The movie comes out March 2011. It needs to come out now.

It’s as if Zack Snyder polled all of geekdom and put everything we like into one movie: Hot, young Hollywood actresses, Carla Guigino in crazy corsets, dragons!, mech suits vertical leaping to attack WWI biplanes and – our personal favorite – a 20-foot cave troll thingy unloading a Gatling gun.

It’s so hard to do the footage justice in words, but we’re going to try.

The footage opens with a slick drum riff from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” as Baby Doll, played by Emily Browning, is driven to an insane asylum during a severe rain storm. Her mother has just died and instead of taking care of her himself, daddy decides to wash his hands of her and put her in a rubber room. Once there, Baby Doll finds solace with five other patients who somehow turn the joint into a brothel/dance review – and that looks much cooler than it sounds.

- WB

Baby Doll gets into an Airbender crouch before kicking ass in Sucker Punch.

On our way to this scene in the footage, as the car pushes through the asylum’s gates, we see the title “Sucker Punch” form in the rain running off the backseat car window, and the aesthetic is very Sin City here, almost to a fault.

But then that changes, for the better. Then someone thought it would be a cool idea to put Sin City, Moulin Rouge, lots of corsets and broadswords and trolls and robot things in a blender to make what could be the most visually intense genre movie Snyder’s ever tackled, or we have ever seen.

Here are ten cool beats from the footage. If you need to be convinced that this movie is one of the best ideas known to nerds, then you are lost, sir. Lost!

1. Carla Guigino plays Madame Gorsky, AKA the ward’s lead doctor, who kinda sorta inspires Baby Doll to use her imagination to escape the white-walled hell she’s in.

Guigino goes from labcoat plain to German S & M gear pretty quickly as – wait for it – Baby Doll and her fellow inmates (lead by Jena Malone’s Rocket) do a little dance number to escape the doldrums, one of many dance numbers the girls do to take them into fantasy worlds that mirror some of their real world conflicts.

Which is a nice way to say they find cooler and cooler reasons to fill the movie with more things that carry guns and wield swords. Woot!

- WB

This can’t end well…

2. Scott Glenn with a samurai sword. A dojo surrounded by snowy peaks and invaded by bad guys in samurai armor. A snowflake falls on Babydoll’s eyelash and the fast-paced montage of all of the girls’ fantasy worlds begins.

3. In bullet-time, we glide down the blade of Baby Doll’s katana as she engages in WWI trench warfare with Nazis and monsters wearing Nazi clothes.

4. A dragon. Yes, a dragon. In WWI?! It proceeds to perch upon a castle wall and lay waste to everything with its fire.

- WB

Dragonheart‘s biggest fan.

5. A zeppelin crashes in a fiery explosion as biplanes swoop down from the sky and machine gun various targets.

Then a mech suit joins the WWI battle and vertical leaps to take out one of the planes. The crowd loses their sh!@ for the second time.

6. A crazy CQC fight with Malone’s character and another girl versus a few Cylon and Tron-inspired robots. This particular action sequence took up a lot of the reel’s running time, and featured lots of robot heads getting punched and smashed against a very sleek, very neon-blue world.

- WB

“Dodge this.”

7. More mech warrior action, a bigger, better shot of the dragon spreading its wings as an army of soldiers try to defend the castle from the dragon’s attack.

8. On an alien world that calls Saturn its neighbor, we’re high and above a landing pad with a earth-bound Huey on it.

- WB

9. Don Draper?! Yes, John Hamm appears, wearing Creep-O glasses and looking like a john for the brothel that seems to run within the bowels of the asylum. He says the line: “Did you see the way she looked at me?” before the action moves on to our favorite shot:

10. A cave troll, wearing a mix of Shredder and samurai armor, while unloading his mini-gun on a gravity-defying Baby Doll. (Just check it out for yourself).

- WB

Mind = blown.

This is Zack Snyder’s first movie based on original material. So all of the above comes from his mind. We can’t wait to see more, amirites? Sucker Punch hits theatres and blows minds March 2011.

www.ign.com

Just to clarify, this isn’t a list of stuff we personally liked at Comic Con. It’s more stuff that we felt got some more positive buzz or generated a new level of excitement at the con — or won over the naysayers. And in the handful of “losers” listed at the bottom, it’s stuff that we got the sense people were disappointed by. Since Comic Con is all about buzz, this is our attempt to gauge the buzz that stuff was getting at the Con.

