When my kids woke up the Friday morning after Avengers: Infinity War opened, before they said good morning or asked anything about breakfast, they wanted to know something: Who died? My kids weren’t old enough to go see Infinity War in the theater, and contract negotiations between studios and franchise stars aren’t necessarily the stuff of elementary-school playground gossip, but my kids had definitely absorbed the idea that somebody was supposed to die. This was the big question heading into Infinity War. All the marketing around the movie implied gravity and finality, and some of those stars had been kicking around the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the better part of a decade. So somebody had to die. General consensus said that it would be Iron Man or Captain America or maybe even both.
Instead, Infinity War ended with the numbing, near-silent spectacle of half the universe crumbling into dust. Characters who’d been Halloween costumes and Lego sets and elementary-school backpacks just dissolved into ash. This was a hell of a thing to describe to two kids while getting them ready for school in the morning.
In the opening scene of Infinity War, after his minion Ebony Maw gives a flowery speech about what an honor it is to be killed by this glorious messianic figure, Josh Brolin’s Thanos looks on a flaming wreckage of a spaceship full of Asgardian deities and rumbles, “I know what it’s like to lose—to feel so desperately that you’re right, but to fail nevertheless.” Two hours later, Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord, whose crucial act of crunch-time idiocy has doomed trillions of sentient beings, looks around wildly and asks, “Did we just lose?” He did. They all did. In Infinity War, the Avengers learn what it’s like to lose. That’s the point of Infinity War, a cosmic-scale hymn to helplessness.
More than a year before the release of Infinity War, Kevin Feige, the producer who somehow turned the vast and ridiculous Marvel Universe into a globally dominant box-office force, described Thanos as the film’s “main character.” In a mega-budget crossover film with dozens of movie stars, Thanos is the character with the most screen time, and he’s also the animating force behind every action. Thanos had existed on screen, in some form or another, since the end-credits stinger scene of 2012’s The Avengers, but he’d mostly worked as a vague and shadowy threat, an undefined promise of a future adventure. In the opening scene of Infinity War, Thanos becomes inescapably present. He stabs Heimdall to death, casually gorilla press slams the Hulk, and breaks Loki’s neck, looking vaguely bored the whole time. That moment establishes Thanos as a character who exists on a scale beyond anything in any previous Marvel film. Thanos is too much for the Marvel superheroes to handle, and by the time the dust settles at the end of Infinity War, he’s the winner.
There are a lot of great things about Avengers: Infinity War, the second-highest earner at the 2018 box office, but the greatest is Thanos. A couple of decades earlier, the villain had been the psychedelic vision of bugged-out Marvel weirdo Jim Starlin. Starlin had conjured a space-opera nihilist in love with the physical manifestation of Death. Thanos was a great character, but his entire saga was deep nerd shit. With Infinity War, the various creative problem-solvers behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe transformed Thanos into a universally recognized force of movie malevolence, a pop-culture presence on the level of Darth Vader or Don Corleone. That’s a magic trick.
The entire existence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a magic trick, too. Infinity War was the 19th entry in a vast and sweeping blockbuster-film experiment, one that started a decade before Thanos snapped his fingers and temporarily erased half of it. With Infinity War, Disney was able to pull in $2 billion of global movie-theater tickets with a cinematic spectacle that must’ve looked like absolute gibberish to anyone who hadn’t seen most of the previous 18 pictures. Marvel had already gotten the entire moviegoing public into its deep nerd shit. Kevin Feige and his braintrust had conditioned everyone to cheer at the entrance of a sullen teenage tree-man playing a portable video game and only ever saying his own name, a sight that would’ve confounded anyone from any previous generation of cinema. In the wake of Marvel’s success, a half-dozen other franchises tried to equal it. Nobody came close.
In 2018, the greatest testament to Marvel’s mythmaking power wasn’t Infinity War; it was the only movie that out-earned Infinity War at the domestic box office. Two months earlier, Black Panther caught the cultural zeitgeist, showing a fantastical Afro-futuristic utopia at a moment when that was what the world really needed to see. Black Panther was such a cultural event that it must’ve even shocked Disney itself; the superhero vehicle, partially intended to prop up the Infinity War opening, became a societal rallying point unto itself. A year later, it became the first comic-book movie ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. If Joe and Anthony Russo, directors of Infinity War, had any inkling of what Black Panther would mean to people, then they almost certainly would’ve given the Wakandan characters a whole lot more to do. (This column is about the box office champions of every year, but I wrote a Black Panther column pretty recently. Infinity War finished just behind Black Panther in North America, and it won the year at the global box office.)
Infinity War weaponizes any and all audience affection for those previous 18 Marvel movies. Its heroes all get limited screen time, but they do the things that people pay to see them do. They soar and banter and strike dramatic poses. In quick little glimpses, we see everything that the movie needs to tell us about these people. Iron Man snarks at the invading alien super-beings while bragging about his new nanotech suit. Spider-Man sneaks off of a moving school bus to go fight the giant donut that’s suddenly appeared above the Manhattan skyline. The Guardians of the Galaxy sing along with the Spinners while responding to an SOS call and considering maybe stealing the ship of the people they’ll rescue. We know all these people, and we’re used to seeing them win. We are not used to seeing them fail. That’s not what happens in Marvel movies.
Amidst all the rapid-fire charisma of all these personalities, though, Thanos is a figure of swaggering, stoic certainty. The principle animating him—that the universe is too big and populous, and it will collapse on itself if something isn’t done—almost works as a criticism of the vast and unwieldy Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. Thanos looks out at a landscape teeming with characters all scrambling for finite screen time, and he sees that it’s too much, so he sets off on a mythical quest to reduce this chaos to something more sustainable. When he succeeds, it’s shocking, not least because the Russos have spent the previous two and a half hours reminding us of why we liked all these characters in the first place.
Leading up to the aria of futility that temporarily ends things, there’s a whole lot of fun stuff in Infinity War. Spider-Man gets a bunch of new Iron Man tech and steps up as a kid who can willingly take on interstellar menaces. Doctor Strange grumpily rolls his eyes at Tony Stark’s self-aggrandizement and convincingly does cool magical hand-spells. The Guardians “Ooh” and “Ahh” over Thor and then get into a brief, entertaining punch-up with a trio of Avengers before realizing that they’re all on the same side. Benicio Del Toro, granted about one minute of screen time, does memorably weird shit with it. At the cultural peak of Game Of Thrones, Peter Dinklage shows up as a giant with metal hands. Hugo Weaving does not show up, but we get a space-ghost version of the Red Skull spouting exposition anyway.
Amidst this juggling act, the Russo Brothers and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely also keep the emotional stuff in play. After getting badly beaten down in the opening minutes, the Hulk refuses to come out and smash, forcing Bruce Banner to go into battle in Iron Man’s Hulkbuster armor instead. Captain America emerges from fugitive life because he knows the world needs him. Doctor Strange goes into a mental trance and comes to understand just how tenuous the universe is. Thanos tearfully murders his own child while Alan Silvestri’s operatic score booms and a whole colorful space tableau spins around him. Even amidst the nonstop wisecracks, which can wear a little thin on repeated viewings, the Russos keep a building sense of doom.
The superheroes of Infinity War act in the ways that Marvel-movie superheroes are supposed to act. They bicker and bust each other’s chops. They acknowledge the absurdity of their own situations by pointing out that absurdity: “He’s from space. He came here to steal a necklace from a wizard.” They make dramatic last-second saves. When Thor, off on his own quest for most of the movie, returns with blazing eyes and a brand-new magical axe, it’s a triumphant goosebump moment. But all the blood-pounding pomp of that arrival amounts to nothing.
Before Thanos, a lot of Marvel movies had bland-villain problems. There were memorable exceptions: Loki, Vulture, Killmonger. But most of the heavies were walking plot-advancement machines, there to help the heroes realize their own destinies or simply to give them something to do. Thanos is the first Marvel villain convinced of his own righteousness, the only one who knows he’s going to win. His motivations are a little muddy; his assertions that there are “too many mouths, not enough to go around” read like a cartoonish misrepresentation of various environmental movements. (Everyone knows that there are plenty of resources to go around; we just have to stop the rich people from hoarding them.) But Thanos’ response to the heroes’ theatricality is to sigh deeply and to explain his motivations again. He remains resolute that he will soon “see the sun rise on a grateful universe.” At the end, he gets to enjoy his quiet moment of triumph while all the superheroes begin to process just how badly they’ve failed.
The silence following the Thanos snap still resonates, even if Marvel has effectively erased the effects of that snap. That ending demands a certain willing suspension of disbelief. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love with comic books knows that comic-book death is simply an abstraction, a vague formality. Any character who dies will come back whenever another writer decides that they’ve got a new take. As soon as Black Panther dissolved into nothingness, I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t permanent, that all these characters would be back. But I still got emotionally caught up in Spider-Man’s shattering quasi-death and in the quiet of that moment. (There’s no score over the end credits; it’s as though Alan Silvestri, too, has crumbled into nothingness.) After the final stinger, when Nick Fury blows away in the breeze, the phrase “Thanos will return” rolls up on screen. At my opening-night screening, someone yelled “fuck you” at those words.
Even if you knew that you were being manipulated, even if you knew that all these characters would find a way to return triumphantly to the screen a year later, Infinity War stung. (Part of the joy in Avengers: Endgame is seeing how the writers and directors find their way to that inevitable crowd-pleasing return, probably the most viscerally satisfying movie-theater moment I’ve had this decade.) And even as Marvel has moved on from that snap, the final Infinity War moment was so resonant that virtually every Marvel product since 2018 has worked as some attempt to reckon with it.
Ant-Man And The Wasp opened a couple of months after Infinity War, and the question of how the movie would address Thanos, unanswered until the final second of the credits stinger, hung over everything. Spider-Man: Far From Home and WandaVision and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier have all been stories about their heroes reconciling with trauma and loss. To avoid that heaviness, Loki had to break the concept of time itself into tiny pieces. Black Widow, the first new Marvel movie in two years, had to jump way back in the timeline to tell a story, and the shadow of its hero’s death hangs heavy over the whole film.
Infinity War represented Marvel at its imperial peak, and it may have broken the studio’s machinery to the point where this all-crushing cinematic saga might not recover. The pandemic fucked up a whole lot of things, and one of those things was an intricately planned-out years-long product rollout. Marvel was able to get Endgame off before everything shut down, and in retrospect, it plays like an ending of a grand endeavor. Everything since has felt like Marvel sweeping up the pieces.
The endeavor won’t really end for a very long time. We’ve got a flood of new Marvel movies coming in the months ahead, and maybe some of it will connect on a mass level the way Black Panther and Infinity War did. But Black Widow hasn’t performed up to box office expectations thus far, even though it’s the year’s highest-grossing movie at the time of this writing. A few weeks after its release, Scarlett Johansson sued Disney for putting Black Widow up for streaming and thus messing up her share of the profits. For the whole Marvel machine to work, everyone involved needs to be making crazy amounts of money. Time will tell, but that era may be ending.
But if Infinity War was the beginning of the end for Marvel, then it was a glorious flame-out: a massive global entertainment machine humming at peak capacity and still coming up with jarring surprises. My kids hadn’t really seen Marvel movies when Infinity War opened, and they still wanted to know who died right away. It’ll be a long time before we see any sort of product reach that level of omnipresence. As that moment recedes into the past, the fact that it happened at all seems more and more miraculous.
The contender: Six of 2018’s highest-grossing films were superhero epics: the gleefully puerile filth of Deadpool 2, the stoner grandeur of Aquaman, the self-aware family-comedy zippiness of Incredibles 2. Given all that, the halo jumps and helicopter stunts of Mission: Impossible—Fallout feel grounded and realistic.
Fallout is a finely-tuned big-budget roller-coaster, but its hard-splat punches and dangling bodies felt old-school and analog in a changing movie environment. And for that type of Hollywood action cinema, it’s a landmark, a shining example of how much lizard-brain fun all that stuff can be when it’s done to perfection.
Next time: 2019’s highest-grossing film, by far, was Avengers: Endgame, but I wrote about that one recently, too. Instead, then, we’ll look at Jon Favreau’s photorealistic and flavorless Lion King remake, the other vastly lucrative Disney CGI spectacle that came out that summer.
390 Comments
One thing I find hilarious about Infinity War is that it has nothing to do with the event comic it’s named after. The event Infinity War was actually a sequel to the event Infinity Gauntlet and involved an evil variant of Adam Warlock named The Magus swiping Cosmic Cubes from across different universes so he could basically rewrite reality at a whim. In fact, for most of the event the Infinity Gauntlet doesn’t even work thanks to The Living Tribunal turning it off. The movie is actually more of a pastiche of different events. Specifically the following:Thanos Quest, which was a prelude to Infinity Gauntlet involving Thanos actually acquiring the Infinity Gems. Jonathan Hickman’s Infinity, which introduced the Black Order and involved Thanos hunting for his missing son culminating in a fight in Wakanda. And parts of the The Infinity Gauntlet, which the movie makes some references to.
I’ve always loved Thanos Quest/Infinity Gauntlet/Stalin’s Silver Surfer run. It’s a fucking blast.
I know that’s a typo but it is ironic. If there was one guy who was a real life Thanos..
When the movie came out, people in the office were talking about it. One of them was talking about how angry the ending made her because of all the characters she liked turning to dust. She looked at me, knowing that I read comics, and asked, “Didn’t it make you angry?” No, I’d already been on this roller coaster 20 years before. I was angry that they used the Infinity War title as that was the shitty sequel series that everyone hated.
Although I’ve enjoyed telling people who ask that question that in the comic, the Snap was the first thing that happened and none of the heroes had the slightest fucking idea what was going on.
Not only that, but the heroes all get brutally murdered as a distraction, and that ends up failing anyway. Thanos ends up being defeated because his hubris caused him to ignore Nebula, who snatches the gauntlet away from him and undoes everything he did with it — purely out of spite.I knew they wouldn’t do that for Endgame, though. It’s great as a character beat for both Thanos and Nebula, but it wouldn’t give the Avengers anything to do.
Yeah, although I liked that the movie did end up incorporating the mad scramble for the loose gauntlet.
Great movie. The last five minutes particularly are such an effective gut punch. I saw it twice in cinemas and the crowds audibly gasped during the moments after the snap.
The nearly silent, resigned hopelessness of those few minutes was stunning. You keep waiting for a reprieve, maybe from the post-credits scene, and even that gave you next to nothing by way of hope (yeah, Captain Marvel got paged, but so what?).
