Of Marvel’s current canon of earth mightiest warriors, Thor is arguably the most difficult to adapt to film, maybe second only to Rocket Raccoon (who is actually getting a movie in 2014).  Marvel accomplished this in 2011 with a really good introduction for the thunder god and now they have the task of following it up.  And they do.  Thor: The Dark World is pretty good.  This may not seem like high praise because it’s not, because although it’s a “pretty good movie” it has plenty of flaws.

I call Thor difficult to adapt to film because he is the least grounded of the Marvel heroes– literally the farthest removed from Earth.  The fact that Thor is from another world makes it so much harder to present his character well because in order to get his character right you have to get his whole world of Asgard right.  It has to look good and have a believable relationship with Earth and the rest of the Marvel heroes making the thunder god just more complicated than Captain America (whose only prerequisite is patriotism).

Let’s start with the biggest problem:  the script.  Although it credits Joss Whedon as one of three writers, his fans know he is way too good a writer for this wreck of a story.  I have a sneaky suspicion he had little real creative input.

The simplistic yet vague plot involves a bad guy named Malekith played by Christopher Eccleston, The Doctor from Doctor Who’s first season.  We know the bad guy is bad because a) he is dark looking; b) he likes the dark; and c) he wants everything else to be dark.  Malekith is in search of a powerful and ill-defined item that will make the whole world dark.  This mystery item makes its way into the possession of Natalie Portman’s character, Jane, who is the Hammer Man’s love interest.  So Thor and Malekith fight over the item in a bunch of extended fights.

These encounters are punctuated by moments of Thor’s relationship with Natalie Portman, which is a relationship that makes no sense and is impossible to care about.  The actors themselves have chemistry but we’re given no reason at all for a literal god to fall for this particular human.  In fact, a plot element introduced toward the end of the movie seems to be for the sole purpose of giving Portman’s scientist character something to do.  Portman seems wasted in this film, with her character out of place in interstellar conflict and her forced plot significance a result of pure random chance.

Still, despite the fact that the story is bad even by comic book standards, this by no means poisons the film entirely.  The Dark World is quite fun to watch, even with the bad plotting.  When a studio has as much money to throw at action sequences as Marvel does you can expect a certain degree of quality, and this film delivers the action scenes you would expect.  Each set piece is interesting and unique, the CG is excellent, and the sound design of Thor’s hammer is especially satisfying.

Marvel has done an insanely ambitious thing in creating the cross continuous film universe that they have in the last six years.  The Dark World may not measure up to some of the other Marvel films, including the original Thor, but it’s by no means boring and most audiences will thoroughly enjoy it.