And you’ll notice that Tron Legacy isn’t on the list — in its third year at SDCC, Tron Legacy maintained the high level of buzz it already had among the SDCC crowd. There’s a big difference between “buzz maintenance” and generating new buzz. Ditto for a lot of other Comic Con favorites that continued to be Comic Con favorites, but didn’t really gain or lose new buzz.

So with that said, here goes, in no particular order:

The buzz winners of SDCC 2010:

The Avengers (including Captain America and Thor)

The big moment of Comic Con, for a lot of people, was seeing the entire Avengers cast on stage together. It’s not as if there was no buzz for the Avengers before Comic Con — as with the Captain America and Thor movies, fan excitement was already pretty high for this project. But Marvel managed to meet people’s expectations — and silence all of the Thor naysayers with some impressive early footage. We were all hoping they would get all the Avengers on stage together, along with director Joss Whedon, and they did. But we weren’t prepared for how thrilling a sight it was. It’s not just that everyone was excited about the Avengers — it was the hope that the Captain America and Thor movies could both hold up to those characters’ mighty legacies, and then the Avengers movie really could pay it all off, with the biggest story yet.

Battle: Los Angeles

This is one of those projects that almost nobody had heard off before Comic Con, and the very consciously Black Hawk Down-inspired footage seemed to get everybody pumped up about it. In a year that saw a slew of alien invasion projects, including Skyline, this felt like one of the freshest, most interesting takes on the genre. And the obvious enthusiasm for the project on the part of Harvey Dent himself, Aaron Eckhart, was pretty contagious. It came across as good action-movie candy, and people seemed to be hungry for more.

Green Lantern

Abin Sur’s corpse, on the exhibition floor, was this year’s version of the Owl Ship from Watchmen from a couple years back: It was the thing everybody had to go stare at. The first footage from the film was pretty brief, but as soon as people saw the big green fist smacking crooks around, everyone remembered what ginormous Green Lantern fans we had all been at one point or another. The clincher was how much Ryan Reynolds seemed to be pouring his heart and soul into being Hal Jordan, without his trademark snark. That moment where he recited The Oath for that little kid? Was all anyone was buzzing about, because you could tell it was sincere.

Super

Speaking of projects that nobody had heard of — this superhero comedy, featuring the likes of Rainn Wilson, Nathan Fillion, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon, came out of nowhere and blew everyone away. It would be hard to go wrong with a cast like that, and we loved James Gunn’s last film, Slither. But the early trailer and unfinished scene that Gunn showed off at the con totally won over the crowd, and the idea of a gonzo reimagining of Watchmen, with some of Kick-Ass‘ ultra-violence and craziness, sounds too good to miss.

The Walking Dead

It’s not like this AMC series didn’t have mega-buzz and excitement going into the con, or anything. But the footage delivered — big time — and left us, and everybody else who saw it, at a fever pitch of excitement to see Frank Darabont’s realization of Robert Kirkman’s zombie-apocalypse comic book. The Super 16 footage, grainy and creepy on purpose, complemented the pitch-perfect visuals, and the glimpses of zombie-slaying won over newbies and fans of the comic alike. Plus the news that fan favorite Bear McCreary would be scoring the thing didn’t hurt. Also, it’s definitely true that the excitement around The Walking Dead TV show benefited comic-book publisher Image Comics, which was able to generate some more heat around their other projects as a result.

The Event

This show was a big question mark — it’s trying to be the next 24 crossed with Lost, and its huge conspiracy-theory weirdness could have been awesome or just contrived. We’ve seen a lot of shows that wanted to be the new version of either 24 or Lost, and it’s usually the kiss of death. But NBC showed the entire pilot, and it just held up surprisingly well, with its disparate strands seeming like they really would come together in a satisfying, not to mention exciting, way. Blair Underwood is a great president of the United States, too. We heard lots of people chatting about how good the first glimpse of this series actually looked. Here’s hoping it actually does become the next Lost — we need a new huge mystery show to obsess about!

Oni Press

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World ruled Comic Con, as we knew it would. Edgar Wright screened the entire thing to fans, and just like the early screening of District 9 last year, it paid off massively. The big Scott Pilgrim installation was a huge hit, too. But even if Scott Pilgrim was close to being a sure thing, buzz-wise, the big winner was Oni Press, the publisher of the original comics. All of the excitement over Scott Pilgrim directed lots of attention to the overall awesomeness of the Oni Press book line. The Oni booth was jammed with fans eager to buy the last volume of the Scott Pilgrim comic. And on the first day of the Con, Oni Press signed a “first look” development deal with CBS Television Studios, which could lead to some new Oni Press-inspired TV shows. But even if it doesn’t, it still shows that Oni is getting some heat right now.

