FORUMS

Due out May 2011, Thor seems certain to be one of the biggest blockbusters of next summer. With the release date still nearly a year away, Entertainment Tonight has posted a set report in order to whet fans' appetites. Said report gives us our first look at Sir Anthony Hopkins as Big Daddy of the Norse deities, Odin, and strewth, if his godly get-up doesn't represent another eyepatch oddity from Marvel Studios.

Yes, amidst the four minutes of breathtakingly banal flim flam delivered by Entertainment Tonight (did you know that Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, had appeared on Dancing With the Stars? That's the Australian version, not the US version. Ooh! How fascinating! Yes, I did have that lobotomy in the end, thanks for asking) is a glimpse of Hopkins in his Odin costume, with him appearing to have a gilded soap tray from a luxury hotel bathroom wedged in his right eye socket.

This is, of course, not the first eyepatch bungle from Marvel; in this year's Iron Man 2, Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury found himself sporting a patch that appeared to have come from a Christmas cracker. It was so ill-fitting you could have slotted Warwick Davis in the space between face and little leather accoutrement. Even David Hasselhoff got a superior eyepatch when he played Fury on the small screen in 1998, it being as tight to the Hoff's head as his Baywatch trunks were to his knackers.

Marvel aren't the only ones who have been working to bring the eyepatch into the realm of the mega-budget fantasy movie. Earlier this year we saw Crispin Glover sporting one when he played the Knave of Hearts in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and Brendan Gleeson got to don a steampunk model in his role as “Mad-Eye” Moody in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And no pirate film could be ever be considered complete without a bit of eyepatch action, so Mackenzie Crook gamely did the honours in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Elsewhere, Angelina Jolie got patched up for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and Tom Cruise got in on the patch action with his portrayal of real-life Nazi-plotter Claus von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer's Valkyrie. Perhaps the most memorable cinematic eyepatch advocate of recent years though was Daryl Hannah in the Kill Bill films, where she played monocular Amazonian assassin Elle Driver.

Going back further, and Adolfo Celi was patch-tastic villain Largo in 007 outing Thunderball, before being lampooned by Robert Wagner's Number 2 in the Austin Powers movies. And how could we ever undertake a movie eyepatch mini round-up without mentioning the titanium jawed Snake Plissken, as played by Kurt Russell in Escape from New York and Escape From L.A.? Why, that would be very one-eyed of us (sorry). We send an affectionate wink in your direction Snake, but don't try and wink back. Wouldn't want you blundering into a lamppost or anything.