The post-credits scene in Infinity War is the only time I think the whole Marvel stinger thing didn’t work for me, because it does undermine the catastrophe of the ending, if only just a little. People called the ending a “cliffhanger,” and in an external sense that’s true, but there’s not actually anything in the movie itself to suggest that — so far as everything before the credits is concerned, the narrative is over. Thanos won, Avengers lost, half of the universe is dead. The Captain Marvel page scene does introduce a bit of hope, which I think was a misstep, however tiny.
The Captain Marvel page scene does introduce a bit of hope, which I think was a misstep, however tiny. Eh, I like it. It’s bad, it’s really bad, the bad guy won. The good guys lost. The worst thing actually happened. And then, just before he’s dusted, Nick Fury cracks just the tiniest sliver of light into all that darkness.
On opening night, when the credits were rolling & we were waiting for something to happen at the end, we were probably down to 50% or fewer people still in the theater when the post-credit scene happened, and I was one of the few people who recognized Captain Marvel’s logo on the pager. I pulled a “YES” like Thor seeing Hulk on Sakaar and had like a half-dozen people ask me what it meant.
I like it as well, but it does set Captain Marvel up in a way that is just impossible to follow through on. And they don’t even try to! I may have audibly groaned watching Endgame when she says “You might not see me for a long time” like 30 minutes in (A lot of that reaction because it felt like a cop-out to introduce such a powerful character and then say “Well, we don’t have anything for her because, y’know, she was only in one of the preceding 20 movies,” but it was also motivated in no small part because because they had just revealed that haircut.)
It was necessary because Danvers is so damn powerful, had she been with the Avengers when Thanos’ ship came through the time portal, she would have wiped the floor with his ass before he could get a hold of the gauntlet. In fact, she should have proceeded to do just that when she finally shows up during the climax, instead of trying to get the gauntlet to Scott’s van.
Oh, I know. I was just cruising through Endgame on Disney+ last night; I remembered that she almost bests him hand-to-hand but had completely forgotten “Oh yeah, she takes out his entire flagship by herself when she shows up.”
Yep. It was a good note of “so you’re telling me there’s a chance…”
My response on seeing that page: Captain Marvel-They needed Superman after all.
I agree. It reminded me that there was another Avengers movie on the way, that the day would eventually be saved, and that most or all of the people who disappeared would probably return. That kind of undermined the impact of the movie for me.
When Captain America, the most “Never say die” of Marvel heroes, can do nothing but keel to the ground and quietly say “Oh god…”, you could just feel the air go out of everyone.
I saw it at a packed matinee and after that mic drop of an ending you could hear, scattered throughout the packed auditorium, kids processing it was over and The Bad Guy Won. Just audible brains melting. It’s probably the closest replication to seeing Empire Strikes Back in the theaters in 1980 I’ve had.
Exactly. Watching it and walking out, I thought “Wow, this is what it probably felt like when people saw Empire”, which came out a few years before I was born.
“A couple of decades earlier, the villain had been the psychedelic vision of bugged-out Marvel weirdo Jim Starlin. Starlin had conjured a space-opera nihilist in love with the physical manifestation of Death.”I actually prefer Thanos’ portrayal in the comics as an Incel on God Mode rather than as the Ultimate Malthusian. In the event The Infinity Gauntlet, killing half of all life in the universe was Death’s idea. To Thanos it was more a pretext to get Death to fall in love with him. It’s honestly a lot more disturbing that he wants to commit a genocide not because of some goal he believes to be for the greater good but for an extremely petty and childish reason.
But doing stupid shit just to get laid is a fairly relatable motive.
Yeah, I’m glad Feige and the MCU writers decided NOT to give the incels any more ideas about genocide as a means to get a date.
Considering how that whole ugly subculture has grown over the last 5-6 years, I agree.
Although it’s hard to get around how fucking stupid movie Thanos is:Thanos: There’s not enough resources to go around! But with infinite power, I can kill half the population to bring everything into balance.Reasonably smart 6 year-old: With infinite power, couldn’t you also just double the resources?Thanos: . . .
I mean, that’s an easy fix. Just take the lead from any multi-billionaire who has the resources to address societal ills and ongoing sources of human suffering while still living a life of unequaled luxury and power, yet hems and haws about why their charitable work amounts to basically flipping a single grimy penny to a beggar.
“Thanos wants to give the Universe a hand-UP, not a hand-OUT.”
Well, resource hoarding is a problem separate and apart from the resources:population ratio. I’m sure in the post-snap world billionaires were probably still hoarding stuff. He probably should have done a second snap for that issue.
I’m sure in the post-snap world billionaires were probably still hoarding stuff.Even more so, the non-organic resources are the same and you’re going to have a lot of people who just lost the family breadwinner or their livelihood, desperate for some way to get by. There’s no way that scenario doesn’t lead almost immediately to a feudal fiefdom.
Reasonably smart 6 year-old’s 13 year old sister: “or you could reduce the fertility rate of sapient species by half!”
Although it’s hard to get around how fucking stupid movie Thanos isI think it makes sense. Thanos is a killer. That’s his thing. So, naturally, his solution to the every problem is more murder. When you really like your genocide hammer, the whole universe looks like a nail.
Hard agree. That’s why I like Thanos’ line in Endgame about how all the death and destruction has never been personal but how he was going to enjoy destroying Earth – it’s clearly a lie. He gets off on the killing, and has found a grand way to rationalize it.
Not just that, he’s following through on the solution he came up with before he had infinite power. When he was just a marauder killing off half the people on the planets he conquered, doubling the resources wasn’t an option. Using the gauntlet to increase resources would mean he was wrong to cull all those other planets because there was, in fact, a better way. No way he would obtain infinite power just to admit he was wrong.More importantly, the villain doesn’t have to actually be right. He just needs to believe he is.
He also kills the resources, like plant and insect life. If he just said sentient life it would be slightly better. But still nonsensical
That’s pretty much what T’Challa did in that What If episode.
That’s pretty much what T’Challa did in that What If episode.
In the event The Infinity Gauntlet, killing half of all life in the universe was Death’s idea. To Thanos it was more a pretext to get Death to fall in love with him.I haven’t read IG in a long while, but I forgot that part. I remembered it as Thanos’s incel-like idea of what it would take to impress Death enough that she’d notice him, only to discover afterward that it wasn’t what Death wanted at all and she isn’t impressed by him in any positive way.
I liked the theory before Thor Ragnarok came out that Hela would be a stand-in for Death, and even in the run up to IW when it became clear they weren’t going with that motivation, I kind of hoped they might split the difference with a twist invoking this plot, like Thanos has supposed noble plan here to help everyone, but we see that it’s at least partly his justification for a delusion.
My then 6-year old daughter declaring that Infinity War was “the worst movie I’ve ever seen” after the super-downer ending, then proceeding to obsess for the next year over how the story was going to end, was one of my favorite movie-related experiences of my life. Not to re-litigate this old argument again, but I wish Martin Scorsese could have seen her anticipation in counting down the days to Endgame and the overwhelming PASSION she had for this story. Yeah, it’s cornball, but that’s what movies do better than anything.
Part of the appeal of cinema is the shared experience the feeling of an audience all reacting to a story at the same time. And Endgame is a hell of an example of that.
Yeah, seeing Endgame opening night was hands-down the best crowd experience I’ve ever had in a theater.
No doubt, I always make time to see Beckett when he shows up on a theater calendar.
I will never forget seeing Endgame in the packed theatre and that communal experience. I had only seen IW a month or two before when it hit Canadian Netflix. The whole movie was an emotional ride. We’ve all seen the videos of audience reactions to “Portals.” And yet as amazing, enthralling as those videos are: the real thing was absolutely unbelievable. People were loud. Engaged. Rapt. But it starts with a hammer. Evans’ Cap is far and away my favorite character in the MCU. I marked out hard when he juuuuuuust budged the hammer in AoU.Hammer hits Thanos: “wait…”Hammer lands: “no…”Hand grasps: “oh my god…”CAPWith zero hyperbole, my response was:“OH MY GOD, THEY DID IT! THEY FUCKING DID IT!”Every hair on my body is standing on end remembering that moment. I was a fucking mess for the rest of the movie. Theatre of people cheering, awwwing, losing it. “On your left” and you hear the buzzAnd it builds, and builds. T’Challa gets a huge response.PETER GETS THE BIGGEST GODDAMN RESPONSETHE MUSIC SWELLSTHE HUGE PAN OF EVVVVERRRRYBOOOODYAnd finallyFinallyFINALLYA whispered “…Assemble.”There is little I have been a part of, including countless concerts and real sporting events, that has felt as AMAZING as the roar in the theatre when that charge came. I was laughing and crying and cheering and pumping my fist in joy, in elation. So fuck Martin Scorcese.
It’s that kind of “communal experience” that still has me championing the theater outings as io9/AVC commentators poo-poo it. Yes, talky teens and cell phone users, etc. can peace right out. But when you get in a room with moviewatchers equally as locked in and eager for what’s happening as you are, it’s SPECIAL. Avengers 1, 3, 4, Dark Knight, Force Awakens, that’s the stuff where the sensation of being amongst a rapt audience has still stuck with me years later.
I wonder if he’s seen any of the reactions to Thor entering Wakanda, or Cap wielding Mjolnir. You *can’t* have seen those in theatres with an engaged audience and thought they aren’t cinema. Yes it may be a super-commercial product but they have built a community of fans around the world
the feeling of an audience all reacting to a story at the same time
The ones I remember the electric sensation offhand include:The whoops when Legolas mounts the horse, The Two Towers
The laughter of disbelief at Jack Sparrow sailing into port, PotC: CotBP
The collective gasp of the (European) audience when Michael Fassbender orders three whiskies, Inglourious BasterdsThe gawping silence during the Holdo Maneuver, The Last JediThe Snap, IW
The collective loss of shit from Portals onward, Endgame
Before Endgame opened we caught my daughter up on all the MCUs to date so she could go with us. She had been dreading Infinity War because she knew bad stuff happened but I don’t think she was fully prepared. Loki, her favorite character, gets killed in the first five minutes. When Spidey dusted she got up and RAN LAPS AROUND THE HOUSE fanning her eyes and whimpering.
I remember seeing Infinity War in the theater and, afterwards, there was a kid dressed as Spider-Man just red-faced, snot-dripping bawling, howling “Spider-man’s dead!!” His dad was desperately trying to explain that, no, he’ll come back, I promise, he’s not dead-dead, the next movie will save him, but that kid was having none of it.
The second time I saw Infinity War, there was an older couple sitting next to me. During the credits, they were baffled and disturbed that a superhero movie had ended that way. I had to explain to them that there was a sequel coming next year.
It’s interesting how kids process movies. We saw Spider-verse in theaters with my youngest. We have watched it several times since. No issues. Last week my wife watched it with him again and it clicked to him that Spider-man dies in it and he was devastated.
Honestly, as hard to watch as the results of the snap are, I am always more disturbed by Loki’s death in the first few minutes. The struggle and the neck snap, ugh.
Honestly, years of reading superhero comics kind of desensitized me to seeing superheroes die. Hell, Spider-Man has died three times in the comics. The first two times he came back to life by giving birth to himself.
I’ve always been more in the X-Men wing when it comes to actual Marvel Comics, and death there is even more of a revolving door than regular Marvel, so hard same.
Yeah. At some point during the disintegration montage at the end of the film, it became obvious to me that these deaths were going to get reversed in the sequel. But that didn’t take away the sting of the subsequent deaths. Even knowing in my head that Peter Parker would return, his anguished crumbling into dust still provoked an emotional response. That’s good storytelling.
I figured given the comics that most of the deaths would have to be unwritten but I thought for the end of Infinity War that when the killing started, it was a great dramatic moment that it just would not stop. Everytime you thought that was it … it kept on going. It really added weight to the end of the film.
Yeah comic book heaven has a revolving door. I’m sure the MCU will be the same. I’m 100% sure we see Tony Stark and Steve Rogers(young and sexy) again in a MCU movie at least once more
I got my kids (9 and 11) gradually caught up on the MCU over the course of the pandemic, and they’ve of course gone from initially not interested to “DAD IT’S TIME FOR THE NEW WHAT IF? EPISODE!!!” But the opening scene of Infinity War scared the shit out of my nine-year-old and made it a bit of a challenge to get her to sign on for the rest of the movie. They knew about the Snap just from cultural osmosis, but it was still quite a ride for them.
Right after the Captain Marvel tease (her movie was actually the first they’d seen back when it came out), I told them “we had to wait a YEAR to find out what happened!” and teased them that I might make them wait too. Just like I told them recently after watching Return of the Jedi – thirty years for a sequel, kids!
How did they fare with the ravening space dog soldier things (“we have blood to spare”) at the end? I reckon I would have shit bricks if I saw that as a kid 35 years ago but I wonder if that’s because I wouldn’t have seen anything similar.
Oddly, perfectly fine with wave after wave of mooks. I’m guessing that was partly because the Wakandan/Avenger army was handling them fairly well, especially once Thor showed up. My 11-year-old was fine the whole time, but the 9-year-old was really thrown for a loop by Thanos, and almost as much by Ebony Maw. She did not like him either, but at least he got spaced relatively quickly.
This comes along at a funny moment, though, because she was greatly relieved by this week’s What If? episode and absolutely loved Fun Thanos.
None of the Black Order have a lot of presence in the film, but Ebony Maw sure does make use of his short time to establish a pretty terrifying impression even in Thanos’s shadow.
He really did. From his “rejoice” speech to his little dismissive hand gestures negating anything the heroes are doing, to him finally getting good and pissed off that Strange is proving to be so tenacious.
I think that reaction you’re describing is a big part of what Mr. Scorsese (I’d be thrilled to be on a first name basis with him) is upset about. The sugar-rush spectacle of these thrilling, well-constructed movies with at least generally-applicable themes are taking all of the, for lack of a better word, mindspace of a huge amount of the younger people, and of much of the creative talent that could be making other things. Even in terms of craft, so much energy goes into making and consuming the visuals of a hoary, CGI zombie of a movie like The Lion King that it’s making the next big innovation tough to see and, maybe, tough to happen. Both Star Wars and The Matrix were mid-budget movies that contained a huge visual novelty combined with an elemental story that they became generational phenomena.