Paul

We’ve been excited for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s next project, a geek road-trip with an alien, for ages now. But when the Comic Con crowd saw early footage featuring a side-splitting sequence set at the actual Comic Con, the excitement could be heard from all over the Convention Center. You could have stabbed a thousand geeks in the face before the Paul panel, and the talk would still have been about Pegg, Frost and their insane supporting cast, ranging from Seth Rogen to Sigourney Weaver to Bill Hader. The combination of Greg “Superbad” Mottola’s character-centric comedy style with Pegg and Frost’s insanity looks like it’s going to pay off just as much as everybody hoped, and we were all Paul‘s bitches.

Charles Yu

We liked Yu’s first book, the story collection Third Class Superhero, a lot. And his first novel, How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, is getting amazing buzz, assisted by some nice marketing at Comic Con. The stickers, including ones which said “I live in Minor Universe 31″ and “I have a degree in Applied Science Fiction” were some of the funnest book marketing we’ve seen in ages, and people started getting curious about Yu’s quirky take on science fiction ideas.

Cowboys & Aliens

As writer Roberto Orci predicted when we talked to him ahead of time, the first glimpse of footage showing Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig totally dispelled any idea that this Western with aliens is a spoof or a cartoon. From the footage we glimpsed, it looked like Ford is finally going to play the total bastard we’ve always wanted to see him play. And even though it’s early in the filming process, the footage definitely had the classic Western feel that Orci promised. People were pumped to see more, and this film was suddenly on people’s radar.

Universal Dead

This zombie webseries, which co-stars our personal favorite monster Doug Jones, was a big hit of the Celebrate The Web event — and then it was announced that Paramount has optioned it as a full-length movie. And Jones himself will reportedly be involved. As creator Kelly Parks points out, this may be the first webseries to make the jump to the big screen.

The buzz losers of SDCC 2010:

The comic book industry

Sorry, but it’s true. Every year, people talk about how Hollywood has taken over Comic Con, but this year it was patently true. And the “Big Two” comic book companies weren’t even trying — Marvel and DC had no big announcements at SDCC this year, so there was no buzz about what’s next for the Marvel and DC universes. Everywhere we went on the floor, we heard comics publishers and retailers complaining about weak sales, because comics were losing out to toys, video games and movie merchandising. The only time you heard people expressing excitement for superheroes was in reference to their movie incarnations. This may have benefited Oni Press and Image, as we mentioned above, but it didn’t seem to translate to interest in the Green Lantern comic book. At our io9 panel, Douglas Wolk asked how many people liked the Iron Man movie, and everyone raised their hands. Then Wolk asked how many people read the stupendously awesome Iron Man comic lately, and most of the hands went down.

No Ordinary Family

So we mentioned that The Event showed its entire pilot, and it paid off. Unfortunately, the reverse is true for No Ordinary Family, a live-action spin on The Incredibles that boasts a terrific cast, headlined by Michael Chiklis and Julie Benz, but suffers from weak writing. The pilot was full of cheesy heavy-handed exposition, and seems to be in a huge hurry to get these characters superpowered so we can have some action — while also spelling out the big character conflicts with all the subtlety of a Speak N’ Spell. The producers admitted at the Comic Con panel that they may rework this pilot a lot before it goes on the air — and let’s hope that’s true, for the show’s sake — but showing a pilot that they knew wasn’t ready for prime time at Comic Con was a bad mistake.

Green Hornet

So it’s not as if this film had invincible buzz going into Comic Con — but it definitely emerged with a bit of a limp. After seeing the footage, we were left with a hope that this film will be a cult classic that we’ll be defending from the haters years from now. There’s no doubt that Green Hornet will have a devoted following, but it may not make a huge amount at the box office. And it certainly doesn’t help matters when you see write-ups like this one, from the L.A. Times. The L.A. Times points out cheesily serious dialogue from the trailer like, “It’s not dying you and I have to be afraid of. It’s never having lived in the first place.” The Wrap adds, “Green Hornet looks like a verdant bomb.” Nobody’s calling it this year’s The Spirit, exactly — but it’s not looking like a hit in the wake of SDCC, even after they spent all that money on Britt’s Garage, and putting the Black Beauty and several green-dressed women in front of the main thoroughfare the entire long weekend.

