First Trailer for Thor 2: Asgardian Boogaloo

Riding the trend of “Well, people liked those Dark Knight movies, so they must like their movies tonally dark and literally dark and also with the word ‘dark’ somewhere in the title” (also see Star Trek Into Darkness), Thor: The Dark World put out its first trailer this morning, and the movie—directed by Sopranos/Mad Men/Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor—looks… yep! You guessed it! Dark!

I’m still stoked for this: Avengers aside, Thor is probably my favorite comic book movie so far, at least of Marvel’s inexhaustible stable of pulp heroes. But a big part of why I liked Thor was because of how goofy and fun it was; like the first Iron Man, in its best moments, it worked more as a comedy than an action movie. It was also the first comic book movie in recent memory to be like, “Man! Comic books are weird! Let’s go with that!” instead of, “Man! Comic books are weird! Let’s get rid of as much of that weirdness as possible!” I’m all for a sequel to Thor that raises the stakes and has a story that hits harder—but here’s hoping in their attempts to go all srs bsns, they haven’t left behind what made Thor interesting in the first place.

Now that I’ve written it, it occurs to me that this post basically reads like any number of things I’ve grumbled about Star Trek Into Darkness, and also Iron Man 3, which looks similarly dour and flat. So I guess my point is that yeah, I liked the Dark Knight movies as much as anybody, but jesus, not everything needs to be so goddamn mopey all the time—especially when the source material is the exact opposite of mopey. I can go watch To the Wonder if I want to feel terrible about life. Thor and his beautifully flowing golden locks are supposed to make me feel better.