I really like a lot of the MCU movies, and I think a couple of them are flat-out masterpieces by any standard (GotG, Black Panther) but sometimes it’s really goddamn depressing that the generational phenomena is the 20th installment of a status-quo-reinforcing franchise with little visual invention or interesting flourishes except for how to make sure your ass is back in the seat in 3-6 months when the new one comes out. Even the previous generations franchises had similar stories, they did not lack for visual distinctiveness and imagination and, stop me if you’ve heard this before, film is a visual medium so that counts for an awful lot especially when everything is just Hero With A Thousand Faces for the billionth time. even the worst of the Star Wars and Matrix movies still did this: why do you think the SW Prequels have spawned a zillion memes? Take any frame of Attack of the Clones and it’s still obvious it’s from a Star Wars movie. Same with the Matrix sequels, even when it’s silly mechs machinegunning sentinels, there’s never a doubt that it’s a Matrix movie. The MCU’s biggest visual invention so far has been swapping the bland, overlit, primary color palette from Iron Man for jewel tones whenever the movie is *in spaaace,* or for earth tones and heavy diffusion filters whenever the movie is in Wakanda (again, that’s GotG and Black Panther). The sameyness is the entire point: it creates that continuity and yet it’s also the worst part. I like these movies, for the most part but they’re the beneficiary of a big budget production arena that has stopped making anything where innovation or imagination could happen. Kids growing up looking forward to the 2683747th installment of the Beanie Babies Content Universe™️ instead of feeling safe having new experiences or seeing new imaginations up on screen is a major concern.
My 6 year old is still not ready for the whole MCU, he’s seems a few here and there. I’m super excited to do a full 20 movie rewatch with him in a few more years when he’s mature enough for it all.
I’m 20 years older than your daughter and I was in the exact same mindset lol. Both Infinity War, Endgame and the way the audience reacted to them in real time, was one of the best movie going experiences I’ve ever had.
is this satire ? if yes, then well done.
Dude, look at the replies. Nobody’s on your side, hipster.
Fuck off
Was she as disappointed with Endgame as my kids were? They absolutely LOVE Infinity War, and won’t even bother to watch Endgame at all.
Your kids have good taste. I was swept up in the finale with everyone else a little bit, but I was also like okaaayyy this is a thirty minute victory lap I get it. I saw a video that talks about how to make that finale more compelling from a storytelling perspective. Lots of shifts in momentum between Thanos and the Avengers. More engaging, like Infinity War. Wish it could have been like that
Even then? People need to get let of things being “cornball” or whatever. As if that somehow makes it “lesser.”Cornball forever.
Absolutely. It’s true pop, zeitgeist art. Marvel Studios’ ability to take the endless serial format of television and tune it to a cinematic format where every episode is a 2-hour, $200 mil budget endeavor, is simply remarkable and still doesn’t get its full due when dismissed as fluff or not-cinema. Because the goal of a movie is to care. And people CARE about these characters, and its universe. It may not have the weight of things to say like, say, “No Country For Old Men”, but the combination of characterization and pitch-perfect casting gets all of this to resonate in a way that few blockbusters (and just one, never mind an interconnected web of them) ever achieve. When my niece is legitimately body-shaking SOBBING over Spider-Man dusting out even though that character is not going anywhere when he’s a movie ATM, that’s the movie experience working.
Absolutely, that’s what I tell people who hate Marvel movies. It’s about the characters, and if you aren’t on board with the characters, then I can see why they wouldn’t be for you. But it is infinitely reassuring that *that’s* why they make billions of dollars. Because people *do* care. So I’m glad as hell they collectively make more than Transformers/Michael Bay garbage
Lol it’s been two years. Marvel nerds find something, literally anything, else to whine about.
This was a fun time for the monoculture Marvel had going; I was somewhat geekily cynical about it (knowing like Tom said that seeing Spidey and Black Panther get dusted basically guaranteed that it would get undone) but still pretty impressed by the end, especially in talking to people I volunteered with/worked with/etc that watched the movies here and there and were just surprised by it without any of the same jadedness haha
Which is something Scorsese used to know all about, but seems to have disappeared up his own asshole the last few decades.
I’ve tried at least 4 times now over the past couple years, but I can’t make it more than 45 minutes into this without falling straight to sleep, and I still feel like I’ve missed basically nothing going into the TV shows. Don’t know how that math works out, but hey, it is what it is.
Two hours later, Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord, whose crucial act of crunch-time idiocy has doomed trillions of sentient beings, looks around wildly and asks, “Did we just lose?”I’m not the only one who things that at least, like, 35% of this whole “worst Chris” thing is residual anger at Quinn for blowing the 28-3 lead in Infinity War, am I?(please don’t reply to this with a long “bUt HiS cHuRcH!!!1!” reply, I know about his stupid church & their stupid bigoted views, all churches have stupid views)
I’ll agree, if only for the Atlanta Falcons slam you threw in there. This also equates Thanos with the New England Patriots, which I’m also down with.
Reporter: Thanos, your children failed to acquire the Mind Stone, any comment?Thanos: We’re on to Knowhere.Reporter: Any update on Ebony Maw’s status? Thanos: We’re on to Knowhere.
Thanos: We’re on to Knowhere.Thank you. That was perfect, particularly since Brolin has a perfect head coach voice.
I was hearing it in David Byrne’s voice.We’re on the road to Knowheeeeeeere….
Thanos is like Brady, talented but an absolute unlikable prick that you want to see get his head slammed through a window.
Quill. Peter Quill. And no, I think it’s because he turned out to be another clueless rich white guy who doesn’t understand (among other things) why his church is toxic.
Damn, not sure why it autocorrected from Quill to Quinn. Quill is a real word, damnit!!!
When Quill the eskimo gets here….
HA!!!!!!!!!!
The coach of the Falcons in that Super Bowl was Dan Quinn… So your original post works as written.
For many people, their entire identity is tied to their church. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Pratt to hear a bunch of people on the internet yell about his church’s views, and for him to just go “Oh, okay. Guess I’ll believe in a different religion then.”In any case, as anti-LGBT churches go, you could do far worse than Hillsong. (Which Pratt doesn’t even attend—he attends the Zoe Church, which is “related” to Hillsong in ways I don’t fully understand.)
He’s a pretty recent convert, which of course ups the zeal factor. I’m a pastor’s kid, few people understand this shit better than me. And I’m queer! So. I didn’t say anything about the reasonableness of expecting his to change his mind. I just said that’s why people dislike him. But Hillsong and its ilk are actually some of the worst because they hide their homophobia. They cloak it in “we love everyone”. They’re the cool evangelicals. Hiding a culture of deep misogyny and anti-queer theology behind skinny jeans and lattes.
Don’t forget the accusations of racism, misogyny, and general exploitation of its most devoted followers’ free labor!
I mean I did mention the misogyny but yes ;)I’m not claiming the denomination I grew up in is remotely perfect but they are actively working toward anti-racism, embracing lgbtq members, denouncing global imperialism and refuse active military and police as members.
I’m not claiming the denomination I grew up in is remotely perfectThat was sort of part of a longer version of my original post. I can’t tell whether the OP intended their “all churches” statement to be taken literally (as in any/all Christian places of worship/congregations), a statement about all religions in general, or something in between.Regardless, it’s almost certainly true that all faith traditions have done some amount of harm on some scale—especially if you go all the way back to their historical origins. But there are also faith communities that seek to actively distance themselves from historically harmful religious practice.
All those things, and his bread and butter has always been playing a goofy, fun, HARMLESS hunk/pudgy hunk, which, I know: actor vs. roles. But it still makes him seem that much worse, I think – kind of, I just thought of this, Pennywise lol. He’s a clown who wants to eat you.
I always think Quill gets a bum rap. Yeah, he fucked up, but so did Thor by not going for the head. Heck, I’d pin as much or more blame on Gamora – she was only “saving” Nebula from a 50% chance of being eventually killed by the Snap. If she’d have kept mum about Vormir, Thanos’s plan grinds to a halt long before Quill has a chance to botch things.
(This is why I really liked Rocket’s line about Thor in ENDGAME: “He’s pissed. He thinks he failed. Which, of course he did, but you know, there’s a lot of that going around, ain’t there?”)
Imagine, characters failing and making mistakes. It’s like we’re telling stories.
I accept that people watch movies in a different way than I do, but the visceral hatred and venom for Quill that started after the movie was amazing to me. I know people to this day who sneer when they mention him because they’re still livid at what he did during IW. It’s not like most of them direct it at Pratt, either.Obviously there were lots of other characters you could blame, even including Cap not letting Vision be destroyed. I think Quill is probably the most direct cause, where most other characters who failed only indirectly allowed Thanos to succeed, but I think the anger at Quill is actually because he lost control of his emotions. For some people, that’s a huge no-no for big strong men who are not supposed to feel anything except sometimes just enough sadness for a single tear to appear in their eye.
‘We’re not going to let that robot die,’ says Captain America, as hundreds of Wakandans lose their lives on the battlefield.America, ladies and gentlemen!
I blame Strange for not taking Tony’s advice and stashing the time stone somewhere beyond Thanos’s reach.
i think the ‘oh he’s jacked now!’ novelty wore off pretty quickly and he hasn’t done anything that good or notable outside of guardians since, and even that shtick is wearing a little thin.
Well, a huge chunk of Pratt’s appeal has always been his “big doofus puppy dog” energy. It worked on Parks & Rec, it works in GotG, but when he tries to strip that out and go for Roguish Han Solo or Action Man he comes off like a frat-boy douche. (I thought he came off pretty well in Tomorrow War, but that still had some of that enthusiastic energy.)
i thought he was about as charming as a cardboard box in the tomorrow war. there’s also just a countdown for how much his ‘one thing’ can go on for. it’s one thing to be a doofus in your late 20s it’s another to be in your mid-40s and still ‘doyy?’ing around.
nah it’s still about the church. one has real life consequences the other is a stupid kids movie.
Also, Strange’s path to victory I imagine included Quill doing precisely that and gumming everything up.As another wise comic character once said, “It’s all….part of the plaaaaan.”
all churches have stupid views Bullshit. There’s a difference between stupid and harmful, and some churches definitely do more harm than others. By its own members’ accounts, Hillsong has harmed LOTS of people, demeaning LGBTQ, POC, and women members and exploiting their labor while its leaders grow obscenely wealthy.It’s not like Pratt lives in some tiny, one-church. He either agrees with his church’s views or simply doesn’t care about them. Neither is a good look.
Put up against Catholics they are saints. As an aside there is a Catholic Saint who took prisoners home so he could rack them after dinner .
no not at all
No he’s just a boring actor who was lucky enough to be in hit franchise movies. That’s reason enough not to like him.
I watched Infinity War and Endgame back to back during lockdown and I’m still staggered by how well they hold up.It’s easy to point to all the crowdpleasing moments and accuse it of fan service and cheap thrills, but there’s a reason that no other franchise has succeeded on this scale.
I don’t care much for comic books, would give the MCU a pitchfork-approving 6.8/10 overall and agree, mostly, with Scorsese’s non-cinema accusations… That all said, I love Infinity War immensely, and it’s almost all down to it actually having something resembling an atmosphere, A FEELING, rather than the (mostly) uniform Marvel ‘TV episode on a $200 million budget’ palette of its lead-up brethren. It’s hard to explain, but many Marvel movies to me, in terms of pacing or story, are like looking at a badly mixed audio file where there are no peaks or troughs, just flat noise: there’s quiet character scenes and big action ones, but they never quite stand apart, whether because of the constant quips or the uninspired workmanlike cinematography.
IW feels different. From the dread soaked garbled distress signal of the opening to the almost arthouse ending of Thanos gazing out over a beautiful Eden, the film casts a palpable cinematic spell. When it’s moving, the momentum and grandiosity is something to behold (the battle on Titan). When it slows down and breathes, you feel it (Thor and Rocket’s conversation ranks top five Marvel emotional moment easily). And they didn’t have to sacrifice the main tenets of a good Marvel flick to do so, as I would argue this is close to the funniest of all their films (‘Why is Gamora?’) without the quips and meta jokes undermining the drama.I wish Marvel could be like this all the time. Both poetic and entertaining. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
(before I’m accused of total Marvel snobbery: I also greatly love IM1, the Captain America trilogy, GOTG1, Endgame [mostly] and Ragnarok. The others aren’t bad by any stretch but they do tend to wash over me upon rewatch)
OK but Black Panther???
I liked it? But it still felt very Marvel-palette to me. Also:- Killmonger was a great villain who was half wasted/stifled for screen time by bringing in Klaw and having the climatic battle be a CGI masked mess (for comparison, Vulture was MUCH better utilized in Homecoming).- Martin Freeman’s utterly superfluous character. His lightgun ‘shoot down the weapon supply ships’ bit would be boring even in a video game and is a contender for worst Marvel action scene of all time. – Bar the decent Kingmaker ritual fights, most action scenes being boringly choreographed/edited with weightless CGI. – What feels like a forced ‘we gotta meet the quota’ bevy of Marvel quips and humour. Can’t fault the cultural significance of it obviously, and for that I’m very glad it exists, but it again feels like a great film trapped in the machinations of the Marvel factory.
I get that a lot of black people really liked that movie and i dont blame them. But honestly it just wasnt that great. Its really overhyped, as far as marvel movies go, its average.
Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis are just the Tolkien white guys. (I will not apologize for that.)I mean, I would love to see more movies in the vein of Black Panther (Afro-futurism is cool!) that aren’t so MCU-y, but I also loved seeing them break the mold a bit, finally, and have a movie that was so very unapologetically Black.
There certainly was a lot to like about the film! And yeah one thing was the real sincere passion I could see between the actors (damn it, RIP Boseman) and director for (most of) the material and the significance of the film. It really felt like an earnest celebration, with a palpable warmth that probably only exists elsewhere in the MCU in GOTG1, albeit a very different kind.Here’s hoping they really let Coogler loose to push the envelope with Wakanda Forever!
‘Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis are just the Tolkien white guys.’Absolutely stunning.
Well. Played. Clerks.
I’m sure Martin Freeman gets tired of playing somewhat baffled guys trying to catch up with other swifter characters, but he was not well cast there, and it didn’t help that his character’s role didn’t seem very well thought out.
Eh, I really liked Freeman in BP. People say his character wasn’t necessary, but he WAS. He’s the guy people explain things to. Without him, you’ve got characters telling each other shit they both already know. He’s the guy who gets to be all wide-eyed at, “Holy shit, THIS is the real Wakanda?” That’s an important guy to have!
