Thor: The Dark World

November 7, 2013

135216331

A seemingly humdrum chapter of the ever-growing “Avengers” saga, “Thor: The Dark World” also turns out to be an amalgam of oodles of other fantasy pictures, most notably “The Lord of the Rings,” which it mirrors from its first, exposition-heavy flashback. It also calls to mind prior films from the Marvel brand, like “The Avengers” itself, which similarly involved an ominous portal looming over an earthly city.

But genre cinema has become so vastly auto-cannibalistic that pointing out narrative links and influences is practically futile. If one has any hope for enjoyment, it’s best to be in the moment with the specimen at hand, and see how well it engrosses with the cards on the table, even if they’re swiped from someone else’s deck.

With this in mind, one can see the sequel to 2011’s “Thor” as quite an achievement. It’s immersive, emotional, flawlessly visualized and effective in its humor, which continues to stem from the fish-out-of-water dichotomy between Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and the godlike residents of Asgard, and love interest Jane (Natalie Portman) and her fellow earthlings. The threat this time is a band of ancient elves, who want to use some liquid life force to cover worlds in darkness amid planetary alignment.

But, again, none of those derivative details matter much. “Thor: The Dark World” triumphs in its monumental special effects, which also recall “The Lord of the Rings” in the sense that they’re rich and astonishingly state of the art (a siege on Asgard’s headquarters occasionally evokes the Siege of Gondor in “Return of the King”). It furthermore gets surprising depth from the bond between Thor and his villainous brother, Loki, played for the third time by Tom Hiddleston, who definitively proves that his is the best performance in Marvel’s entire Hollywood universe.

The notion of merging worlds, and presenting a permeable barrier between them, is one this film uses consistently. It proves as central to the plot as it does reflective of the movie, which pulls viewers into its world with much greater skill than most will expect.