The Cape

This superhero show screened an extended sizzle reel or a truncated pilot, and it came across as hokey and somewhat formulaic superhero action. Even Summer Glau as a blogger who fights crime named Orpheus couldn’t make people get excited. Not even a raccoon robbing a bank could save the day! And other people were kind of lukewarm. IGN writes, “The Cape seemed a bit weak, in my opinion.” Digital Spy called it “quite patchy.” The death blow comes from Hitfix’s Alan Sepinwall: “The crowd’s reaction was very, very muted. When a Con crowd is enjoying some footage, they’re vocal about it – very vocal. But here, everyone was very quiet.” All in all, the Cape got tangled up in itself.

Falling Skies

I really liked the footage we saw from this Steven Spielberg-produced series, and I’m excited for any show that has the guts to show us a post-apocalyptic world, starting six months after an alien invasion. So if it were up to me, this show wouldn’t be in the “losers” category. But we heard people shaking their heads over this show, for whatever reason, maybe because of the footage’s reliance on a child voiceover and the slightly cliched nature of the alien-invasion scenario. Slashfilm was particularly damning, saying the footage failed to impress, and it felt like a standard TV series rather than a Spielberg project. The best IGN could say was, “We don’t think the show is dead on arrival.” But others — including me — gave it a more positive review and seemed pumped about it. So I’m grudgingly putting Falling Skies in the “loser” category because of some negative buzz, despite my own sincere liking for it. Prove the haters wrong, Falling Skies!-i09

Additional reporting by Lauren Davis, Annalee Newitz, Cyriaque Lamar, Alasdair Wilkins and Meredith Woerner. Thanks also to Arno from IMDB for his help with brainstorming.

Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.

New posters have just been released for the movie, featuring hottie Ryan Reynolds in the title role, Gossip Girl beauty Blake Lively as his childhood sweetheart/sidekick Carol Ferris, Peter Sarsgaard as the evil Hector Hammond, and Mark Strong as Green Lantern’s mentor-turned-arch nemesis, Sinestro.-Celebuzz

After two appearances in the Iron Man movies, it’s safe to say that everyone loves S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Coulson. Wherever he goes, Easter Eggs follow. Thankfully, actor Clark Gregg is headed to The Avengers. But first, what’s he doing in Thor?

In the Thor roundtable interviews at Comic Con, we got to spend some quality time with Clark Gregg, the actor who plays Agent Coulson, who just found out that he would be appearing in The Avengers, here’s a little snippet from the interview:

What’s it like bouncing from film to film as this character?

Yeah yeah it started out as nothing — a couple scenes in Iron Man, and it just became a better role. And every time they call, I’m like, “Really? I get to do this guy again!” Every time they peel back some more layers and he’s got more interesting stuff to do.

Especially today to get to see some of that Thor footage and to be blown away by it, as a fan. And to stand up there and have Joss Whedon kind of tell me, “we’d like you to be in the Avengers.”

You just found this out?

Yeah I can barely focus on talking to you guys because I just want to call my Mom.

Do you know anything about the script? Do you know where you’ll show up?

I don’t know a damn thing. This I can’t get in trouble [for], because I don’t know a damn thing.

At the panel Robert Downey, Jr. called The Avengers the most ambitious thing that’s ever been done. As the self-professed glue of the Marvel Universe. I’m curious as to how seeds might be planted in Thor [for Agent Coulson] to where he ends up with everyone else? How does he get there [to The Avengers]?

I think it’s safe to say, without getting instantly evaporated by the Marvel ray guns, that Thor is an origin story. Obviously a hammer is in New Mexico in a giant crater. Nick Fury is otherwise engaged. It’s Agent Coulson’s job to show up and investigate that. And I don’t think he knows, going into New Mexico. anything more than that. It kind of reeks of superhero to me, with the giant hammer in the perfectly symmetrical crater. I think that by the end of this movie, that this is very much in line with what S.H.I.E.L.D. is in existence for. More than that, I’m too scared to talk about.

Branagh, whose previous films include Frankenstein and Dead Again, is known for over-the-top theatricality and an emphasis on acting in his films. The 3D Thor is no exception, especially since the director says he loved Thor growing up and has even worked to include different versions of the first Avenger in his film. Though the hero’s iconic hammer is pure Jack Kirby, Branagh assured the audience that “there are some Donald Blake touches” too.

Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, a minor character in the comics who has a very large role in the movie. She called her character a rare “real, frazzled, grounded female scientist – not the low-cut lab coat and sexy glasses kind of thing.” She added that she was happy to get back in front of a green screen with an actor-oriented director like Branagh, because “working with green screens is a skill – it should be something you learn in acting school.”

Chris Hemsworth is the perfect physical type to play the god of thunder, and when we saw the sizzle reel from the film, I was immediately sold on Hemsworth as much more than just a pretty boy who looks good shirtless. We saw him in both action scenes and in tense, intimate moments – and he burned up the screen. Especially when he finds the hammer hidden at the heart of a secret New Mexico military installation and lets out a mega-shout to heaven.

His damaged younger brother Loki is played by Tom Hiddleston, the god of mischief who turns into a major badass who wears black fetishwear and big horns on his head. Hiddleston says Loki’s main issue is that “he was the guy who was almost the guy, but wasn’t.”

Before we get into the footage, let me say that the 3D was good. It didn’t feel intrusive, but at the same time we got a lot of fun squirts of fire aimed out into the audience – plus, of course, some hammer throwing. And the 3D made the sets really pop, giving the whole flick some texture. I’m usually the first to grouse about the overuse of 3D but I think Thor earned it.

So what was so sciencey about the footage we saw? First of all, the emphasis was on the secret industrial-science facility where Thor is being held by clueless fed types for part of the movie. Plus, when Thor is hurled to Earth by Odin, who casts the young god out for his arrogance and penchant for war, we see a shot that looks remarkably like something out of a scifi movie. We zoom toward the galaxy from a great height, as if Thor’s home Asgard is in another galaxy rather than being some kind of god dimension. Also, Asgard itself looks more like one of those really gorgeous Alderaan-style planets from Star Wars rather than heaven.

Jane is the person who finds Thor when he crashes to Earth, so Thor is immediately treated like a scientifically-discoverable thing rather than a mystical presence. (There’s also a nice moment of quippery where Jane tells her sidekick that “for a homeless guy, he’s pretty cut.”) And we hear him explaining to Jane that he comes from a place where “magic” and “science” are indistinguishable. This does nothing to quench our feeling that this is a scientific universe – it’s just that the Asgardians have science that’s advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic.

So I know what you want to know: What about the hammer fighting? Was it awesome? Hell yes. Like I said earlier, there’s a great moment when Thor finds the hammer Mjolnir, pulls it from a pile of muddy rock, and lets out a cosmic yelp. Then we see him fighting a variety of enemies, including brother Loki and his fetishwear-clad Asgardian corps, who have taken over Asgard after the death of Odin. He does a good hammer throw, and the hammer manages to look both cartoonish and kickass at the same time.

We also got a glimpse of Hemsworth doing the steely eye when he’s being interrogated by a fed at the secret facility, who accuses him of being a highly-trained mercenary. I like the look of our mercenaryesque god in that scene: Human, but with a glint of godhood in his eyes.

The other ultra-awesome part of the sizzle reel was meeting Destroyer, who looked like a medieval version of Gort from the original Day The Earth Stood Still. He stands a few heads taller than a human, and when he arrives the Feds mistake him for “unauthorized military technology” and ask him to stand down in bored tones. Then he opens all the layered vents on his suit and his face plates open to reveal – emptiness, shortly filled with a surge of fire. Again, it feels Gort-like, but also terrifically old school, as if he has a dragon breath weapon.

I was left feeling like this film would be a pleasure to watch, full of awe-inspiring visual flourishes, great acting, mega-battles, and funny, tight dialogue. A perfect superhero treat.

The full roll call (via Cinematical):

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark
Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow
Chris Hemsworth as Thor
Chris Evans as Captain America
Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye
Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner / Incredible Hulk

Robert Downey Jr. invited director Joss Whedon to the stage, saying, “We knew we had to find a director you’d love.” And being his usual self-depreciating self, Whedon said:

I have had a dream all my life and it was not this good . . . This cast is more than I could have ever hoped for. And I am going to blow it. So I need your love; I need your support.

When the crowd went nuts, he said, “Oh thank you.”

Amazing photograph via Coming Soon.

