3. The Godawful MacGuffins
When I realised that the plot of Thor: The Dark World was based around another MacGuffin, I threw my head back and laughed: didn't we just go through this sh*t with the Avengers? The Tesseract, as a concept, is uninteresting enough, but to pretty much have exactly the same "world-ending, ultimate power" in The Dark Word's mysterious Aether... well, that's just a step too far. One incredibly boring MacGuffin I can take: two is almost insulting. "What's wrong with these ancient artifacts of power?" you ask. "They're just there to drive the action!" Well, precisely, but the inherent problem of using these super-powered objects as narrative guides is that they mean nothing: just colourful-looking objects that we - as human beings - have no relationship or connection to. We can't even visualise what an "ultimate power" is, let alone get behind a villain who's spending an entire movie trying to nab one. Fact is, these MacGuffins are lazy storytelling devices, which is why they feature so heavily in - yes - the comic books. With so many stories to think up, week after week, you can forgive a comic book writer for throwing in items like the Tesseract and the Aether - after a while, it doesn't matter. But at least when a villain tries to steal a nuclear weapon in a cheesy action film we know the cost: being blown up by a bomb is something we can relate it in a real world sense (more than with a box of light and a floating red vapour thing, anyway).