Re: Thor

FWIW, here's something else about the film that I found kind of puzzling, 
though it does seem to be part of a larger trend.  To quote a message I 
posted to ArtsAndFaith.com a few nights ago:

- - -

No spoilers or review-ish evaluations of the film here (and in any case, 
it's already Thursday -- Thor's Day! -- and the movie opens tonight at 
midnight, yada yada yada), but something just occurred to me, and I 
wondered if anybody else here might have any thoughts about this.

Put simply, I wonder if this movie might have something in common with Tim 
Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Or Percy Jackson, come to think of it.

What do I mean by that? Well, all three of these films are sequels, of a 
sort, to existing stories ... yet all three of them recycle incidents from 
those earlier stories as though those incidents had never happened before.

In the case of Alice in Wonderland, the recycling is mitigated somewhat by 
the fact that Alice has a sort of amnesia, and has forgotten all about her 
previous trips to "Underland". So she's bound to repeat herself somewhat.

But in the case of, say, Percy Jackson, we are supposed to believe that 
all these myths really happened ... or a lot of them did, at any rate ... 
and yet, look, here in the modern world, Percy still has to do battle with 
Medusa (who, according to the myths, was supposed to have been killed by 
Percy's namesake Perseus thousands of years ago). So did the events 
described in the myths really happen, or did they not?

Likewise, Thor is based on the idea that the Norse myths and legends 
reflect actual historical events. And yet ... well, for starters, Thor and 
Loki seem to have been born some time AFTER the Asgardians encountered the 
Vikings, so how could there be Norse myths and legends about these 
characters? And not one of the gods seems to be aware, at first, of the 
fact that Loki is a devious trickster ... even though this is how the 
Norse myths have described Loki for over a thousand years. Likewise, at 
the beginning of the film, most of the gods, including Loki himself, are 
utterly unaware of a certain fact about Loki ... but this fact should 
already be well-known to anyone who has read the original myths.

I've never read the Marvel comics, so I'm curious as to how THEY may have 
dealt with some of these issues.

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