Just to pile on (and I did like it a lot, so this didn’t matter SO much): there’s a weird amount of sloppy CGI. Once when he jumps on a rhino, once during the climactic fight, maybe a few other times. It was the first time in years that I sat up in the theater and was like, “Uh oh, someone missed a deadline.”
I completely agree with your Killmonger comment and I’ve always thought it was ridiculous for him not to survive that final wound and be put in freezer prison or something for use in future movies. The only answer to those with whom you disagree shouldn’t be death, especially not with a character and actor of that caliber!
I never got the “Killmonger was a great villain” thing. The character lost me after murdering his girlfriend/partner for no reason, and then being consistently rude and misogynistic throughout the movie. I never understood why so many female viewers fell for his bullshit. He was an asshole through and through, and his final line that everyone goes gaga over makes no goddamn sense if you think about it for more than 2 seconds(if they jumped off the ship, they aren’t his ancestors, just dead branches on a family tree)The other reason I rank Black Panther lower than most is that the depiction of Wakanda makes no sense. It’s the most advanced country in the world, but a good chunk of the population is living in an 18th century agrarian economy with horse-drawn plows? Also, determining your king by ritual combat? That’s almost racistly primitive.
It was beautifully shot and amazingly acted, but there was just too much stuff that made no goddamn sense, even as superhero movies go.
Yay, a chance to get on my Black Panther soapbox (note, I’m not trying to change your mind per se but offer another perspective).
I think Killmonger is a great villain, but part of that is that he is actually a villain, as the violence, misogyny etc illustrate. To a certain extent, those scenes serve the purpose of reminding the audience that he is actually the bad guy (though that seems to have been lost on some people who gloss over them). More to the point, and similar to how Infinity War/Endgame portray Thanos (which I talked about upthread), the movie does a good job of demonstrating that Killmonger’s motivation, however noble or altruistic it’s stated, is ultimately B.S. Like many revolutionaries turned dictators, he conflates his cause (which may be just, or at least have a kernel of rightness) with his own quest for power. Burning the heart-shaped herb drives this home – when given the choice between protecting the power and legacy of Wakanda or doing something that would only benefit him (ensuring that no one else could challenge his power), he chooses himself. He’s not a good guy, even if he’d like to think he is.
Also, as far as Wakandan politics goes, I think it’s a decent depiction of real-world politics (I’m actually a political scientist). We all have lots of things in our political system that have long outlived their intended purpose or context but hang on out of tradition or inertia or because they kind of still serve a purpose. (the Electoral College, the Senate, Presidential Pardons, etc). The kingship by combat things seems like that for Wakanda: it is depicted as a mostly-hypothetical scenario (everyone’s surprised when M’Baku actually shows up to challenge T’Challa). There’s also a bit of logic behind keeping it, though: if the main duty of the monarch is to protect the kingdom from outsiders, proving the ability of the would-be ruler to fend off a challenger is a good way of ensuring that (even if physical combat is no longer the best metric of that protection). Sorry for the long reply; this is one of my favorite movies to (over)analyze.
Seriously, I think that’s a slight demerit for Black Panther. What if he actually had a point and you can sympathize with him and question the heroes (ie: the Maquis from Star Trek) without also murdering for power-hungry reasons. Also yeah the “savagery” of the depiction of Wakanda is a bit puzzling, not to mention in IW they fight with spears
I am honestly shocked that no one has shouted “Racism!” in the depiction of Wakandan culture. It’s like a combination of extreme Hotepness with every racist’s belief that black people are primitive tribesmen.
The fact that the movie was written and directed by black people seems to have shielded it from a lot of really obvious criticisms. Trial by combat, horse-drawn plows? That’s every racist’s dream description of an African country.
The livestock-powered plows were only in the countryside outside the cloak/forcefield-protected city, though, right? That was just window dressing so people would think Wakanda actually was a racist’s description of an African country.The battle to the death (potentially) for the Wakandan throne, on the other hand, is something you think a nation that advanced would have grown beyond, but it also seems like for the most part, it was just ceremonial and no one had challenged in a long time, until M’Baku challenged T’Challa.
But I thought the entire country was hidden? I thought maybe it was non-farmers writing the movie thinking they were depicting some sort of pastoral paradise, not realizing that old-school farming was back-breaking labor. And I didn’t even get into the third world style marketplace within the city. It almost reminded me of the late, unlamented Inhumans show, where if you stepped back for a second, you realized that you had a very small upper class running everything, and a huge serf class. I think BP suffers greatly from the “We were all Kings and Queens” Hotep stuff that never seems to realize that to be King, you have to have subjects. They kind of quickly show the subjects, never mention them again, and hope you forget.
No, the country’s not hidden. The outside world knew of Wakanda, but thought they were just reclusive dirt farmers, and the Wakandans outside the cloak were there for show.It does make me wonder how they handle that. “Okay, T’Charaa, M’Bothu: you’re on ‘broke-ass sodbuster’ duty today. Bono is going to show up with an entourage and act like he’s doing us a favor, so really sell it, okay?”
You get that they based Wakanda on actual African tribes, right? And coordinated with those tribes? Had advisors from those tribes? Part of the whole cultural impact of Black Panther was imagining a technologically advanced African culture that is ENTIRELY African and not remotely associated with colonial influences.However, I will grant that a technologically and socially advanced culture determining their king via ritual combat is a shitty goddamn way to pick a ruler.
“they aren’t his ancestors”Spiritual ancestors. Your people are your people even if there’s no actual familial linkages.
I’m with you on the final fight b/t T’Challa and Killmonger. The battle-for-the-throne beatdowns looked so much better, and you’ve got the director of Creed, but your ultimate battle is weightless-looking CG.
Ugh, that definitely brought down the movie, a bit. Two nearly identical, rubbery, not-quite-finished CGI panther dudes duking it out was NOT a good idea. But, at this point, I don’t watch ANY movie for the climactic final battle. It’s a narrative necessity, but since you can do ANYTHING with CGI almost everything they can do has lost its impact. Which is okay, it’s rarely the most important part of the movie anyway, and when they pull off something cool and creative and different it’s a bonus.
A FEELING, rather than the (mostly) uniform Marvel ‘TV episode on a $200 million budget’ palette of its lead-up brethren.I sometimes wonder if I’ve entered the “I liked it before it was cool” hipster stage of comic book movie appreciation, but I do think that my weariness with the MCU really comes down to what you’ve captured here: being unmoved by them.I’ve seen every one theatrically except Dr. Strange, which I still haven’t gotten around to, but a lot of the time it just felt like I was doing my event cinema homework. There’s that same washed out colour palette, the obligatory quips, the movie stopping dead to jerk off Iron Man, the night time CGI battle designed to hide graphical flaws, the end credits stinger, rinse and repeat. While it still treads some of that same territory, IW lets things breathe; the emotional beats have real weight. Nothing could ever displace X2 as my favourite comic book movie, but despite its flaws, IW is undoubtedly one of the best MCU entries because it actually tries to be a real movie.
You should definitely see Dr. Strange – it definitely has some of those visual elements that you find lacking in many of the other films.
It has a proper resolution to its end-of-film CGI fight, for a start.
I actually fell asleep during Dr. Strange. I liked his character in the Avengers movies, but his origin story bored me to sleep.
origin stories are just played out. I enjoyed the film fine but mostly the second half. They could’ve easily just had him be there with powers like Spider-Man
This. It’s so dull watching him do his doctor stuff. It feels in a lot of ways like a rehash of Iron Man. You could argue all Origin stories are like that, but Strange being such a similar arrogant, egotistical douche gives it a few too many bits. Second half is definitelyw ay better.
That’s a major reason why I still haven’t seen it. I want to watch Dr. Strange show up and do cool Dr. Strange shit; I’ve no interest in yet another origin story.
Eh, it’s a pretty rote superhero origin. The final “fight”, though, was fantastic.
In trying to reconcile the people who feel so much with these movies and the people who pass them off as mediocre trash, I’ve come to decide (besides, obviously, people love stating subjective tastes and objective truth) that a large part of what does or does not work for the MCU is how much someone is willing to get invested in them.
Infinity War and Endgame were cultural events, rather than just huge movies, because they paid off investment in a franchise over ten years. If you weren’t invested in them, they inevitably were going to fall flat, and likewise given the brick-and-mortar plotting of the MCU, no single film is likely to wow someone who isn’t interested.In many ways, the films have become the big-budget equivalent of the people telling you this television series is great, you just have to do your homework and get through a season-and-a-half of crud so you can understand context when it gets good. Some people don’t really want a “homework” approach to their media, and that’s fine.
Oh, for sure. I’m a known The Avengers hater, but part of what was so cool about that big comic book splash page fight was the “Holy shit, they pulled it off!” element of knowing that years of these movies were leading up to this moment, this cementing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So even though I didn’t care for the movie itself, I was still invested in seeing these characters together in one movie.
In many ways, the films have become the big-budget equivalent of the people telling you this television series is great, you just have to do your homework and get through a season-and-a-half of crud so you can understand context when it gets good. Some people don’t really want a “homework” approach to their media, and that’s fine.The thing about this argument is that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone who’s genuinely invested in the MCU describe watching any of the movies as homework. The worst Marvel movies are medium flicks that I still find incredibly enjoyable to watch. Thor 2 is my lowest ranked, and I’d still watch it just for the merits of seeing it, not for any study related reasons. The only people I see describe keeping up with the MCU as homework are those who are relatively soft on the whole concept. And that’s fine! I was a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire before Game of Thrones came out, and I was surprised by the way it seized the cultural zeitgeist. I was happy that so many people were enjoying something I enjoyed, but the fact that it became a sort of necessary cultural touchstone for everyone to have to interact with was very strange to me. I think of the MCU in a similar way, even though I wasn’t into comics before they started. Now that the Infinity Saga is done, I see a lot more of the “I don’t want to do homework to watch movies/tv” argument. You don’t have to! There’s no scarcity of interesting media to consume, so you can just watch whatever you like. But I still like every single MCU entry I’ve seen so far, and I’m going to keep watching them because I enjoy them, not because I feel I have to keep up with it to stay current.
I mean, even if you don’t watch MCU movies, or watch them and think they’re crap, or meh, or whatever, there’s absolutely no denying that Marvel has pulled off something absolutely extraordinary. I mean, damn, over a decade without a serious misstep, where most superhero franchises flame out in three movies or fewer. Even the least of the MCU movies like Thor 2, Iron Man 2, and Age of Ultron are still decent and an entertaining watch. And it’s totally possible to narrow your field and still enjoy the movies. My Dad likes Captain America, and that’s it. He’s only watched the movies with Captain America in them. And he’s liked all of them! There’s enough context in each movie where you know what’s going on ENOUGH where it makes sense. Though he did need me to explain Rocket.
. . . the dread soaked garbled distress signal of the opening. . . Beyond it’s tremendous effectiveness, I adore that it’s an admitted Kobyashi Maru homage AND that they got THOR director Branagh to voice it.
I would argue this is close to the funniest of all their films (‘Why is
Gamora?’) without the quips and meta jokes undermining the drama.
I would argue this is one reason why the Russos have been so good for the franchise. They know how to include jokes that are funny, but don’t come at the expense of the more dramatic moments and characters.
Absolutely, I think it’s the most blatantly cinematic movie out of the entire MCU. Time is spent to establish tone and atmosphere more than most of the others, almost everywhere has some interesting coloring going on, the cinematography is best described as sweeping.
Why does that screenshot somehow almost make everyone look like they’ve been cut out of one of those playstation 2 video games that used facial mapping.
There’s so much I love about this film (Thor’s entrance is one, Cap’s is another and the interplay between Stark, Strange and Parker is fantastic) but one of my absolute favourite bits is that ending. The notion of Thanos being the protagonist makes the film really interesting and it’s highlighted there. Try listening to the score for that final scene (‘Porch’) without the context. It feels like a quietly triumphant, if slightly bittersweet and exhausted, heroic piece of music. It’s easy to listen and imagine this playing over any of the heroes emerging from the rubble of a difficult battle and taking a moment to appreciate their hard-earned victory. Instead it’s playing over the image of a man who’s just murdered half of all life in the universe. (It’s also just a great piece of music. I don’t think Silvestri gets enough credit for this and Endgame. His best scores in years for me.)
Though I’m not sure what uber-miserable cut Tom watched. There’s definitely music in the end credits. It’s dramatic and somber (especially when the title comes up and dusts away) but it’s definitely there.
I was going to comment on this myself. It’s pretty hard to forget the cut from Thanos to credits with that great piece of music perfectly fitting the mood. Kind of reminds me of the the sad music from RoboCop.
Thanos really is this movie, and Josh Brolin really makes Thanos. The gravitas he brings to utterly insane notions to the point where it sounds like Socratic wisdom is remarkable.A tenuous link perhaps, and not only because of Brolin, but No Country for Old Men came to mind watching IW. Another movie showing an unstoppable force with a twisted philosophical agenda coming up against a competent ‘hero’ who ultimately fails to stop them.
Love your take.Thanks.
They did a great job with Thanos, and a top notch villain makes the movie work in a way that Ultron didn’t.They made a smart decision by dialing back his power from the bloated thing he later became in the comics, which was basically writers wanting him to be able to break a planet in half with his pinky! And become invisible! And shoot lasers from his nose!
If he was like that, the scene where the gauntlet is almost pried off his hand wouldn’t have worked as well as it did.
The main problem with his side is that Ebony Maw is the only interesting henchman and the other three? four? are so bland and forgettable. I hadn’t even realized Carrie Coon was one of them, and when her character is so dull that she can’t do anything with it, that’s not good.
Ebony Maw is so awfully overbearing that his getting suckered by Peter Parker’s Alien plan is a lot of fun. But the others are just a blur.
Also Thanos’ argument for killing half the universe is just stupid. Even he’s obviously smart enough to see the plan just doesn’t make sense (the people will quickly come back; also, everyone’s going to have a serious tummy ache will he kills half the bacteria in their stomachs; etc).I get it they had to pick a different motivation than he had in the comics (to impress Death), but man, they could have come up with something better than that.
They should have had Thanos trying to impress Jodie Foster.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but it DOES make sense. Thanos is a killer. He LIKES to kill, that’s his whole thing. His philosophy of killing half of all life came from the fact that he LOVES killing people. He’s just elevated it to a philosophy where he’s the savior of the universe through lots and lots of murder. If your only tool is a murder-hammer, the whole universe is a nail. Other options don’t even occur to him, the solution is always murder.
Yawn. Who can’t shoot lasers from his nose. And I once punched a guy so hard, he flew off the face of the earth.
