, are instead taking a cosmic nap and awaiting their next chance to harvest the game-changing magical power the Aether. Thor’s father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), thought his own father had sent the Aether to a place where it would never be seen again. But they should have thought of the obvious place — Thursday nights on NBC. As it is, the dark force slips out of space like a galactic hernia and falls into an abandoned factory in London, where l’il astrophysicist Darcy (Kat Dennings) finds it and alerts Jane, who gets infected with the all-consuming force. Thor steps through a wrinkle in space and brings her back to his Asgard home, where the Dark Elves plot to harvest the Aether coursing through her. Oh, and there’s a once-every-5,000-year event called the Convergence that briefly lines up all the galactic systems in a row like a giant bull’s-eye for the Dark Elves.
Fooling you into thinking the bad guys have a chance is what these movies are all about, but that never happens here. “Dark World” is as narratively gripping as if the pages of the IKEA catalog attacked one another. (Watch out, Olofstorp is massed for battle against Lindved!) I think even the filmmakers (TV director Alan Taylor and a squadron of screenwriters) would be surprised if you ever became emotionally engaged. One vanishingly minor character’s funeral takes up pretty much the same amount of screen time as that figure has enjoyed in the whole movie, and we’re supposed to tear up? Nah, it’s just that pagan funerals provide lots of CGI opportunity: the lonely boat floating out to sea, the archers firing arrows into it, the waterfall, the spirit ascending. Cool.
A dogfight is similarly meaningless: Thor has decided to turn traitor, disobey his father (as always) and fight his own brother warriors. Fratricide looms. Heavy stuff, you’d think, but instead it’s all played for a lark. (Nobody seems to get hurt, or if they do, nobody cares.) When Thor brings up the idea, he does it in a jokey way, and later there are no consequences whatsoever. I think Jane even refers to it as “treason and stuff,” or maybe she calls it “kinda treason-y.” Whatever. Oh, and if a character’s hand should get cut off? It just pops back 30 seconds later. “Dark World” is low-stakes, low-emotion, lowbrow. Guess how high my interest level was?