To each his own, but if we’re playing that game, I’d totally put Cap above Thor and Iron Man 2 above Hulk.
At least in the movies, he’s basically just Superman flying. In Thor he hovered while fighting the Destroyer. Which gets back to the original point, just because he can fly (as Iron Man can) doesn’t mean he can survive an uncontrolled drop at extreme velocity while tumbling in a cage. The movie intentional doesn’t answer the question, as he busts out and goes into controlled flight before the crash.
I think reading it as “Loki knew that Thor was never in danger” gives him too easy an out. He’s conflicted about killing his brother, clearly, but he is villaneous enough to go through with it, perhaps rationalizing that there is a chance that Thor will live.
I didn’t see Thor, was he spinning his hammer like a helicopter, or just hovering?
He was spinning it. The Destroyer and Thor were both in the middle of a tornado-like vortex created by the hammer spin. That’s the only time he hovered stationary in the film, and it was a special set of circumstances.
He was spinning it, until he remained hovering while using it to block blasts. He then dived in mid-air, at will, to attack the Destroyer. Clearly, he pretty much has freeform control of his flight.
Regardless, spinning it mid-air in a helicopter effect (from a hammer, really?) is not the same concept as throwing it and being dragged along. One can rationalize that the hammer has flight/anti-gravity and he directs it and holds on for the ride, but that is still essentially the same as free flight, ala Superman. It still gets back to him possibly being in mortal danger from the Hulk cage.
I like that you bring up the word ‘helicopter’ because whenever he charges that thing up for flying, that’s what it calls to mind for me. I don’t remember how he used it in his own movie, though.
I liked that moment when Hulk couldn’t pick up Mjolnir and looked confused.
Also, Joss Whedon is so freaking cool.
-xtien
“Are you ever not going to fall for that?”
Well, I think we can all agree on “Thor’s flying makes no damn sense” and leave it at that. Which is a pity, too, because everything else about the character makes perfect sense.
Sure, but by that point, the self-sustaining vortex was supporting him ;-)
He then dived in mid-air, at will, to attack the Destroyer. Clearly, he pretty much has freeform control of his flight.
Well, see…that’s cause…Mjolnir went first…hrrrm…eh, it’s comics stuff, don’t over analyze it. Like I said, it’s pure comics magic.
I agree. The issue that I think is more interesting is Loki and his motivations/thoughts. I think it’s a misinterpretation to say that he knew that Thor wasn’t in any danger from the Hulk cage drop. It dilutes the character and the relationship of the brothers to make his actions mere horseplay.
Yeah, and I never claimed that, either. Certainly Thor’s borderline panic while plummeting to earth indicates that HE thought the outcome wasn’t going to be pleasant, though of course that doesn’t necessarily mean he thought it would kill him.
Not you, CLWheeljack, who I originally responded to on this issue.
Glad you linked that…I was totally gonna do the same, as I just read that a lil bit ago. He’s such a fun guy. If I had unlimited amounts of money, I’d fund a money, hire Joss to write/direct it, and Nathan Fillion to star, just because I think working with the two of them would be an absolute blast every day.
“Also, with my percentage of “the Avengers” gross, I can afford to buy… [gets call from agent. Weeps manfully. Resumes typing.] …a fine meal.”
No, it’s Asgardian magic. You guys are treating it like riding a Harry Potter broomstick. It’s more like sympathetic magic or (for you AD&D nerds) the material/somatic component of a fly spell.
“Thor throws his hammer and is swept along with it, allowing him to fly” is a mythical description of what happens, not a physical one.
Sure, but Stan Lee wrote several panels worth of explanation of Thor’s flight (I read them and described the mechanics earlier on this page) that were purely rational and “physics”-based. Early Marvel was full of stuff like this–diagrams of Spidey’s webshooters, illustrations of the internal workings of Iron Man’s armor, and so on. Admittedly, the physics explanation made no sense since Thor can steer and doesn’t crash when the hammer throw runs out of steam, which is why I said it’s comic book magic.
I didn’t mean to say that he wouldn’t be in any danger at all, I just meant Loki was pretty sure it wouldn’t kill him. It’s no fun to win if you can’t gloat.
The stuff about the hammer throw was just flavor text.
It makes sense because: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Which Padme Amidala quotes somewhere in Thor).
Mjolnir is “forged from the heart of a dying star” - that’s some weird science right there. The Asgardians are just hyper-advanced aliens of some sort (who for some peculiar reason behave like a norse warrior culture in their daily life! - or maybe that’s just how they appear to us, how our mind interprets them).
In the Earth X series, there was quite a good rationalization of it: they are hyper-advanced shape-shifters, who drift shapelessly between the stars until they take on forms drawn from the minds of other species they encounter. I don’t know if that might not have been a slightly better rationalization than the one used . But the Earth X series is a bit of an outlier in the general canon, I guess.
Christien, please tell me you’ve seen Firefly by now!
That’s only in the films, though. In the standard Marvel continuity, the Asgardians are just what they seem to be, gods whose power comes from Earth’s divine energy. All except Thor are the direct creation of Odin, and the two of them are complicated. As the Marvel wiki says:
The periodic cycle of Ragnaroks continued for thousands of years. The story of one such cycle, as told to Thor by a giant eye claiming to be the severed eye of Odin, was supposed to have happened around 7 BCE to a version of Asgard with a red-haired Thor. Their counterpart of Odin was also known as Wode, and was worshiped by the Franks in the area that later became Bavaria. The Franks held sacrificial jousts in which those warriors slain would gain the honor of joining Wode on the Wild Hunt in the sky. This Asgard went down in flames; according to the eye, Asgard’s destruction served as part of the phenomenon later called the Star of Bethlehem which attended the birth of the Christian/Muslim prophet Jesus of Nazareth. Vidar, Balder, Hoenir, Vali, Vili, Ve, Modi and Magni (Thor’s sons), and a few other gods of this incarnation of Asgard who survived this Ragnarok emerged to find the spear of the prior Odin. Grasping it, they were transformed/merged into a new Odin, who again created a new Asgard. Accounts differ as to whether the new Asgardians actually had childhoods or Odin implanted them with false memories of pasts and childhoods that never happened.
Odin grew tired of the Ragnarok cycle and decided to end it once and for all. He joined with the Earth-goddess Gaea to produce the latest version of Thor.
Also note that they expressly don’t use technology:
The Asgardians are not highly advanced in technology, and unlike many of the Olympians or other pantheons, very few wield magic.
I’m not at all surprised they were altered into high-tech aliens for the film, since presenting them as actual divine beings would have sent the religious right into a frenzy.
“There’s only one god, and he doesn’t dress like that”
I loved that line! So Captain America is a monotheist and, I’m assuming, a Christian. Rogers doesn’t sound like a very Jewish name and American Muslims hadn’t been invented back in the 40s.
-Tom