A let down to a improved sequel

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2018)

Thor: The Dark World follows Thor, Son of Odin, after the events of The Avengers with the tension between his brother and him still tense and a new issue caused by family a long time ago affecting his current life with his love and the world he has grown to love too.
Alan Taylor does a very good job directing. Improving on the first film with its overuse of dutch angles and keeping the filmmaking more simplistic and stylistic. The best part of the film is the action scenes are very well filmed and beautifully designed with special effects, great direction, and fantastic acting. This is though not Taylor's best film in his career and it sadly is the weakest Thor film in the now trilogy with a lot of issues from the script and some questionable acting choices as well that could come from Taylor or the casting director.
Getting to the writing, it feels like each act in the film is written by a completely different person and has a few times that I felt like I was watching a different film completely with each act change. The script portrays the main antagonist as this one sided generic villain that has just one job and it is to destroy the universe, heard of that one before?, yeah me too. And especially with Iron Man 3 having a very rich villain, it falls short on the writing. Besides that the characters written are all good. But I do feel like they were trying to cram in as much as they can into this film which was completely unnecessary for this aftermath film. Then the tone change, with it going from extremely dark and serious scenes to awkward comedy doesn't transfer well at all in this film and honestly doesn't feel like a Marvel film when rewatching it.
The acting is overall amazing. Hemsworth drastically improved in this stand alone film compared to the first in his acting. Hiddleston is once again amazing as the god of tricks and his manipulation and use of great plan developing to get what he needs. Even minor characters like Thor's warriors and his mom and dad all are so much stronger than the first film and have a lot more useful parts and more defining roles than the first film which is nice. But the main villain once again comes off bad compared to the rest of the film. It could've been from the prosthetics but his acting comes off so bland and feels like his voice is one of those computer text-to-speech things. But one character compared to an ensemble of amazing actors can be forgotten.
With a huge issue of storytelling and a single character that could've been better written and acted. It falls short on its potential as the sequel.
Thor: The Dark World gets a 6/10