I thought the first Thor movie was average at best. Never read his books, never cared for the character. He’s in a similar boat as Superman; having god like powers makes it hard to be concerned about his or her well being. The Dark World is a significant improvement over the first, but still has its faults.

The best part for me is that a small part of the movie takes place on Earth. There’s much more of Asgard and a few of the other realms that Thor watches over. This makes for a much more visually interesting (and often beautiful) and unique movie with the wild colors, landscapes and technology. There’s a much better sense of where Thor comes from and how his culture operates. Also, since this happens after the events of The Avengers, there’s a solid jumping off point of change in Thor and Loki. Loki is locked up for his tyrannical run for Earth and Thor is busy settling things down from Loki’s actions.

The hook of the movie arrives when a great ancient power awakens that threatens all nine realms. After barely fending off the first attack by the Dark Elf Malekith, Thor and Loki must team up in order to stop him from destroying everything. It’s Loki’s chance for some kind of redemption, but can he really be trusted? This is easily the best and most thought out part of the movie. The story arc with the brothers and their parents works really well and gives great motivation and reason for the rest of the movie (and the cool ending).

They lucked out finding Tom Hiddleston to play Loki as he’s the perfect fit for such a role. He’s been great from the start, but now he really owns the character, it’ll be hard to imagine anyone else playing Loki (he pulls off that silly helmet somehow too). He’s got depth, his reasons for being the way he is and that all combines into being a great foil to his brother Thor. Chris Hemsworth continues to fill Thor’s boots well, I can’t think of anything negative to say about him.

I’m very take it or leave it on Natalie Portman as Jane Foster though. She’s just kind of there with her stupid red boots and it’s hard to believe she’s a scientist. Using a couple of big words in rapid succession and spinning a few dials on a machine doesn’t make you a scientist. This folds into my main problem with the movie: there’s a lot of convenient solutions at just the right time. There’s way too many moments of “just go with us on this one” from the writers. Characters get marooned in another realm only to walk into a cave and find the other end of a worm hole that they were playing with at the beginning of the movie. It brings them right where they need to be. Science is used as the solution for The Big Problem of the movie, but it’s theoretical science written on paper at best. Jane and Erik are doing some Einstein level mathamatics and engineering in a matter of minutes and it all works right out of the gate. Did I mention they are sticks? Sure we see them first used in The Avengers, but they quickly reverse engineer them for this new problem and then toss them around like outlet sale bocce balls. You can really just fling those things around in energy storms and god only knows what else and they work perfectly? Sure the results look cool and Thor gets some serious punching done, but come on. Even if it’s easy to sweep aside being in the Summer Blockbuster genre, it’s still dumb. Speaking of dumb, the jokes! They really tried making this movie funny with quick quips, but gad zooks are they bad. Most of them hit the dirt like a big mouth bass.

As far as comic book movies go, The Dark World is one of the better ones. They do a lot with a rather average character and that’s commendable (almost forgot to mention, the soundtrack is terrific). It moves the Marvel Universe in the right direction and they are making these movies better with each one so I can’t complain much.