Thor 2: The Dark World
***
Huge scope and spectacle meets family rivalry.
Every hero can only be as good as his enemy is bad, and in this one Loki is loopy, malevolent and bad, but ambiguous. This makes for an ambiguous film – it looks great but the storyline is kind of obvious.
The film starts off with Loki (Tom Hiddlestone), the damaged psychopath, returning to Asgard and jail. There’s lots of family dynamics with the darker side of royal politics on the side as Thor (Chris Hemsworth) tries to clean up the mess Loki created across the many worlds of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Hiddlestone creates the more complex character, while Hemsworth keeps with the straight and narrow definition of Norse hero god, but the film works best when the two are sparring.
Asgard is grandly beautiful and Stellan Skarsgaard is great fun as maybe-he’s-not-that-crazy scientist Peter Selvig.
SPECIAL FEATURES: The obligatory extended and deleted scenes are always fun, but the features are more intriguing. The audio commentary on the extended and deleted scenes explains why they didn’t make the final cut, but it is the info from the features that really grabs your attention.
There’s a feature titled Scoring Thor, dealing with composer Brian Tyler’s work on the score. Then there is the two-part feature A Brother’s Journey: Thor & Loki, which delves into the basic relationships defining this film, even if it is subtitled The Dark World. It also discusses the action sequences and the engineering that went into the beautiful sets.
The Marvel One Shot: All Hail the King, starring Ben Kingsley as the Trevor Slattery character from Iron Man 3, is hilarious, hinting at a storyline that can be explored further. - Theresa Smith