IIRC, Carrie Coon got pregnant around production time and it basically torpedoed almost everything they had for her.
One of my only issues with IW is how glossed over the Black Order are. They really could have been the villains of their own movie (they would have fit right in the GotG films.)
I buy the argument that Thanos is the protagonist, but my problem with the movie is he’s a good villain, but a poor protagonist, mostly because his motivations are just plain dumb. There are no indications in the film until now that the universe is somehow overpopulated.I did love, however, how many dumb people on the internet bought into Thanos’s argument. He’s serving up warmed over Malthus from the 18th century and there’s a bunch of mouth breathers online saying, “Maybe he’s got a point.”It really drives home how easily people are won over. If some dude demonstrates a bit of power and has Josh Brolin’s voice, dumb people will believe whatever he has to say, even if he’s a fictional character.
One of the things I like about Thanos in the MCU is that his motivation is fundamentally flawed and that he believes it with an unwavering faith. He’s a fanatic; he’s decided to believe in a particular problem and a particular solution, and he refuses to let anyone or anything stop him.
I also like the way that Endgame illustrates that, like many fanatics, his real motivation is much more selfish. He gets pissed when he learns, not that his plan didn’t work per se, but that the universe was not grateful to him, and just decides “screw it, I’ll destroy the ENTIRE universe and start all over.” For all his talk about wanting to save everyone (even if it meant killing half of them), what he really wanted was to be a god who got to make those kinds of decisions. The rest was just justification for doing so.
People think the solution to gun violence is more guns. Same principle.
There are no indications in the film until now that the universe is somehow overpopulated.There is, and the set up is basically the backbone of the entire two movie plot. The motivation for Thanos is his own experience and account of the universe being in a resource deficit, but because he’s the “Mad Titan”, this account is from a unreliable narrator. On the flip side of the coin, Thanos does have multi-world experience when the Avengers do not, so the Avengers are in no immediate position to deny this claim outside of just speaking on behalf of Earth and trying to prevent universal genocide.And that’s what makes this a great plot device. His solution is nuts and evil, but the problem it is attempting to solve has potential for being true, or at least a point one can’t immediately reject by using just Earth as the basis for argument. In his mind, he’s pruning the universe for healthier growth. ______________Thanos: Going to bed hungry, scrounging for scraps. Your planet was on the brink of collapse. I’m the one who stopped that. Do you know what’s happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It’s a paradise.Thanos: Little one, it’s a simple calculus. This universe is finite, its resources finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correction-Thanos: [Scowls as his egotistical narcissism prevents him from fully listening to her] I’m the only one who knows that. At least, I’m the only one with the will to act on it. [He stands again and walks back to Gamora] For a time… you had that same will… as you fought by my side. Daughter.
I’ve had way too many arguments with YouTube dildos over the logic of his plan. They state he kills half of all life, including bacteria and plants and non-sentient beings. Hence why you hear birds when they undo the snap. How the hell does that give the universe time to replenish food?! they still have the same “finite” resources not to mention this is a universe where space travel exists, thus probably more efficient ways to feed people. In the end it still can be chalked up to him being “mad” with grief over what happened on Titan, and that it’s a better plot than him wanting Death to love him. But it’s still completely bonkers.
And I don’t have a problem with a villain having an insane plan. But it’s simply nuts that so many feeble minded people bought into it.If Thanos is positioned as the protagonist, then this goes to show how easily people will identify with that protagonist, whether or not their goals are logical or even ethical.
It’s too bad we didn’t get scenes of a bunch of birds and other animals blipping back into existence. In any case, even if “kill half of all life” did include animals, it’s senseless to say it killed half of all Flora, and downright stupid to say it killed half of all bacteria. We see the Snap happen, and no trees disappear. Thanos retires to the garden, and it’s not half barren. And killing half of all bacteria would kill pretty much everything else too.Not to rehash this for you. I’ve seen those arguments on Youtube. I just don’t have to patience to interact with anyone there.
Thanos’ plan was so dumb. You have infinite power and the universe is basically empty space with TINY bits of matter floating around! He could have magically increased resources by creating billions of new galaxies and had room left over. And why snap 1/2 of everyone randomly? That just ensures nearly everyone left is fucking grieving. It’s teeth-grindingly small minded and poorly thought through.
I read a really great analysis where the gist was that not only does Thanos’s plan not make much sense but it isn’t even thematically interesting because it really serves no purpose other than to drive the story forward. Thanos thinks he’s noble and trying to save the universe, right? Well… the characters in the movie are superheroes! They’re supposed to be saving the universe, too! But at no point does Tony Stark or Captain America or Captain Marvel swoop in to say like, “hey, Thanos, we empathize with the good you think you’re doing, but we’re doing good TOO, and here’s how!” instead they just lamely enforce the status quo by stopping Thanos without ever trying to offer some solution or alternative.
It just proves that the writers don’t actually care about Thanos’s motivation except as a vehicle. The script is not actually saying anything; the “heroes” of the movie don’t ever comment on it and Captain America never has anything like a “you’re wrong, Thanos” type of moment. No consideration for what the Avengers are doing to combat scarcity and reduce universal suffering.
I don’t think he even really makes sense as the protagonist! How many scenes are really approached from his point of view? (In the scenes between him and Gamora, for example, is our POV aligned with his, or Gamora’s?) It’s why “screen time” is not really the measure of how this stuff works.
Excuse me, you had to watch Infinity War to realise that people are dumb sheep? What, Donald Trump getting elected as president of the United States some years ago didn’t clue you in?
What I love is that I can envision the dusting and Thanos’ rest as comic panels. It truly hit that pitch of “this is the stuff I read growing up truly alive” that made a life’s worth of nerdom worth it. And the miracle is Marvel got those hooks in everyone. It’s still WILD that Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet are now cultural touchstones that EVERYONE knows, instead of a comic-book-fan handshake.
I’m a bit of a nerd for director’s commentaries, and I found it fascinating when the Russos said that if they make one change to the script, it shifts from a Thanos movie to a Thor movie.
I enjoyed this, but it did kind of feel like too much. Not the film itself, but the weight on its shoulders and the cultural omnipresence.MI6, however, was that weird blip where you have a series in which the 6th film is arguably the best, as was the 5th, which still kind of blows my mind.
That’s definitely a weird series in that it does somehow keep getting better as it goes on. Not sure how they’re doing it, other than maybe that Tom Cruise is essentially becoming Ethan Hunt due to his mania for actually learning those skills and doing those stunts.
Rogue Nation is my favorite of the M:I movies. Everyone raves about Fallout and while it did have excellent action scenes, it didn’t feel much like an M:I movie: I expect more subterfuge and clever devices and trickery, rather than car chases and helicopter chases and punching and explosions. (Granted, the bathroom fight is fantastic.)
idk I couldn’t get behind the message, where it’s supposed to be about the “fallout” of all of his decisions from the last movies, and there *are* these really interesting scenarios where he’s in actual espionage operations with actual stakes, but then he magically mission impossibles his way out of having to make a potentially compelling decision. So by the ending I was like yeah yeah yeah I know he’s gonna win.
I dunno. They actually had me wondering if he would pull it off. And when the cut to him at the end there’s a bright flash of light in the distance. For a split second I thought it was an explosion only to realize that it was the sun. I thought it was incredible.
There’s that scene on Titan before the big fight with Thanos where Strange uses his powers to go through every version of the upcoming fight, and it turns out there’s something like 10,000,000 of them and the good guys only win one of them.Infinity War feels like that — there were 10 million ways it could have and should have failed, and somehow they landed in the one version of the movie that worked.I love Infinity War so damn much. It’s probably the Marvel movie that does the best job at accommodating every aspect of Thor — Hemsworth’s comedic timing, the character’s nobility, the sense that Thor is, even compared to the other Avengers, basically a god. The movie is almost three hours long, and somehow it manages to never feel like it’s that long while also feeling like it needs every second of that runtime — it’s got this frantic pace that mirrors the relentlessness of Thanos’ assault. And it’s really a hell of a thing to make an Avengers movie where Thanos gets the hero’s journey and the big, peaceful ending scene.The ending remains as chilling and shocking as the day the movie premiered. Yes, everyone knew the dusted characters were coming back — we all knew there was another Avengers movie coming out. But the fact that, in spite of that knowledge, the ending still had people openly weeping in theaters is a point in its favor, not an argument against it. A movie is more than just a vehicle for genre savvy, world-weary analysis — the emotional heft of the moment swept all of that away, and watching these characters who, for a decade, had represented indomitable will and unbeatable virtue then fail so completely and so catastrophically was a punch to the gut.It’s an Avengers movie and a Disney movie that ends up borrowing an infamous bit from Michael Haneke’s Funny Games to make its ending possible. That’s still incredible to contemplate.
What I think was incredibly smart is that they allowed a good chunk of Thanos’ victories to take place off-screen. Xandar and the Nova Corps, the planet that was rescued in the big finale in Guardians of the Galaxy? Oh yeah, Thanos reduced them to rubble and took their Infinity Stone. The Collector’s stone? Nope, too late, already done and Knowhere is a burning husk. The fights that would’ve been the big action setpiece in other movies are a footnote in Infinity War, which really gives you the sense of the scale of Thanos’ power and the threat he poses.
There might be a moderately interesting Disney+ series in how Thanos worked his way to the opening scene of Infinity War, but that’s probably just a case of over-explainy Star Wars disease.
I already feel like What If is dangerously treading those waters. I liked the Star Lord episode but the Thanos appearance felt way too meta, at a level of the Disney princesses making fun of themselves in Wreck it Ralph. As dumb as your character is, own the dumbness.
A big part of why the movie works,—RedLetterMedia’s review talked about this—is that the screenwriters knew how to weave all of the separate heroes’ stories and give every character just enough screen time before switching perspectives. You never get bored and you know what’s going on with who, where, and why. It’s masterful.
For a movie that is LONG, it FLIES. Because it moves so well. Compare that to watching a Bayformers sequel where time itself feels like it has come to a stop.
Man, this movie was fucking wild. Deep-dish nerd shit in mostly the best ways, and then it just spanked it all with a downer ending which we knew was going to get undone soon enough but still worked, because it works in the context of its own movie. This movie’s very existence is so absurd, it’s like Star Wars Episode 19, but it’s what ten-year-old me in the 80’s might’ve hoped for from that very thing, and worked well enough for fortysomething me in the 10’s. This whole next-level absurdity might be all that keeps me from liking it more than the first GOTG movie, but it’s not hard to imagine that at some point that’ll be more feature than bug.
This was a fantastic movie, and theater experience, because it finally started delivering on the 10-year promise of an entire interconnected universe of heroes — and promptly had all those heroes lose everything.And what’s great about it, is that you sort of see it coming — but then Thor’s grand entrance in Wakanda makes you believe just a little that they pull this whole thing off — and then, nope, it’s Thanos’ hero’s journey. But we also know that Dr. Strange knows that they have to lose in order to win… it’s just so good.My theater was silent after the gasps of people dusting, throughout the entire end credits, and then went fucking ballistic when the Captain Marvel logo appeared on Fury’s beeper.And Thor and Captain America’s entrances, plus Thor fucking tanking a neutron star, were just pure comic book writ large.
“Thor fucking tanking a neutron star” brilliantly phrased.
In my showing, after Thanos did the snap, it was dead quiet. Until Bucky dissolved. Then there was this building chorus of whispers of, “Oh no… no no no no no… GOD no!” as each character vanished.The loudest comment, though, was probably from me. I couldn’t help it. When the words, “Thanos will return” came up after the credits, I yelled out, “Holy shit, that’s fucking cold!” and then had to slink out of the theater in shame while everyone laughed their asses off at me.
At the end of Avengers: Endgame (our second time viewing, but the first time with our kids with us), my youngest, who was maybe 6 or something, YELLED out “Can we GO?!” and then started to cry when people in the theater got the giggles about it.
Yeah, we were gasping and “aw hell no!”s until basically we got back to Thanos on his farm-planet and then just silence from the end of the music and then through the credits… The loudest comment, though, was probably from me. I couldn’t help it. When the words, “Thanos will return” came up after the credits, I yelled out, “Holy shit, that’s fucking cold!”I mean… you’re not wrong there…
It’s like a great wrestling match where the heel champion is going to win. Even if it’s inevitable, you can still lay out to where you can make people believe the good guy can still win. Just that belief is enough to get people to use only the edge of their seat.
Hope spots for days!
I’ve told this story before, but it bears repeating.Early Saturday morning (like 930AM) viewing of IW.Heroes dusted, Thanos gazes out, credits begin. Stranger next to me whispers, “Did that just really happen?”Silence from both us as credits roll.
Fury’s pager appears. Stranger gasps, “Aquaman!”
Infinity War is the very definition of Marvel mediocrity. Among a number of other problems, comic books have so abused the idea of “death” that the end had no effect on me.But my real question is why don’t people complain about Thor’s worthless side quests in the same way they do about Rose and Finn’s in The Last Jedi? I actually like both side quests, but the people who whine about the latter rarely complain about the former.
probably pacing, lack of a shiny new toy at the end of their lesson
I thought Thor gets his axe did stall out the movie a bit. Not as badly as the casino planet subplot, though, maybe because the underlying reason for getting the axe was easier to grasp than whatever was going on in Montecarloine. But it wasn’t a great bit for me because in the end the axe seemed like just a bigger hammer and nothing really special.
See, I thought Thor getting Stormbringer was a great misdirect. It’s the weapon that can kill Thanos!! He has to nearly sacrifice his life to get it! The handle is Groot’s arm! It sets up the 11th hour victory that usually happens in these movies! And it almost happens!
Yes, it ends up being a red herring, but that’s what’s great about it.
One of Infinity War’s great tricks is that it has these awesome big damn hero moments sprinkled throughout the movie, and then it just brutally subverts all of them minutes later. Wanda descends from above to save Nat using her awesome powers!…and then it turns out that’s exactly what the bad guys want, because it leaves Vision undefended. Thor descends from the heavens in a blaze of righteous light, wielding the ultimate weapon, as the stirring Avengers theme soars in the background!…Ha ha, he still doesn’t go for the head.
One of Infinity War’s great tricks is that it has these awesome big damn hero moments sprinkled throughout the movieI think that’s what keeps it from being a miserable experience. Movies (or shows) where the good guys just lose over and over again aren’t any fun. It turns into a fatalistic slog to watch your heroes get kicked in the teeth for two hours (to me, that’s part of the problem with non-Luke/Rey stuff in The Last Jedi).
