I have to say that it bothers me that this movie is going to form what people think of Thor for years to come, just as how the Spider-Man movie changed how people viewed that character and ditto for what Batman did. I understand that Hollywood needs to mess around with things to make them work for a movie, and inevitably politics are going to get involved, but it irks me when the changes are substantial enough to damage the entire essence of the character to the point where some of the silliest seeming things about the character are not explained and put in context so they make sense, and where someone watching this movie who picks up a "Thor" comic book is probably going to get hit over the head with a giant "WTF" attack.
Let's be honest, having a Black norse god was annoying, especially seeing as his inevitable apperance in pretty much every trailer I've seen so far belies it being a minor "walk through" type role, as was initially being described... but really that's the tip of the ice berg.
The biggest problem I have with this trailer is that it REALLY misses the entire point of the comic book Thor. See, Thor is actually the spirit of a god inhabiting the body of a mortal called "Donald Blake". He has sort of stopped using the "secret identity" thing in recent years, but the reason why Thor is blonde is because his host body is blonde. There have been storylines with Thor's original form (red hair and beard) showing up, as well as other beings wielding the power of Thor either through inhabitation, or by being chosen as worthy to wield Mjolnir in his absence, or having a duplicate weapon forged. This kind of power transfer is one of Thor's defining tricks and not something all those gods can do, and it's been used as the source of storylines. We've had Thor transformed into a frog in the past and retain all of his godly powers (as sort of a joke), we've also had aliens fill in for him in the past (Beta Ray Bill), the essence of Thor move form Donald Blake to an EMT with a similar physical build (stories like "WorldEngine"), and we did indeed have a black norse god for about 15 minutes when Thor was away and Loki and The Enchantress teamed up to empower Storm as a deity and give her a counterfeit dwarf-forged version of his hammer (she however broke free, smashed the hammer, and refused to do the job). We've also had a couple of differant cross-gender versions of Thor himself, both during the elseworlds "Universe X" thing where the essence was inhabiting a female body, and then later we had "Thor Girl" in the main continuity with a more "Beta Ray Bill" type backround.
Originally when I saw the hints of the Thor movie coming up, it seemed like they were going to get the origin more or less right, and at least prevent more of the "hey, why does Thor not have Red Hair like the myths?", but from the looks of this is seems like we're having Thor phyically sent to earth rather than being a projecting essence. Oddly this approach also means that it will be harder to keep the franchise going if they ever need to change actors because in the comics Thor can move between similar host bodies, so if this actor decided to quite, and they decided to replace him with "Triple H" or another person who went for the role, they could have justified it.
I'll also say that Thor being all upset about wiping out an entire race (whether it's Loki wiping out the gods, or whatever else) seems a bit out of place, a bit of modern politics. While he does periodically wind up upsetting Odin and defending mortals to him, it should be noticed that he's kind of a genocidal maniac himself... it's just he directs it towards things like Giants. I remember back when "Wolverine" was first becoming big in comics, there was a big deal about how he would kill people which is something supr heroes of the time wouldn't do (the comics code dying). This lead to some discussions about Thor, who had no real issues with killing things like Giants and Trolls. While not especially gruesome, there was no assurances that these things all lived during various Asgardian battles, and it seemed unlikely. His battle fury was also compared to Wolverine's Beserker rage for a while too, he very much taking a "kill them all" attitude especially during stories set in Asgard. Of course it was argued even during the comics code period that these things we'ren't "people" much like how destroying robots wasn't a big deal.... even if they were self aware as most monsters and killer robots were. This can sort of extend to Thor's mentality where you know... Giants and Trolls and stuff aren't people.
The point here is that Thor is not supposed to be a thumb-twiddling 1990s+ ultra-liberal democrat. On a lot of levels you could say he's a bit of a hypocrit, but you know he is a guy who is unlikely to make arguements about the inherant wrong of judging a people or slating it for destruction even if he disagrees with it. I mean that's kind of what he does.
That last point might not be a big deal, it's going by one line, but really it does have me concerned. I mean part of the fun of Thor is that he's a good guy, but one that doesn't subscribe to a lot of modern morality. Also why he's doing good things he has no compunctions in a lot of cases about saying "I'm a god, I might protect you, but your petty moral laws don't apply to me".
