#tone is a good mix of the 2013 film and the original. leaned a BIT towards evil dead 2 goofy moments

[agentjazzy]

came back from evil dead rise!! anyways, as a californian who's mom has dyed red hair I was feeling pretty targeted 😰

like what do you MEAN it takes place in california, this is supposed to be MICHIGAN'S problem!!!!!!!! now we have to worry about deadites?????????? FUCK

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, at least four times.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Four (23.52% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Surprisingly dull.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Darcy tells Jane about the scientific anomaly. They check it out together. They pass when Jane reappears. Frigga instructs Jane. To be honest, I forgot to notice if they actually passed once Jane came back to Earth, but it’s ok because we already confirmed that the film achieved multiple passes anyway. There were definitely some.

Female characters:

Sif.

Jane Foster.

Darcy Lewis.

Frigga.

Male characters:

Malekith.

Bor.

Loki.

Odin.

Thor.

Fandral.

Hogun.

Volstagg.

Richard.

Ian.

Heimdall.

Algrim.

Erik Selvig.

OTHER NOTES:

Odin is encouraging Thor to have a relationship with Sif, aka his One Female Friend. What a cliche. It comes to nothing in any direction and I don’t know why they bothered to even mention it.

They bother to give Frigga something to do (ever-so-briefly) in this movie, just in time to kill her off. Nice.

They spent so much time having Thor and Loki trade quips while they’re escaping Asgard, I straight-up forgot that Jane was there. Bad editing, y’all.

Erik is ~crazy~ and then he sees the convergence is happening and he’s spontaneously better and it’s all just very...poor.

Thor’s whole take-the-aether-to-Svartalfheim plan goes astronomically badly and I feel like they kinda...gloss over that. He and his buddies all commit treason, they deliver the aether straight to Malekith, and Loki DIES (as far as Thor knows, anyway). It’s just kinda weird that they don’t take a moment to be like ‘wow, really fucked that one up’, y’know, lean in to the emotion a bit, give it some weight? I feel like they played Frigga’s death like it was the more desolate moment, which is nonsense from both a narrative perspective, and in terms of character (since the audience is three films in with fan-favourite Loki, as opposed to this being Frigga’s second appearance but the first in which she actually did anything (recall in the first film she was not actually given a name, let alone anything to do)). Whatever. 

I’m not gonna linger overlong with this one, because there’s really not a lot worth saying. For the ladies, I will say this: I think all four of them have more utility in this film than they did in the first Thor. Jane is less prominent than last time, but she gets to do more than just talk excitedly about science this time (though for the middle portion of the film, she is rendered a damsel and spends a lot of time either unconscious or just weirdly silent and being totally forgotten by narrative and audience alike (pro tip: reaction shots of all involved parties are important. No one is ever just hanging on the sidelines of a major action event doing and thinking and responding to nothing). Nevertheless, she gets to actively participate in science-ing a way to win the day at the climax of the film (using Selvig’s tech, admittedly - I can’t give points to any aspect of Jane’s handling in this film without also adding a caveat), and at least that’s better than standing around yelling and wringing her hands over Thor? It’s something.

When I say Sif had more utility this time, that’s...maybe an exaggeration. She had about the same amount as last film, really: she does at least one (1) thing in her function as ‘one of Thor’s group of friends’, and she gets at least one (1) scene where she has a personal conversation of some description with Thor so that the film can play with the possibility of using Sif as a love interest. It’s not a thrilling effort, and I can’t pretend that there’s any real evidence of a character there, just a placeholder standing in until someone with an actual personality shows up to take over (it doesn’t happen). Darcy continues to be that mix of fun and annoying that only sometimes works as comic relief, but at least this movie gives her some minor action to perform (getting Selvig out of the psychiatric facility) as opposed to just tagging along being chatty for the sake of it all movie long. It’s not much - and frankly, Selvig’s whole storyline is useless - but at least it allows anything at all to be happening on Earth while Jane and Thor are away. It’s...something.

And then there’s Frigga, who, as noted, is briefly given something to do so that the film can shore up some meagre emotional capital in order to buy a fancy funeral scene and some tasty manpain for our Asgardian royals. Yippee. An inordinate amount of attention is given to the death of a relatively minor character with whom the audience has been given little opportunity to forge an attachment, and while it works fine enough at that point in the film, the fact that the movie never reaches that same tempo again is egregious. Normally, the primary emotional intensifier in the film is the event which prompts the final act, but this movie misplaces that event way early with Frigga’s death and then Thor’s treason-plan which ensues; there’s a whole other action set-piece on Svartalfheim and ANOTHER (much more major) character death, and THAT is what spurs the final act of the film, but it is handled in a much more low-key (pun not intended) fashion, with very little response from the characters past the immediate moment. After Loki’s death, there’s no evidence that Thor is particularly bothered, there’s no indication that he’s emotionally driven to avenge his brother (or his mother, now, because we already spent that arc) by defeating Malekith at last, and there’s no hatching of a reckless Hail-Mary ploy to beat the bad guy, they just kinda...go and plant some gravitation rod thingies. Wowzer. The primary emotional intensifier of the film happens at the half-way point with Frigga’s fridging, and there’s not nearly enough fuel in that to keep the story running to the end. 

Essentially, this is the problem with the entire film: it has no emotional cohesion, and that renders events that should feel compelling/exciting/original perfunctory and empty instead. It also has the same problem as the first Thor in that the majority of the characters feel flat and fairly meaningless as individuals, existing more as plot devices than anything else, but unlike the first film this one doesn’t even muster a good villain plot (Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith has presence, but he isn’t given anything dynamic to work with, he’s literally ‘evil, because’. Also, I’m annoyed that they had Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Malekith’s lieutenant and failed to do anything cool with him as a character, he’s just The Muscle (who is also ‘evil, because’)). The adventure to Svartalfheim is the best part of the film because it has the sense of escalating stakes that the actual final act lacks, so it’s the only time that the tone of the film feels like it’s on-track, plus it is notably the only time that the narrative utilises Loki (fan-favourite character and easily the best asset from the first film: you kinda want to lean in to that - the other best character from the first movie, Heimdall, remains woefully underused this time around). Once Loki is out of the picture and Thor’s not real worried about it and the characters on Earth are fooling around with planting a handful of itty flimsy spikes in Greenwich to disrupt the cosmic alignment of the nine realms (who knew it was that easy?), the film lapses into the same old predictable beats with no emotional core, and while there’s some basic fun in the portal-hopping of the film’s climax, there’s no sense of any genuine jeopardy for any of the characters, nor is there a clear idea of what they actually have to do to beat Malekith or how that can be achieved, so the action isn’t building toward anything more defined than ‘super-powered aliens whaling on each other’. As the MCU already learned (but evidently, failed to internalise) after The Incredible Hulk, just having rubber characters bounce around breaking stuff and being invulnerable until it becomes convenient for them to stop does not a good finale make. Well. At least this movie isn’t as ridiculously contrived as Iron Man 2? It’s less fun, though, and for all its spectacle, it’s not even as good as the first Thor movie, and considering how very generic that film was? That’s a dire conclusion. The MCU track record for sequels is presently, not good. Just you wait, though - we’re about to have an exception to the rule.