The lovely and hilarious Cobie Smulders was on Letterman last night, along with a new Avengers clip that finally shows Smulders as SHIELD agent Maria Hill. Talking, even! Specifically, she's talking to Nick Fury, who's scolding her for pointing out how fucked everything is instead of doing something useful, although if everyone's going to blow up anyways I wouldn't want to waste my time trying to evacuate people either. Let 'em get incinerated in the comfort of their own homes, that's what I say. FYI, I think we can assume the "tessaract" being discussed is the Cosmic Cube, so there's a little more confirmation of what we already knew. Thanks to Michael E. for the tip.
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If Whedon decided to turn on his cracker-jack comedy mindset and set Maria Hill up to secretly be a Canadian teeny pop princess who goes by the name of "Maria Sparkles" in the past, so help me...
-waves Mjolnir in hand-
Has anybody done a more recent schmooshing of all the footage we've seen into one video? Seems like we've got a lot more to work with now.
OH MY GOD, the avengers movie is coming out the 25th of April in France ! There is a god ! And he's French !
Also, the fact that she's played by Cobie Smulders will maybe mean that I will hate her less than in Earth's Mightiest Heroes, because damn she's unlikable.
For a moment, I was intrigued by the Avengers movie, but that's just because I misread "Cobie Smulders" as "Cobra Commander". My exact thought was, "what the Hell? That's awesome!"
Yes, the tesseract is the cosmic cube. It's a better name all around, both because it's less goofy and because it has some real scientific relevance. Plus, it sounds awesome.
In effect the movies are combining the mathematical notion of a tesseract (a cube comprised of cubes extruded into four dimensions instead of three) and Madeleine L'Engle's literary borrowing of the term to describe teleportation by the shortening of space between two points. (Also featured in several sci-fi/fantasy works since then though not necessarily by the same name, such as one of the teleportation methods in Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I used "tesser" as a nod to L'Engle for basically the same functional teleportation idea in Cry of Justice.)
In conclusion: the authors were awesome. {g}
rob, there's a problem with your headline. here, let me fix it for ya:
Oh Hai First Decent Footage of Maria Hill in Avengers new clips for me to BATMAN with!
More likely she gets killed off and replaced by Sharon Carter.
There'll probably be multiple post-credit scenes, since they have to set up a bunch of future movies.
I'm tired of all of these motherfucking Skrulls on my motherfucking giant flying aircraft carrier?
Yup, Tessaract=Cosmic Cube. The Red Skull refers to it as such in Captain America(I believe Howard Stark's journal in Iron Man II did as well).
Speaking of Captain America... (SPOILER ALERT, IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT)
Did anyone else find it really convenient that the Red Skull disintegrated in a way that made him look like he was getting warped away? When I saw that, I immediately thought that they might bring him back as a time-traveling villain to face the Avengers... as in he becomes Kang in a future movie. Add the throwaway "death" of Bucky that surely hints at Winter Soldier and that movie didn't really resolve anything. :P
Yeah, they clearly intentionally made the Skull's death look enough like teleportation to bring him back, if they wanted to. I think it'd be great to have the second Cap movie involve some other villain doing stuff with a post-credits reveal that it was the Skull pulling strings the whole time, setting up a third movie show down.
Yeah, everyone left thinking "sequel" when that happened.
Although forget Kang - have him be Baron Zemo (who was tied up in the Skull backstory at some point if memory serves). I want to see Cap fight a pink-suited bad guy on the big screen!
Except, of course, that Doom is tied to the Fantastic 4 franchise, while Kang is probably tied to the Avengers.
I don't think they've combined multiple characters into one to avoid origin stories. I think it's because some of the characters just aren't very interesting, or don't have any thematic relationship to Tony for the movies. So, for instance, in IM2 they wanted the movie to be about Tony's daddy issues. There really aren't any villains that are a natural fit for that, so they create one. But he has to be a villain of some kind, right, so they draw a couple bits from a couple different guys (Russian-ness and use of similar tech from Dynamo, and lack of need for a helmet/suit of armor from Whiplash) to give him something to do.But the main thing a villain has to do is be somehow thematically related to the hero. It's not enough to just make some Russian dude that also has a suit of armor.
Considering that Kang in the comics is the descendant of Dr. Doom (or that was the canon when I was growing up), I'd say combining their characters makes much more sense from a cinema perspective.
No real reason other than following an intermittent pattern of combining / changing two characters into one to reduce the number of new origins. It's very possible that he just comes back as himself.
That clearly looked like the teleportation as done in thor. I don't think he would come back as kang or anything though. I was thinking maybe he ended up with the frost giants or on one of the other worlds mentioned in thor so he can come back as a villian in the future.
That was a pretty nice set up. If you've seen Thor and how the Asgardians traveled it was clear the (for whatever reason) that the Skull get's transported (not desintegradet) by the Cube, witch did happen to him in the Comics too (or at least I think so).