The heroes win . . . a lot . . . in Infinity War, just not when it mattered most. It’s why the ending lands so hard (even when you know it’s coming). There’s enough hope and possibility of a hard-won victory there that it’s a gut-punch when they lose. It’s one of those movies where, even if you’ve seen it fifty times, you still find yourself somehow thinking they’re going to beat Thanos.
But that’s absolutely true about Finn and Rose’s mission as well. It’s a great misdirect. It’s also central to the themes of the film in ways Thor’s quest isn’t.
But that’s absolutely true about Finn and Rose’s mission as well. Eh, the problem is that Finn and Rose are really, really bad at the thing they’re trying to do. And they aren’t even trying to do all that much. It wasn’t a thing where they’re coming up with aggressive or audacious plans that succeed or come up just short (which cause them to come up with even more audacious plans). Their whole story is “Go to a place to find a dude. Can’t find the dude. Talk about stuff. Then find the dude, then get tazed for parking before they even talk to the dude. Get saved by a stranger (who just so happens to have the same exact skillset as the dude). Then get saved by another stranger who’s a little kid. Then get saved again by the first stranger.” They don’t do anything. They don’t really even try to do anything, except ride a horse-thing with a creepy face.
I like the characters, but it’s lazy fucking writing. And I don’t get the “themes” thing. Sure, there’s a little bit of sophomoric wisdom about “wealthy weapons dealers aren’t nice or moral people” but that’s some weak philosophizing that doesn’t actually have anything to do with anything else that happens in the movie. It’s just kind of a “time out while we deliver a lesson about capitalism” that has no impact on anything.
I also like that Thor gets some development, especially after the silly but traumatic events of Ragnarok. It retroactively improves Ragnarok for me, and later on Endgame “improves” Thor 2 which I never thought was possible
True, but after Endgame I did go back to Thor 2.It was… still pretty bad. =D
I love TLJ and (most of) the Canto Bight sequence, but goddamn did “Montecarloine” make me snort laugh.
Because Thor’s side quest was more interesting?
It wasn’t. And had no real payoff either rather than to pad the time count.
I think part of it is that Thor’s quest, and his interactions with Rocket, set up his subsequent actions in Endgame very nicely. We see just how close he is to being completely broken.It also sets up the audience for his big arrival on the battlefield and, like Bruce, gives us hope that everything’s going to turn out ok. Part of that comes through in TLJ but not nearly to the same degree.
It’s definitely the worst part of the movie for me, with Dinlage’s stunt-casting (and over-acting) and the random sci-fi nonsense about restarting the dying star using… friction, I guess?… but what really confuses me is that there’s a scene wayyyyyyy back in Ultron where Thor goes on another side-quest, and ends up in a vision of Asgard where everyone is dead, which… surely it would have made more sense, and not seemed quite so random suddenly introducing this new location and race and side-character, if they’d gone back to the “ruins” of Asgard instead, where perhaps he would again have encountered the shades of all those who had died, and ended up getting his new weapon that way? Would still have been a side-quest, but might have actually felt tied into the main narrative more.
I liked it. I liked to get to see Rocket and Thor play off each other for a while, and I thought Hemsworth’s acting during the “Then what I have I got left to lose?” exchange with Rocket is the best acting he’s ever done anywhere.
I agree that it might be the best part of the movie. I just don’t understand the double standard. If anything, Rose and Finn’s trip to the casino planet is more central to the themes of the film.
I mean, the obvious reason is that many of those people are just looking for reasons to hate Finn and Rose, and here they are together on an adventure. I also like both scenes, but in addition to the slight difference in payoff (Thor almost manages to win, Rose/Finn only tip off the enemy), I think that there are more threads being tied together in IW, so it’s just one plot line out of ten to be resolved. TLJ had one main thread, and then one that split off. It just feels a little jarring in context, although I had less of a problem with it on rewatches.
Finn & Rose’s adventure is delightful. It’s cool to see a high class version of the Cantina/Jabba’s Palace and it has a nice message about other entities finding profit from these battles of good vs evil. And DJ is a fantastic character that not enough people talk about.
LOVED that scene. That moment alone convinced me that Hemsworth is a great actor (and I was already a big fan).
But my real question is why don’t people complain about Thor’s worthless side quests in the same way they do about Rose and Finn’s in The Last Jedi?It’s a fair question, but there’s a simple answer: payoff.
Hemsworth is amazing in the side quest (for my money the best acting I’ve seen from him, better even than him dunking to Waititi’s alley-oops in Ragnarok), and it scratches an itch that Marvel fans have to see established characters who have no real business hanging out together interact with each other. On paper, none of it works. The side quest itself is kind of a takeback on Thor’s character development from Ragnarok, him learning that he’s not “the God of Hammers” and losing his eye. As far as I remember (paging Laserface…) Thor and Rocket aren’t a classic pairing from the comics. Everything about the side quest screams “Did you ever consider just making the movie 10 minutes shorter?”But on screen it works, from Hemsworth’s delivery of “It was an elective in Asgard!” and calling Rocket “Sweet Rabbit…” to Rocket’s established habit of collecting high-tech prostheses garnering Thor a replacement eye, to Teen Groot showing that he’s the same Groot from GotG1 by giving up an arm when that’s what his friends need.While I love TLJ and am a big fan of Rose Tico, the TLJ side quest sends Finn off with new characters (and BB-8, but only functioning as comic relief and deus ex machina). Because the other characters are new, you’re not enjoying any narrative sequel economy—you have to establish who Rose is, and who the Benicio del Toro character is, and what this new setting means—and so TLJ’s side quest is longer, almost to the point of being its own mini-movie. And Boyega isn’t lighting up the screen like Hemsworth does in IW.
Because Peter muthafucking Dinklage as a giant dwarf!
Personally, it’s because the Thor parts were an actual story rather than the “here’s some stuff happening, you love these guys right?” wheelspinning of the rest of the movie.Personally if there was a Thor-only cut of Infinity War I’d find it infinitely more watchable than what we actually got.
Lots of people, myself included, criticise Thor’s bloated side-quest as being the worst part of the movie.This is the way.Dammit, wrong franchise.
Because Thor’s sidequest wasn’t pointless. He lost Mjölnir in Ragnarok. He gains an even more powerful axe that can summon the bifrost since Asgard and Heimdell were both destroyed. It’s creation also gave Groot purpose.
“He’s from space, he’s here to steal a necklace from a wizard” is maybe my favorite line in any Marvel movie. Markus & McFeely don’t get nearly enough credit for their amazing script work for the MCU.
I’m partial to “dude, you’re embarrasing me in front of the wizards”
I’m a big fan of Ruffalo’s “No, but when do I ever get what I want?” response to Tony asking he he wanted a shot at Maw.
Ruffalo forever
Another great Ruffalo line was “there’s an Ant-Man and a Spider-Man now?” followed by Rhodey just shaking his head like “don’t ask.”
Ruffalo got some great lines.“Broke up? Like a band? Like the Beatles?”
I was never a Hulk fan, but I loved Ruffalo when he was Banner.
for a movie with so many huge, bombastic scenes, it had a ton of lovely grace notes too. My favourite: Spidey asking Tony Stark if he’s seen this really old movie called Alien.And later, Starks quip that he was going to take out the villain cos “the kid has seen more movies than you.”
Downey’s delivery of “And Due. To. That. Fact., we’re now in a flying doughnut billions of miles from Earth with no backup!!!” kills me.
I never understood Strange’s concern there. Can’t he just portal them home?
Spidey asking Tony Stark if he’s seen this really old movie called Alien.That’s just a repeated bit from Civil War, where he’s like “You guys ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?”
And the one that follows shortly “oh, like Footloose?”
“Is it still the greatest movie on Earth?”
“It never was.”
For a split second Quill’s face turns to “oh no you fucking didn’t” and it’s magical.
Yes, it is. THat’s part of why it’s funny.
Peter’s vague-but-enthusiastic familiarity with classic 80s sci-fi is one reason why MCU Spidey is the best movie Spidey.
Spidey asking Tony Stark if he’s seen this really old movie called Alien.The best part was that Dr. Strange’s cape did a fucking double-take at that.
Side note: I’m impressed at how Marvel turned Doc’s cape into a classic Disney animated silent comic relief sidekick.
Ahem*Aliens*, not *Alien*Though both would work for the point he is trying to make, this is true.
Those three together were great. My favorite exchange by far was:
“Hi, I’m Peter Parker.”
“I’m Doctor Strange.”
“Oh, we’re using our made-up names. I’m Spider-Man.”
(Strange just looks away disgustedly)
Yeah, it was in the trailer, but it was a fantastic fucking joke.
Because Dr. Strange is such a ‘straight-man’ character, it’s great how they worked in misunderstandings-as-humor for him. e.g.Kaecilius: “Mister…?”
Dr. Strange: “Doctor.”Kaecilius: “Mister Doctor?”Dr. Strange: “It’s Strange.”Kaecilius: “Maybe, who am I to judge?”
I LOVE that line.
I just saw Infinity War for the first time a couple months ago, and loved it, and that was by far my favorite exchange/joke. I laughed, and then still it took me a couple beats to realize “Hey, Dr. Strange ISN’T a made-up name, he’s a BRAIN SURGEON named STRANGE! HAAAAHAHAHAHA!!!”
They used a much better take in the trailer than the film IMO.
The whole sequence of Stark, Banner, Strange, Spidey and Wong against the henchmen is great (I love the “steal a necklace from a wizard” summary quoted in the article) but there’s something especially wonderful about how Peter notes he was on a school trip “to MO-MA!” as he’s getting thrown around. I remember my screening losing it at the Hulka Hulka Burning Fudge line too. And “Broke up? What, like The Beatles?”
I also love that it’s TONY STARK who eventually wears out and tells Peter to chill with his pop culture references.
This is definitely the best movie theater experience I’ve ever had. Saw it at midnight at a small theater filled with other comic nerds. People cheered when the Iron Spider suit’s legs came out. It was dead silent after the snap. Such a cool pop culture moment to see a decade of movies come to (the first part of) a conclusion. Endgame absolutely nailed the ending though.
I loved the character development done to Thor in Ragnarok – especially losing his eye and his weapon. Then the Russo brothers say “forget about all of that” and in this film give him back his eye and a new weapon, basically saying that those losses didn’t matter.A similar problem happened with Spider-Man in Homecoming. As bad as that film got the character of Peter/Spidey, at least the end had some promise, with him rejecting the idea of being an Avenger and leaning on Stark’s tech to be Spider-Man – maybe the next film could have the character be his own man. Then in the next Russo film they threw all of that away with the return of the “Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark!” Spidey whose only motivation was to please Tony and be an Avenger again.The Russo brothers may be great filmmakers and storytellers, but they had a problem accepting character development done to characters in their own films.
Doesn’t this presuppose that character development can only be things that actually break down the character? Thor lost his eye in Ragnarok, because it turns out that Asgardians are actually mortal after all, even if it seems incredibly difficult to kill them. Losing that eye was a fine development to help him understand his mortality, but having one eye was functionally empty. It didn’t effect the way he fought. He didn’t seem to see less or react slower. Rocket giving him an eye, though, establishes a bond between them. Thor lost his hammer, and learned that his power is not tied to his weapon, but is innate to him. However, he’s still not powerful enough to beat Thanos, so he seeks out a weapon that can. When we see Thor in IW, he’s using the same tricks we see him use in the beginning of Ragnarok with his hammer, only greatly leveled up in power, because the end of Ragnarok had him learn the full extent of his power.None of that character work is erased by the Russo Bros. It’s just built upon. If Thor was to remain one-eyed and empty handed, I don’t know why everyone else’s injuries, like Stark’s heart condition and Rhodey’s paralysis aren’t problems. The effects of those losses remain, even if they’re repaired or replaced by some other means later.
Very well said, Yellowfoot. To me, Ragnarok, Infinity War, and Endgame are the real trilogy of Thor movies. No character goes through more development in those films than Thor. Many of his losses in Ragnarok are repaired in IW, but many are not (Odin’s still dead, Asgard’s still gone) and many new losses follow (more Asgardians dead, Loki and Heimdall dead, and worse to come). Those tragedies are not erased by a new hammer and an artificial eye. He’s picking himself up, but the guy’s still in pieces.Those 3 films really made me appreciate how great Hemsworth is. I liked him in the first two Thor movies and Avengers movies, but he just crushes every new aspect of the character. He’s hilarious in the comedic moments, and damn if he doesn’t sell the tragic and poignant moments even more.I’m not sure how well the MCU will carry on without Downey, Evans, Johansson, and Boseman, but if they keep Hemsworth at the center of things, I think they’ll work.
I am soooo fucking excited for Thor 4. It sounds batshit. Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher? O_o
“None of that character work is erased by the Russo Bros. It’s just built upon.”I can’t seen how in one film Thor loses his eye and weapon, and learns that he doesn’t need either of them, and then in his next film they give him a replacement eye and a new weapon. It’s basically saying that his development in Ragnarok didn’t matter and the Russo brothers were just going to ignore it.
I’m with you halfway, here. Thor going back to “I need a weapon” after a major point of Ragnarok was “Are you, Thor, the God of Hammers?” is a definite and undeniable backslide. Now, in real life people backslide, but it kinda felt like IW’s writers saw a bullet list of Ragnarok’s plot points and were like “Loses hammer, eye. We’re on it!” without catching the nuances of the story.The restoration of his eye, however, is a takeback that works. First of all, IW pairs him with someone who’s a known prosthetic enthusiast and collector, so it makes sense that Rocket wouldn’t leave him one-eyed, and that this would be part of their bonding.More importantly, the main effect of Thor’s lost eye is to essentially turn him into Odin, a character development that’s a lot less earned in the course of Ragnarok’s story than his discovery that he doesn’t need Mjolnir. Thor’s story arc in IW and Endgame, following pretty well on his Ragnarok arc, is learning that he’s not his father, and that the throne doesn’t suit him. He has some bad luck right at the outset, being hit almost immediately by Thanos and his crew, but it’s bad luck born of Thor’s longstanding weakness for his brother, who draws Thanos to the Asgardian refugees with a hidden infinity stone. Then after the sidequest, he almost turns the tide against Thanos, but fails again and is chided by Thanos for not being sufficiently ruthless, “Should’ve gone for the head.”At this point, the change that’s cosmetically indicated when he gets his eye back is clear: he’s not Odin. In the first half of Endgame he shows it, both in his pointless revenge killing of Thanos and by going to seed in the five years that follow, neglecting himself and his kingdom. Endgame brings Thor around to the idea that he’s more suited to be a protector than a king, and he abdicates the throne.
