Strongly lacks the emotional core of the first movie

Rating: 6/10 (11 November 2013)

A dark elf named Malekith and his right hand Argrim/Kurse fought an ancient war against Odin's father for the possession of a powerful macguffin called the Aether. If possessed by the elves it has the power to put the entire universe back into darkness. However, this can only occur during the convergence. This is when all planets in the nine realms are perfectly aligned and thus easier for Malekith to use the aether to darkify all worlds at once. He loses and is forced to flee and put himself and his surviving people into stasis until the aether is accidentally found once again by a certain brown-haired scientist. Cue Thor and the problems this brings to his world and family.
Mal and Argrim/Kurse- Neither character has any real depth. The director said that unfortunately most of it was left on the cutting room floor. However, even though kurse does most of the brute strength work in the movie, and Mal really doesn't get to do anything groundbreaking until the final battle, both are deliciously intimidating and menacing. Basically they are everything Loki failed to be in two movies. Good villains. They lack strong characterization but they both got the job done. Their actors worked with what they had and they did it beautifully. Also of special mention is the dark elf language. It was made especially for this movie and sounds deliciously demonic.
When the aether is awoken again Thor is forced to team up with his deeply untrustworthy adopted brother Loki, and his shallow as a kiddle pool love interest Jane Foster. He is more mature here, but also still very likable. Movie hit its stride when Thor and Loki are together. Great chemistry. Their screen-time together is unfortunately all to brief. Gotta get back to what's important Jane's posse and their'funny' earth scenes.
Jane- she serves three unfortunate purposes and they are the plot device to get Thor to earth, his depthless love interest, and a damsel in the distress. Seriously she literally spends the second half of the film knocked out, has no speaking lines with Loki after the infamous slap, and barely any lines of note with Thor either for that matter. She does get to be of use in the final battle, but it's a little too late. Foster (and friends) needs to be written out of the story someday soon.
Loki-I liked the character yet again and he is the sole reason I went to the theater to see this. I saw Thor and the Avengers on Netflix. He has such a strong presence that the screen feels empty when he isn't on it. His overall characterization and agency felt more at home here. Like this is the real continuation of Loki from Thor 1 instead of that pathetic comedic mess he was written as in the Avengers. This movie just proved to me yet again that Loki is treated better as a character in the Thor movies.
Acting overall was good.I loved the ending credit artwork.No love triangle crap. Asgard was beautiful. It looked more lived in here. Music was decent, but scenes go by so quickly that you really can't appreciate it. You will actually have to youtube if you actually want to listen to it.
Fanservice pandering is very evident here to the detriment of overall characterization. Will become very apparent what I mean by this after the movie is watched.
Comedy- overall execution is the problem. Sad things happen in this movie and yet I didn't care. Couldn't care. A lot of the comedic points were strongly misplaced.
This leads me to my biggest problem there was a severe lack of emotional impact. The somber scenes just flew past while the earth and funny got to keep on strutting. Transitions from melancholy to earth/funny were off big time. We aren't given time to linger and soak in what just happened and the characters aren't either. More time should have been spent on the emotional scenes and less on the latter.
Earth- more tolerable then the first one, but overall still the most boring part of the Thor movies. If they can't (or won't) get rid of earth, at least in his movies, then please tone it down. Just like the first film the most exciting and character driven scenes happened on Asgard and the other worlds. Leave earth for the avenger team-ups. It's not the runtime it's what you do with it that matters. We stayed on earth with its meh characters and comedic moments to long, and the emotional parts suffered greatly for it.The overall dialogue was off. It was clunky in parts and cheesy. I definitely preferred the first movie.Two credit scenes - The mid is foreshadowing a movie to come and it's an atrocious looking scene. It looked like it came from the worst of the sci-fi channel. Even the director has gone on record despising it. It was filmed by someone else. If this is a hint to what this future movie will look, and play, like then I sense marvels first bomb. End credit was meh to.
Disney's cheesy stamp is all over this. You can tell Marvel /Disney had their hands too far in the cookie jar in this one. To the point the director is asking fans to petition for a director's cut so we can get the serious, emotional movie he wanted instead of this big budget action comedy. I will never understand how they seem to know that the family drama is where the juicy meat is, and yet they keep giving us large doses of earth characters and their 'funny' moments. It's like since the Avengers has made this a shared universe Thor can't be the high fantasy drama it could and should be. Overall this movie did the visuals and action better than the first, but it missed the boat on the most important thing to me. A soul.