Frog Thor was awesome. Throg is still a character, I think, whenever they do a run of the Pet Avengers. Speedball steals the show though as the snarky cat.

Feminism is about equality, remember?

Not really in the film, but the review here says the film draws on Millar’s work within the Thor franchise? Oh, I don’t know. You’re ahead of me on cred points, anyway; my first comics were the My Little Pony and SuperTed comics. :D

Not sure Millar had a hand in this film or plotline! Did he?

Sif is interesting in the comics – at one point Sif and Jane merge to become the same person for a good few years, and then they unmerge in a later plotline… Romantically Thor has gone from Sif to Jane and back again in the comics, it just seems to rest on which woman the current writer fancies the most. (Merging the two was clearly someone who couldn’t decide?)

I have a very confused relationship with Thor comics. First comics I ever read (more accurately, had-read-to-me when my dad occasioanlly bought them from the one newsagents in Leicester that sold imported American comics) featured Thor as a frog and also as some dude named Eric. Neither of whom is the actual Thor. Ah, the nineties.

I liked X-Men because it was easy to understand. Even with clones and people’s babies being sent into the future to grow up and come back as reacurring characters. That’s when you realised you’ve skewed your daughter’s perception of fiction forever.

Stellan Skarsgaard gets to play Swedish! (shock! Horror! SURELY NOT, etc, etc) …and then getting into a drinking contest with a Norse god. WHOOPS. (also, we felt Anthony Hopkins was better for exposition!Odin than Brian Blessed was. Though Ray Stevenson channelled him magnificently for Volstaag.)

All the admin side of SHIELD and the ‘yes, we are doing this for legitimate reasons’. The SHIELD agent on his lunch break going ‘er, we got a Xena, a Robin Hood, a Jackie Chan…’

Kenneth Branagh showing that Henry V was not a one-off fluke when it came to ‘*this* is how you film a close-quarters battle with swords and warhammers, Hollywood.’

The terribly pretty scenery. Which has huge tracts of land.

Actual understanding of tech and computers. ‘They took your laptop.’ and not being able to recreate half a ton of tech stuff off the top of her head without her notes.

Only slightly faily bits: Rene Russo being surplus to requirements. Not enough Heimdall. ‘er, why is Bifrost ending in New Mexico? Shouldn’t it be somewhere in the Northern Europe? Greenland would be at least plausible if you wanted meteorologists and physicists studying in a remote region with added US power.’ ‘…Thor and Loki were teenagers in 900 AD? Um… you do know they were being worshipped a good 800 years earlier, right?’

Seq

I’m glad you liked it though. I was a bit worried because I did like it but there are only three ladies in it. It passes Bechdel though – unless in this context to speak about science and wormholes is to speak about Thor, which is an interesting argument.

Disappointingly, I believe Natalie Portman is not in the Avengers film, having been passed over for more Scarlet Johansson in a cat-suit based AK-SHON. I could be wrong through.

Yes, I think Natalie Portman was underused and I’d have liked to see more of some human relationships to parallel the Asgard ones.

I also feel like only 2-3 women was a shame although the relationship between sarky-quipping recent college grad Darcy and scientist Jane was a nice mirror of male sidekick partnerships and that made me smile. On reflection, I think the fact we only caught glimpses of these relationships is a minus – Darcy and Jane’s partnership is instrumental in facilitating some of the plot but is not really presented as such.

Did enjoy the film though. Especially Heimdall’s horned disco armour. Iris Elba has never looked more awesome.

I was actually ok with the uselessness of humans – after all, it’s a film about gods – I felt that there was a god plotline and a human plotline that sort of intersected – scientist vs government agency and gods vs ice-giants.

I expect we will see some Natalie Portman ass kicking in the Avengers movie – and yes, I have a LOT of excitment for that.

Rewrite the opening sequence to show the scientists are a little further along in their research – they realise they are seeing a potential wormhole and they are studying the conditions required for one. Then when Heimdall is frozen in ice and unable to let Thor back in to asgard, we insert an extra short section where he has to ask for the help of SHIELD and the scientists to create a wormhole at our end, allowing them to contribute to the rescuing of asgard. It might have reduced the emotional impact of the ending slightly but since this is presumably the plot they will be using to bring Thor back for ‘The Avengers’ I see no reason not to include it in this movie.

This would also have allowed Natalie Portman to be kick ass with science. Which would have made me eternally happy.

On a completely seperate, and much geekier note, was everyone else as excited as me by the cameo appearance of hawkeye and the avengeriffic post credits coda? I mean, check out the cast line-up from Comicon http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1994917401/

I’m still neatly surprised we’ve found something Mark Millar’s had a hand in that we’re diggin’ – I’m used to us rolling our eyes at a fair percentage of his output (and tweets)!

I actually found the Sif line a tad cringey – why MENTION that she’s a woman at all? Thor at least got told to STFU but from a meta sort of perspective I was a bit like, “did that exchange (“LOOK AT US WE HAVE A LADY AND WE’VE ACCEPTED HER LADYNESS IT WAS A STRUGGLE BUT SHE HAS PROVED HERSELF”) really need scripting?”

Didn’t mind the hair – Sif’s not particularly warlike in the Eddas as I understand it either! I like the idea of her having, in a spin on the gold-wig myth, METAL ARMOUR HAIR, in a sequel though. Alas, I am not Marvel’s plot consultant, though. :D