Who Is Peter Dinklage's Character In Avengers: Infinity War?
Speculation has been ramping up about Peter Dinklage's mystery Avengers: Infinity War role for a while now, with guesses ranging from Black Order voice acting to secret S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, so the truth has been a long time coming--and it's not the first thing we expected.
Far from a brief cameo or a voiceover, Dinklage was actually a key player in Infinity War's proceedings in the surprise role of Eitri, the king of the Dwarves of Nidavellir, one of the Nine Realms in Asgardian mythology and the home of a legendary forge.
Unlike the other Nine Realms worlds we've seen in the MCU thus far like Midgard (Earth) and Jotunheim (home of the Frost Giants), Nidavellir is less of a planet and more of a strangely medieval space station. It's a planet-sized building constructed around the heart of a dying star--the only known energy in the universe powerful enough to allow the forging of Uru, the mystical metal used to make Thor's old (now destroyed) hammer, Mjolnir.
It's replacing Mjolnir that drives Thor (and Rocket and Groot) to Nidavellir in the first place--though what they find is a little less than the bustling, grand Dwarven city any of them expect. Instead, the realm has all but crumbled after a visit from Thanos, where he forced the Dwarves to use their forge to craft the Infinity Gauntlet and then unceremoniously (and unsurprisingly) murdered everyone there except the king. Eitri has been stranded there, forced to shoulder the burden of his guilt over arming the Mad Titan.
To make matters worse, the forge has gone dark, which means it's now up to Thor and Rocket to reignite the furnace and get the Uru flowing once again--even if they're only able to do so long enough for Eitri to pour some into the mold of a new weapon. Unsurprisingly, despite being nearly fatal, the team manages to produce Stormbreaker, an ax with the power to potentially kill Thanos. It may not have Mjolnir's mythological cred or cool "whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy" inscription, but it'll certainly do.
Over in the comics, Eitri and the rest of the Dwarves of Nidavellir have a slightly more protracted (though ultimately less bleak) history. On that side of the Marvel Universe, Eitri was not responsible for crafting the Infinity Gauntlet (Thanos did that himself), but was responsible for making Mjolnir--an event that was so cataclysmic that it actually, in some versions of the tale, caused the extinction of Midgard's dinosaurs. No, really.
Over the years since their early 1980s debut, Eitri and his people have been on-again-off-again key players in Thor's adventures, usually coming to the aid of Odin when there is unrest in the Nine Realms that requires the construction of new armor or weapons. All in all, the Dwarves have historically remained on pretty good terms with the Asgardians in that sense, and have generally always been happy to lend a hand. However, when things started going south for both Earth and Asgard during the 2011 Fear Itself crossover, things went a little off the rails and the Dwarves and their forge had to briefly step into the spotlight in a major way.
Following a sequence of events relating to, in no particular order: the destruction of Asgard in its Earthbound location of Broxton, Oklahoma; the toppling over The Avengers by eccentric billionaire Norman Osborn; the dissemination of multiple evil mind-controlling enchanted Uru hammers all across the globe; and a prophecy about actual, literal Ragnarok carried out by a possessed daughter of the Red Skull; the Avengers found themselves in desperate need of some big guns. Tony Stark, who has some experience in the arms dealing industry, took it upon himself to figure out the solution to that problem.
The answer took him to Nidavellir and to the Dwarves, where he convinced them to create nine special Uru weapons that would be strong enough to combat the oncoming apocalypse. He also coated his own Iron Man suit in Uru before he returned to Earth and doled them out to a group of heroes nicknamed "The Mighty:" Captain America, Black Widow, Ms. Marvel, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Red She-Hulk, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Hawkeye.
Obviously, the MCU isn't going to completely borrow from the Fear Itself model--half of the featured "Mighty" characters are either off the table or nonexistent in the film universe and Thanos isn't exactly mythological Ragnarok (we saw that already with, well, Thor: Ragnarok last year). Still, Eitri's introduction and the time spent on Nidavellir, as well as the confirmation that Stormbreaker can do some real damage to Thanos, puts some real potential on the horizon.
from GameSpot https://ift.tt/2HAkMVx