The stars of Battle: L.A., Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez, came to Comic Con along with director Jonathan Liebesman and producer Neal Moritz. And they showed a ton of new footage:

The footage opens with a little background on the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles, when anti-aircraft artillery responded to reports of an unknown aircraft. It then switches to a more modern-day Los Angeles, clearly under enemy fire, although the nature of the fire isn’t entirely clear. As the military evacuates LA, a Marine platoon is ordered to find a group of survivors and bring them back to the evacuation point. But time is short; the Armed Forces plan to bomb LA in just three hours, hoping to obliterate the invading army. The Marines clearly know little about these invaders, except that they are “not of this world.”

As the Marines track down the survivors’ signal, they are ambushed. We aren’t able to see the enemy, although they don’t appear to be much taller than humans. Their alienness is betrayed by their gunfire. Most of this footage looks far more like something out of a Iraq War movie than a science fiction film, but the gunfire resembles something out of a laser gun, as if to remind us that we’re dealing with extraterrestrials.

We only get the barest flashes of the alien invaders. We occasionally get a glimpse of something sand-colored, a foot taller than any human they encounter, wearing a round, flat helmet. It is not clear at first whether they are entirely biological, or partially mechanical, but it is very clear that they are soldiers. The only hint we get of the aliens’ anatomy is when a group of Marines rip one open, looking for weaknesses. And even then, we only see its chest: tough, stringy tendons that are torn apart.

We get a better look at the alien ships. These are messily mechanical monstrosities, obviously built for function over form. The smaller ships vaguely resemble Serenity from Firefly, but there are also larger ships that more closely resemble flying saucers.

On the panel, Jonathan Liebesman talked about trying to make the aliens feel like a real invading army:

That was one of the challenges we faced in the movie. What I love about James Cameron is that all of his designs are functional – they all look like they could work. [These] aliens have an army, generals, medics, lieutenants. We wanted to make it look like they could work.

And Liebesman talked up the aliens’ weird design:

We wanted to do an alien that wasn’t an insect or a creature. Ridley Scott in Alien really pioneered these fantastic creatures, and in District 9 we got these great insects. We wanted to do something that was literally alien… They have a hint of biomechanicalness to them.

In a separate press conference about the film, Moritz clarified that the aliens are attacking all across the U.S., but we just see the invasion from the vantage point of one Marine battalion in L.A. This ground-up view of the attack gives a “fresh twist on the genre” of alien invasion.

And Eckhart told the press conference that the destruction of L.A. in the movie is massive and awe-inspiring. There were freeways shut down, with cars littered across them, and bombs going off everywhere. “We shot so many rounds it was insane.” He added:

When I met Jonathan for the first time, we sat in a room in L.A., and Jonathan had this beautiful display on his computer. He pulled something up on Youtubem and it was Marines fighting in Fallujah, house to house, and he said, “That’s what I want the film to look like.” I said, “I’m in.” We made an urban combat movie with aliens… They put us in boot camp for three weeks where we ate together, slept together, showered together, called each other names [and] shared rations… Neal and Jonathan really gave us the tools to make it real.

Said Moritz, “Early on in the process, we were very conscious that we were taking two genres, a war movie and an alien movie, and combining them.” Liebesman shot a short demo film that convinced everybody that those two genres could be combined successfully.

Liebesman told the press conference the destruction of L.A. isn’t depicted in terms of landmarks — the aliens aren’t using “Wikipedia Travel” to look for monuments to wipe out, like the Hollywood sign. They’re looking to wreck the city as a city.

Rodriguez revealed at the press conference that her character wasn’t in the script until right before filming — Moritz had promised to put her in another movie if he killed her off in Resident Evil 4. And they needed someone to provide intelligence, so her character, a geeky tech sergeant, was added. Rodriguez is less of a fighter and more of an intel person in this movie — but she does kick ass “in a cool, geeky way,” she adds.

So why are the aliens coming to Earth in the first place? Liebesman explains: “Earth is 70 percent water. The aliens in our movie use water for may different things, so they are here for those natural resources.”

A new image of Australian Star Trek actor Chris Hemsworth in the role of the thunder god has been released, and it’s pretty clear that someone hit the gym pretty hard in preparation for filming. Thor’s most potent weapon might be his enchanted hammer, but clearly he has some pretty impressive guns at his disposal too.

The Kenneth Branagh-directed Thor, which co-stars Natalie Portman, Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins, hits theaters on May 6, 2011. If the theaters know what’s good for them, they won’t even think about hitting back.