I never got the “Thor loses an eye to show that he’s like Odin” thing. Besides the physical similarity, Thor was never like Odin, before and during Ragnarok. Every Thor/Odin interaction we saw in the Thor movies showed how they were very different characters.
If you never got it, it’s not because Ragnarok didn’t underline the point enough times. Immediately after taking his eye, Hela taunts him with “Now you remind me of Dad.” Then that’s followed by Thor actually getting a vision of Odin, who starts with “Even when you had two eyes you only saw half the picture,” reminding him that him fixations on Mjolnir and on Asgard as a physical place are holding him back. The vision ends with Thor complaining that he’s not as strong as his father was, and Odin insisting “No, you’re stronger.” Then at the movie’s end, Thor is king and he’s wearing an eyepatch like the one Odin used to wear.Aside from losing an eye making him look more like Odin, the injury doesn’t affect him at all. As @Yellowfoot pointed out, it doesn’t impair him. It happens late enough in the movie that there’s no real time for him to dwell on the loss or what it means to him, so there’s no time for it to affect his character development. So if you don’t get the “Odin thing” what is it about Thor losing an eye that you “love?”
What I *love* about it is that Thor loses his eye, his hammer, his home, his father – he’s brought so low, but realizes that he’s more than the two-eyed son with a hammer he thought he was. He literally learns that he’s not the “god of hammers”, and that “Asgard is a people, not a place”. Then in IW the Russo brothers say “yeah, we’re not interested in any of that character development” and ignore/undo it.
Losing his eye and hammer in Ragnarok is character development for Thor. Then in IW the Russo’s say “we don’t care about that, let’s just given him another weapon and a replacement eye.”
No
Wow, you certainly changed my mind with your reasoned and well thought out response!
You never presented an argument. You just stated your thesis three times, the most recent time after I hadn’t even responded back to your previous repetition. See you in three weeks, when you’ll be back to emphatically inform me that Thor lost an eye and his weapon in Ragnarok and then IW undid that character development.
I am happy that Parker can finally grow up and not be perpetually 15 after the events of Far From Home, I was really getting tired of the “kid Spider-Man” characterization by Endgame. At some point Holland will look 30, and it’ll be as weird as late-Tobey was in playing a teenager
I have no faith in the MCU that they will ever let their version of Spidey grow beyond a teenager. It was either Feige or someone with the MCU who once said that Spider-Man’s default status quo is a teenager in high school, which shows a lack of knowledge of the character. Because in the comics Peter aged in real time – within 30 issues he had gone through all of high school and was off to college. It wasn’t until he got to ESU that they realized they had to slow things down and kept him in college for his status quo.I thought after Homecoming that Peter would be allowed to grow and mature. But the events of the Avengers movies and Far From Home proved me wrong. I’d like to think that after FFH Peter would finally be allowed to grow and mature. But I doubt it.In the comics the “kid Spider-Man” was more mature than most of the other adult super-heroes. He was an orphan who, at 15 years old, was suddenly thrust into the role of sole breadwinner to support his aunt, all the while continuing to go to school and being Spider-Man. Anyone who thinks that teenage Peter/Spidey was a goofy teenager either didn’t read the comics or has forgotten them.
At this point I don’t trust the MCU to ever let Peter grow beyond being a teenager in high school. Maybe they’ll let him start university, but that’s it.Either Feige or someone high-up in the MCU have said that the default of Peter Parker is high school, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the character. In the comics Peter aged in real time when he was in high school – after 3 years of comics he had aged 3 years and started university. It wasn’t until university that Stan realized they should slow things down, so he spent 7 (?) years in university.Peter being ~20 is the real default status quo. And this was a 20-year-old with a job in college, living away from home, driving a motorcycle – not the teenager the MCU seems determined to always portray him as.
Nice write up. But I’m confused by the premise in the opening paragraphs. It’s implied that you saw the movie on opening night without your chidren because “My kids weren’t old enough to go see Infinity War in the theater…”
I can guarantee your local theatre would not have stopped you from taking your children (no matter their age) into a PG-13 movie about comic book characters. Did you make them wait until it was streaming online and blamed the theatre for that?
He said at the end that his kids hadn’t really seen any Marvel movies before then, which makes me think they might have been young enough that he just didn’t want them to see it in the theatre, especially without knowing ahead of time what was going to happen. If they’d been 13, it’d probably be safe to take them along, even if they weren’t particularly interested. But if they’re 8, and have no interest in Iron Man and Co anyway, I could see him leaving them home.
so, i guess the next big bad that threatens the universe will be the beyonder?
Kang, reportedly.
I’d say “pretty confirmedly” at this point. If that were a word, which it should be.
probably the most viscerally satisfying movie-theater moment I’ve had this decade.Vader chopping up rebels like a badass in Rogue One.
Although I maintain that that moment would have been even better if we’d had no idea he was in the movie before then.
Totally. I feel like the ‘Vader’s Castle’ scene was unnecessary and was added just to get a pop for showing us Vader’s crib. That whole scene (if you needed it, and I don’t think you do) could have been done over holo-transmission.
A big problem I see in modern sci-fi/comic book movies is treating great distances like they’re a drive down to the corner market. JJ did it in Star Trek. Ratner did it in X-Men 3. It was done in Rogue One, though I’m sure that was a Disney add-on and not Edwards.
I feel like the ‘Vader’s Castle’ scene was unnecessary and was added just to get a pop for showing us Vader’s crib.Maybe, but I still love the idea of Mendelsohn showing up at Darth Vader’s house to whine that he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved.
I thought it was a pretty good misdirection. I forget if it was part of the promos or just film news, but I knew on opening day that Vader was in the movie. After the Mustafar scene, I relaxed, thinking that James Earl Jones croaking a horrible one-liner and choking out Krennic was the full Vader cameo. If we didn’t have a scene with Vader earlier, I’d have spent the entire climax waiting for him to show up.
I wouldn’t say that’s that modern; these trips take as long as the stories need them to take and that’s been true since at least original Star Trek.
If only Rogue One had similarly been able to make me care about any of its expansive cast of characters (other than Ben Mendelsohn). Maybe if it had used them in 18 previous movies.
I’ve come around that the opening scene, up until “Thanos is coming! Who?” is one of the best scenes in the MCU. Beautifully acted and shot, and sets the course of what’s coming. I much preferred this Thanos to Endgame’s Thanos, as a character, although there were hints of the former in the latter. Not sure I thought this at first, but Infinity War is definitely superior to Endgame. It’s the stronger overall movie, and the more enjoyable rewatch.
I disagree. Infinity War feels like an inevitable conclusion in search of a movie, where Endgame feels like it is actually building to something.
I don’t like that the Thanos they fight in End Game is fundamentally a different guy. It messes with the stakes for me.
But he is a fundamentally different guy. The Thanos of Infinity War is on a spiritual quest to collect the Stones and fulfill his mission; the Thanos of 2014 is still a violent warlord. I appreciate the differences; I just prefer one to the other.
I initially didn’t like the Thanos in Endgame bc he felt like a less developed character and I thought that they made him more of an unrepentant villain to make it more satisfying when the heroes defeat him (which it is), but the more I’ve rewatched, the more I realize he literally is a less developed character (as evidenced by how much he is unlike the Thanos at the beginning of Endgame). The Thanos of Infinity War/Beginning of Endgame has to actually go through hardship and even personal loss to achieve his goal, and it, maybe not humbles him per se, but sobers his outlook. By contrast, the Thanos of Endgame is still in violent warrior mode, plus is PISSED to discover that his plan didn’t work out the way he wanted and that he got his head chopped off for it. Additionally, he doesn’t have to work for the stones, but has found a shortcut – he sits down outside the rubble of Avengers HQ and waits for his underlings to literally had him a prefabricated Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos without the character growth is less sympathetic, but in ways that are true to the story – and it DOES make it all the more satisfying when Steve then Wanda then Carol then Tony whip his butt.
You are so right about Thanos’ transition from deep nerd shit to cultural ubiquity being a magic trick…But that makes me so mad that they made him a paternalistic psychotic environmentalist instead of a homicidal incel. The latter is rooted in a real cultural problem, with real causalities. It could have been the chance for the most seen movies of the era to say something about something.I think when we look back in 10 or 20 or 50 years, Thanos being ‘an environmentalist who takes things too far’ is going to be extremely cringe.
What I love is that the usual jerky nerdboy cynicism towards the movie’s ending at the time was that it didn’t matter, because we know they’ll all come back anyway. That there were no real consequences and everything would go back to normal with a reset button.Every Marvel movie (and TV series) since Infinity War has dealt with the consequences of “The Snap.”
They really did the best job they could of making consequences stick. Original Gamora is still dead, the new one is a different person altogether. Half of the universe is 5 years older, moved on and now is displaced. Tony and Natasha are for real dead, as is OG Loki and most of Asgard. Many of the surviving Avengers are broke or have nobody to look to for guidance. And so on.
To be fair, most of the consequences that really stick come out of Endgame, not IW—it’s only in Endgame that you learn the heroes don’t just find a way to undo the events of IW through time travel, and so there is this real period of time where the people who were snapped out of existence are just gone. It’s in Endgame that Tony and Natasha die. Although I enjoyed IW, the feeling coming out of the theater was that because of who disappears in the Snap—namely, all three of the biggest characters introduced in Phase 3 to that point—it kind of gave up the game that the movie’s consequences couldn’t possibly stick.
Yeah, it’s not about the bigger picture, it’s about watching these characters realize they monumentally failed
I still maintain that Infinity War is a fantastic spectacle, sub-par movie. It was an exhilarating in-theater experience that, as Breihan mentions, is nigh-on incomprehensible to people who hadn’t followed the MCU religiously. It’s a collection of tremendously entertaining character moments and set pieces that never manage to gel into a cohesive narrative. It’s very much “a thing happened…and then another thing happened…and then another thing happened and oh shit we’re all dead.” Which is by design, of course—we’re supposed to feel cheated and bereft of a traditional climax, a climax that’s ultimately delivered by Endgame. But…evaluating IW as its own entity and as a self-contained film, particularly on rewatch, it’s all just kind of relentless and exhausting. I can watch Empire Strikes Back on its own over and over again, despite how it similarly smashes the status quo to pieces. I can’t imagine watching Infinity War without immediately popping in Endgame afterward.
Does this also apply to the LotR films? Could you watch The Two Towers in isolation?
Yeah, easily. Just because a film is part of a series doesn’t mean it can’t have a cohesive narrative. Two Towers has a very definite beginning, middle, and end in the way Infinity War doesn’t.
Ego from Guardians 2 deserves to be on the “great MCU villain list”, even if he also delivers a lot of exposition.
I loved Ego except that he flat out tells Peter he gave his mom a tumor. It just seems needlessly stupid of him to divulge that information. I guess you can chalk it up to him having such a large…ego…that he can’t comprehend Peter saying no to him, but still a bit anticlimactic
It’s a classic screenwriting tradeoff. The moment is more important than the whole. Oh my god, Ego just reinforced that he’s completely out of touch with the regular human experience in exactly the way that would cause our all-too-human protagonist to wake up and kick ass!Given what we know about the human brain, it’s tough to even argue that the screenwriters are wrong when they do it.
But I still got emotionally caught up in Spider-Man’s shattering quasi-death and in the quiet of that moment.Everyone always points to his death as the most gut-wrenching (probably because it lasts three times longer than anyone else’s), but for me it was Groot. Just the anguish in his voice and Rocket being so effected. And then it was made worse a few weeks later when I learned his last word was “Dad”.
This was my favorite Avengers movie. As a comic reader from 1979 and someone who ran from the westside to the east side in 1991 to get issues of Infinity Gauntlet (in between college classes) I wanted to see how they pulled this off.I was so happy Thanos beat these punk Avengers ass! I knew I would not like Endgame anywhere close to Infinity War. Thor’s story in this movie was so great. Long live Thanos, he was almost right. Like his snap should have only killed half of the Marvel movie superhero characters forever! I could get behind that!
I had missed a number of MCU movies before seeing this, so pretty much everything outside of the Tony, Strange, Spider-Man, Guardians plotlines kinda went over my head because I hadn’t really seen anything of Black Panther or who the heck Vision was.In the end, I think I like this more than Endgame because I can watch those parts and skip over the rest and still find it enjoyable. Endgame doesn’t really have the same kind of format until maybe the climatic fight.
a cinematic spectacle that must’ve looked like absolute gibberish to anyone who hadn’t seen most of the previous 18 pictures.This is precisely why I told my dad and stepmom to skip out on Infinity War and Endgame until we can finish watching the films leading up to them. We’re almost there.
i saw this with a buddy who i share a lot of movie taste with, but who doesn’t really care for blockbusters. at the end i asked what he thought and he said ‘it was a 3 hour fight scene where the heroes all lost. it was awesome.’
Before Thanos, a lot of Marvel movies had bland-villain problems Also, after Thanos.
Infinity War represented Marvel at its imperial peak, and it may have broken the studio’s machinery to the point where this all-crushing cinematic saga might not recover.See, I think their approach has been really smart. Trying to jump back in and do another big damn buildup after Infinity War/Endgame couldn’t possibly work. It was this universe-shattering event, and taking some time to do some smaller-scale movies and stories that gradually move us to what’s next (along with giving Black Widow the movie she should’ve had 6 years ago) while dealing with the fallout of The Snap and losing so many of the original Avengers (and Vision) is the right move. Give the characters and the MCU world a chance to breathe, a little bit, while gradually introducing stuff like the multiverse around the fringes without trying to do Big Event Movies for a while.
Yeah, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Disney has gotten used to making billions of dollars off MCU entries with the idea that the MCU can try to do different and smaller stories, but I think this was the plan to. Even in a world where the pandemic didn’t exist, I think Feige would have cautioned higher ups that they shouldn’t expect any more IWs or Endgames for a very long time, if ever. I’m excited to see everything in Phase 4. Like, I genuinely can’t wait to see The Eternals, and I’ve been looking forward to it since before the first trailer, and that’s with knowing nothing about them. It’s because it’s something so different that I want to see what Marvel is going to do. But at the same time, I can’t look at a premise like that and actually believe that it would even do Spiderman money. It seemed clear to me that the MCU was always planning to use its enormous goodwill to take some risks, and I like that idea.
