With the new issue of Empire set to hit newsstands next Thursday, the good people over at the magazine have unveiled this new batch of images from Marvel’s ‘Thor: The Dark World.’ “You know, we are killing Asgardians in this movie,” says director Alan Taylor to the outlet. “It turns out immortality isn’t all that it was cracked up to be.” Explains producer Craig Kyle, “Asgard at the beginning of the first film was at a time of peace. Now our guys have been fighting for over a year, constantly. It’s a time of war. When the Bifrost was broken at the end of the first film, Odin had to conjure a lot of dark energy and go through a lot of personal sacrifice to try and get his son back to Earth. And it was a one-shot deal. If Thor didn’t succeed, without the Tesseract he couldn’t have got back again. And in our film, finally the Bifrost has been rebuilt, but during that time, when the cops were largely cut off from the rest of the universe, you had miscreants that came in from outside the Nine Realms, pillaging and destroying and causing havoc. So that’s what our guys have been doing now – trying to put all these fires out across the Nine Realms.”

In the film, the likes of Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Jaimie Alexander (Sif), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Ray Stevenson (Volstagg), Kat Dennings (Darcy Lewis), Rene Russo (Frigga), Tadanobu Asano (Hogun), Anthony Hopkins (Odin), Stellan Skarsgård (Dr. Erik Selvig) and Natalie Portman (Jane Foster) reprise their roles from the first ‘Thor’ film, while Zack Levi is confirmed to play Fandril, Christopher Eccleston will play the villainous Malekith The Accursed, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje will be playing Algrim the Strong and Kurse.

Set one year after ‘The Avengers,’ Thor battles to save all the Nine Realms from a mysterious enemy older than the universe itself. However, a primeval race led by Malekith, who is out for revenge, intends to descend the universe into darkness. Confronted by an enemy that even Odin and Asgard cannot overcome, Thor must reunite with Jane Foster and set out on a dangerous journey that will force him to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Source, Empire.