Heroes and the Creation of Myth: Thor: The Dark World

Superheroes occupy a nearly-unique position in the history of human character creation. They are creatures of myth, but at the same time people with the concerns of human beings, even when they are themselves alien. This puts them in a position to not only be the subjects of myth, but to interact with and in some cases control the creation of the mythology which surrounds them.

In this series I set out to analyze the different ways heroes participate in the creation of their own mythology. I've decided to begin with the largest single continuity ever attempted in film, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the time leading up to the release of The Avengers: Infinity War I'm going to watch or rewatch the eighteen existing MCU films in order to look at them specifically from this perspective. Today I'm reluctantly looking at Thor: The Dark World in what's probably going to be the shortest post in this series.

I got myself into this project, and writing about all of the interesting things Marvel is doing with their characters in the movies leading up to this has made me even more aware of what a complete clunker The Dark World is. Thor, who had a few moments of looking like he might gain a modicum of self-awareness in The Avengers, is back to being his old self in this movie. And his old self remains not only completely uncaring about his effect on others but also incredibly dull.

I got around this in the first Thor movie by skipping Thor and talking about Loki, who has also taken a step back in this movie. Loki's megalomania was over-the-top and unjustified, but at least it was interesting. The defeated and imprisoned Loki has little to offer us, and as he makes his way back to freedom and capability he does it through being a cliched version of himself. Loki lies badly! Loki fakes his own death! Haven't we seen this before?

The Svartalfheim villains offer us nothing as well. They don't care about myth, they just want all light in the universe to be extinguished. Their villainous motivation is, well, villainy. It's very frustrating, after looking for, and finding, depth unheralded in this series of action movies, to come upon one where they just didn't put any effort into having any. This would be discouraging if I didn't know that the meaty Captain America: Winter Soldier was next on the list.

We do get one moment, at the end of the movie, when Thor declares that he is not ready to take the throne of Asgard, when it feels like he might be evaluating himself and his actions. But his experiences in the rest of the movie don't support that kind of character growth. It's tempting to interpret this as the result of his uncertainty in The Avengers, but I think it's more likely to be for completely different reasons, reasons which have nothing to do with the self-awareness that I keep hoping he'll grow into.

I really wanted to find something worthwhile in here, but this is just the empty shell of an action movie, and its flaws shine brightly when placed next to its peers.

Previous entries in this series:
Part 1: Iron Man (2008)
Part 2: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Part 3: Iron Man 2 (2010)
Part 4: Thor (2011)
Part 5: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Part 6: The Avengers (2012)
Part 7: Iron Man 3 (2013)

_{All images in this post are from Thor: The Dark World, copyright 2013 Marvel, used in this post under Fair Use: Criticism. Provided courtesy of Movie-Screencaps.com}