The first Thor movie disappointingly managed to avoid being the campy disaster the premise and marketing campaign clearly promised us through some great casting, nice dialogue and a couple of neat action scenes. The sequel coasts by again on these saving graces – covering up the fact that it has an incomprehensible story-line built on some ridiculous contrivances and a villain completely lacking personality or purpose.

How’s this for a plot:

It turns out there were some evil elves (ELVES!?) who wanted to return the universe to darkness… at least I think thats what they wanted. They were called “The Dark Elves”, so thats probably it. Unfortunately, they can only do it when they have the magical Aether and all of the universes align somehow; again for reasons unclear.

The problem is that Thor’s grandpa hid the aether where no one could ever find it. That is until Natalie Portman (of all people) finds it by accidentally falling into a space-hole she found in a warehouse in London. The Aether somehow attachs itself to her and wakes up the elves… who were sleeping?!

Or some bullshit.

Then there are some fights. And explosions. Maybe some romance. What I am trying to say is that this is not one of cinema’s greatest story-lines…

I only really picked up on a lot of this when getting drunk and talking about it afterwards, though, because it’s one of those films that just works while it’s running.

The cast are all charismatic and charming, and they all act like the movie is making sense. The dynamic between Thor and Loki (who’s a prisoner after trying to enslave us all in The Avengers) is great, and Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston sell it well. Alan Taylor takes over from Kenneth Branagh as director, and as a veteran of Game Of Thrones, he know how to sell the look and feel of all this fantasy nonsense.

Look, I can’t in good conscience recommend this to you as a good movie, it really isn’t. But I enjoyed myself sitting there and watching it. If you have already seen Gravity, then you could do worse than giving Thor: The Dark World a look.

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