I think Feige would have cautioned higher ups that they shouldn’t expect any more IWs or Endgames for a very long time, if ever.Oh, I’m certain Feige and the Disney Masters absolutely expect another IW/Endgame, just not for a while. Which is the right move. Endgame was the end of an era that started building the minute the first Infinity Stone showed up. Now, the original Avengers are all effectively gone, (Either dead, retired, or probably not Avenger-ing anymore) so right now we’re at a soft-reset where they have to start building a new team and threat while working through the fallout of IW/Endgame. We’ve got our new Captain America, we’re starting to see the shape of the new BIG SCARY THREAT in Loki, we’ve got Scarlett Witch starting to really own and understand her powers, we may have a new Black Widow (I haven’t seen it, so I’m not 100% sure). Maybe a new (She)Hulk.
With the combination of D+ and regular movies, they can tell whatever kind of story they want to, at whatever length they want, in order to build up to the next BIG THING over the course of a few years instead of the usual movie move of constantly trying to outdo the last thing IMMEDIATELY.
Going by the D+ series, they’re clearly building toward some other big ideas. The multiverse being a prominent one (which we also know is going to play a role in the next Spider-man, Dr. Strange, and Ant-man and Wasp).And Kang is clearly intended to be the next Big Bad, though I imagine he will be very different from Thanos.
I do really like the idea that they’re going to come at the Multiverse from several different angles, where (potentially) the audience is the only one with the whole picture. We saw the start of it with Loki, we’re getting fun bits in What if?, and Spider-Man/Dr. Strange are going to be connected, but possibly not to Ant-Man’s part in things.
I’d like to think Disney understands they should build up to a next IW attempt, but I’m also afraid they might try to force it if some of the smaller films don’t live up to their expectations
I thought the original Avengers (2012) was the peak of Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was… until Infinity War (2018) blew it away.Better writing, better setup, better scenario that tries to treat as many characters with respect they deserve, all anchored by one of best comic book movie villains to grace the screens since Heath Ledger’s The Joker.It became my favorite MCU film after repeated viewing and still is. Marvel will have a hell of time topping this one. They did it once, they can do it again.
Spider-man fights a giant donut? what?
The thingy was donut-shaped
Yeah, I’m all alone. I’m rolling a big doughnut and this snake wearing a vest . . .
“There are a lot of great things about Avengers: Infinity War, the second-highest earner at the 2018 box office, but the greatest is Thanos. A couple of decades earlier, the villain had been the psychedelic vision of bugged-out Marvel weirdo Jim Starlin. Starlin had conjured a space-opera nihilist in love with the physical manifestation of Death. Thanos was a great character, but his entire saga was deep nerd shit.”After Infinity War I tried to explain to my family that this had been the storyline in the comics. My wife and sons still think I am full of crap and making it up.I love Infinity War-I thought everything about it was great. The action was fantastic. The character beats were earned and consistent over the movies. The fact that Marvel had the courage to go through with the snap really raised the stakes for Engame. I loved it all. I know I sound like a corporate shill here, but the MCU-bringing all these grand stories together in a coherent unit just as me and my brother used to dream about as kids with our comics spread on the floor-is an amazing, difficult achievement (just ask DC). From Iron Man forward it has been a joy, and Infinity was the height of it even more than Endgame (which I also loved, but lacked some of Infinity’s punch).
Nice.Thanks.
Enjoyed this once in theaters…but when I saw it again on Netflix it just feels like a total non-movie that only exists to align all the characters for the sake of the brand and snap ending. Also many of these characters only work in their own movies and are just a bunch of assholes when all in one place.
Star-Lord’s complete lack of sense in the final battle has always stuck in my craw. It just doesn’t make sense to me that he, immature buffoon as he is, would so thoroughly lose his cool as to screw it up for the whole universe.
IMO, that moment would be so better if it was Nebula’s fault. How great would it be if the Avengers had Thanos on his knees, their plan going perfectly…and then an unaware Nebula just drops out of the sky, hell-bent on avenging her sister, and completely ruins everything? It’s in-character, it completes the arc of her evolving relationship with Gamora, and it doesn’t do irreparable damage to one of the universe’s big remaining leads.
I don’t agree – we know who Quill is, and if he had developed any emotional stability between movies it was because of the influence that his relationship with Gamora had on him. Finding out a) that the woman you so deeply love that not only did she convince you to kill her rather than let her father kidnap her (again) but that you indeed tried was b) immediately thereafter murdered by her father would make almost anyone snap in two when they actually saw that murdering father.
“YOU KILLED THE WOMAN I LOVE AFTER A LIFETIME OF TRAUMA AND ISSUES WTH FATHERS AND A DEAD MOM”rubes: feh what a baby
Don’t quite agree re:Star-Lord, but Nebula definitely got a bit short changed in her arc and I would’ve like to see her try to get revenge on Thanos at some point
“But Black Widow hasn’t performed up to box office expectations thus far, even though it’s the year’s highest-grossing movie at the time of this writing.”Dude. Be better than this. IT’S STILL A FUCKING PANDEMIC.
lol
Oh fuck me we get to talk about Lion King? A miserably pointless remake with no soul? Oh well.
I watched the two movies twice because the first time around I literally did not remember anything. Upon second watching I can see why. It’s just so much nothing pretending to be an epic something. Comics like these are fun because of the episodic nature, the lack of finality to anything, the lack of true lasting consequences.But of course we can’t have that in the movies. We have to have big heroes making big sacrifices.I would never watch either of these again. I am so so tired of them making the same goddamn movie over and over again but just bigger and more actors and more green screens and more ‘splosions. It is exhausting. And they just keep pumping them out. At least 25% of all movies made now are green screen cgi blockbuster nonsense to sell merch.The ensemble movies never work. All the best of the recent superhero movies are the standalones. The first iron man, the first two batman movies, Thor Ragnorak, etc. I mean when are we going to get fucking Marvel vs. Capcom the movie?
Infinity War has its problems (Vision is whiney and impotent, why doesn’t Wong send them to the artic to begin with; etc.), but all in all it’s one of the tightest, best written, and genuinely moving of the MCU pics. We’ve watched it 20 times.But what a colossal let-down from that movie to Endgame, which has absurd logic gaps (deus ex Ratina), relies on a beyond-tired time travelled gimmick (that they pull out of a hat), and then just turns to shit in the last 30 minutes with a completely perfunctory battle that looks like an extended cut scene. We’ve watched the movie twice, and the second time was only to confirm it sucked as bad as we thought.If Infinity War is a 7 (that’s an MCU 10), Endgame is a 2 (or an MCU 5). I wish the latter movie didn’t even exist.
Hm. For a bit, recently, I’ve been on the “IW wasn’t really good” train. I’m wrong. I’m not quite sure where this is going to go, but I have a bunch of stuff popping up in my brain: 1. Thanos is the Protagonist. As an English and Social Studies teacher, I love using this example when I take middle-schoolers through elements of story. It’s easy for kids to get caught up in the idea of “protagonist=hero.” Thanos is the Protagonist of Infinity War. He is the central character, and it is about his journey. The conflict is primarily his. The Avengers and other heroes are the obstacles and antagonists in his way. The conflict is resolved… when he makes the snap (which also helps talking about falling action and resolution and blah blah blah). 2. Doctor Strange is Better Than In His Own Movie I enjoy Doctor Strange, but his film has always left me somewhat underwhelmed despite some terrific performances and inventive visuals. There is a magic about having Strange bounce off of the other characters that gives him a spark. We see it in his brief scene in Ragnarok; it is amplified here. In *particular*, Strange is about the only person with the intelligence and arrogance to actually put Tony Stark off of his “smartest man in the room” game. And it is GLORIOUS watching Cumberbatch and RDjr play off of each other. 3. Goddammit, Tom HollandYou’re absolutely right, Tom. We *know* these characters —- particularly T’Challa and Spider-Man —- are coming back. Yet, the snap is wonderfully, tragically effective. It is stunning, even to comics nerds who knew or at least wondered if this was where Marvel was willing to go. It is more poignant than in the comics. Quill’s disappearance is brutal. Bucky’s is awful. Rocket and Groot breaks my heart. And then Tom goddamn Holland, reducing us all to tears. Fuck. Sake. I like but wish the MCU/Sony Spidey movies were better, but Tom Holland is a miracle.4. That Opening SceneHere’s a weird fact: I didn’t see IW in the theatres. I don’t know why. Somehow, I just wasn’t interested. Read the spoilers and all. In fact, I saw Ant-Man & The Wasp *first* (it was wild to hear people’s reactions to the credits scene for AM&TW —- that gave me a real inkling about how people were responding to IW). But I loved Thor: Ragnarok. It was absolutely fucking devastating to see that opening scene. After everything the Asgardians went through in T:R, after the growth of Loki and Thor, to see them get crushed so hard again. I don’t agree with the take that IW just “ignored/erased” the events of Ragnarok. It was brutal, gutted, and set the stakes. Thanos wasn’t playing, and nobody was safe. The crack of Loki’s neck may be the single most unsettling, gruesome moment in the MCU. 5. Get This Man A ShieldThat’s it. That’s the bit. Yesssssss.6. Thor and RocketPerhaps the most meaningful, emotionally resonant thread in the film. A one-eyed Asgardian god without a kingdom, and a science experiment talking racoon. How in the hell did Rocket Racoon become one of the emotional centers of an entire damned series of movies? 7. GamoraIt shouldn’t have worked. Yet somehow, even though we know Thanos is brutal, relentless, evil; Brolin and Saldana convince us that Thanos truly does regret the action he is about to take. I’m glad Gamora is back post-Endgame; I have faith in Gunn to deliver in part 3. But the Gamora we now have lacks several years of character growth. It will be… interesting. 8. Characters don’t always make the best choicesThe Quill bashing gets tiring. There is a trend in literary/media criticism… not criticism, just general audience engagement… that seems to want our heroes to never make mistakes. There is no story if characters don’t make mistakes or make poor decisions. Quill does, indeed, ruin what seems like a win. Because he sees complete fucking RED. He loses his goddamn mind in rage, anger, and grief. I think people have confused Pratt’s real persona (which… other than a couple things, isn’t really as awful, it just seems trendy af to gleefully pile on him as the “worst Chris,” but I love Andy Dwyer and Star-Lord so get tae fuck) with his character. And guess what? Peter Quill IS a screw-up! That’s a big part of why he works. The Guardians are all screw-ups and misfits. Tony Stark is a big fuck-up, too. He ended up causing some of the biggest issues the Avengers face, throughout the saga, due to his arrogance and hubris.So I guess I do love this movie lol.
The first Dr. Strange suffers from having to tell a rather familiar origin story for a character that will no doubt prove pretty important to the MCU. I agree he’s better in the Avengers films, and I think this will continue as we get more of “the Sorcerer Supreme who’s here the help and fix everything” as opposed to egomaniac Stephen Strange going through the rote-comic-book-origin-patterns of learning to be a more selfless human being.
Yeah, Dr. Strange was really the first MCU movie that hit the “ superhero origin story” beats we’ve had for a while. There’s a reason it reminded a lot of people of Iron Man. For as many characters as the MCU has, they’ve done a good job of avoiding the “Superhero Origin Story” movie, for the most part.
I mean, really, for the traditional origin story setup you’ve got Iron Man and Captain America. Thor and GoTG aren’t superhero origin stories, and even Ant-Man is more of a sequel to a Hank Pym Ant-Man movie from the 80s that doesn’t exist than a traditional “origin story” (it helps that it’s set up more as a heist movie than a superhero movie). They dodged it with Captain Marvel by making her origin the mystery of the movie, just skipped the origin story completely with Spider-Man, Black Panther is pre-established in the same way Thor was, and the other characters were side-loaded into the MCU by way of other movies.
Yes! Antman is way more a heist movie!Ad now I really want the 1980s antman movie
I want a “Hart-to-Hart/A-Team” style retro series with 80s-era Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas doing Ant-Man and The Wasp stuff, complete with OG Battlestar Galactica special effects.
Stark really should’ve started the movie in prison for the events of Ultron. That would’ve been something if he were locked up and has to come up with a jailbreak scheme to help, or someone breaks him out. And a big redemption arc in the eyes of the world if he goes from “villain” to saving the universe. Agreed on Quill, yes he’s a manchild and a screwup, but that’s the point of his character. It’s similar to when I hear people complain about Tony Soprano being problematic. That’s…the damn point. They also make it clear its his destiny to screw up, in the timelines where he doesn’t, they lose. Somehow.
I agree with most of these points, all good aspects of the movie… and yet I still remain on the “IW wasn’t really good” train. Well, not that it wasn’t good, because it clearly connected with people, but more that it just didn’t connect with me. I’ve only watched it once, so maybe it’s worth a revisit.A lot of that has to do with the 3rd and 4th things you mention. I’m in the camp that totally felt the opening scene rendered Thor Ragnarok a waste of time, and that sort of started me off in a bad headspace for watching the remainer of the movie. There is a joy to watching so many heroes banter and interact who haven’t before. But for whatever reason, it comes off to me as Marvel being SO in love with itself because they’re kings of the world now, and Infinity War, so thin on plot as it is, comes off more as a corporate victory lap, than it does a structured film. Suddenly, I’m finding the nonstop quipping to be grating, given the “stakes.” It gets to the point where Hulk hiding from coming out, stops being this running gag, and it’s just starting to piss me off. I put “stakes” in quotes because I’m in the minority of the The Snap have 0 impact on me whatsoever. I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing as the characters started lightly turning to dust. My reaction wasn’t so much “Oh no!” as it was “wtf?” Are they dying or something? Maybe this speaks to how disengaged I was with the visual language of a movie that had enough green screen to make Zack Snyder blush, but everyone fading away with dumb looks on their faces was just another weightless CGI moment to me. (to be fair, Tom Holland was the only one selling the situation. His death was great). I so wish I felt what others felt from The Snap, but regrettably, my attitude was: Everyone’s coming back, and it’s just a matter of how, so this is nothing.
One of the reasons I loved Endgame so much was the Leftovers-esque 1st Act, and how much it proved The Snap was not nothing. By extention, WandaVision and TFATWS, further explore how much it mattered. (By contrast, Loki’s show explores how much it doesn’t, and I wasn’t a fan). But I digress. The point is, I think by itself, Infinity War is a weird watch, but as a part of a whole, it’s a lot stronger.
I enjoyed IW so much more on the second watch. Something about knowing where all the build up was going to lead really hit it all home.
#1 is a huge part of it. It is a BOLD move to make the villain the unquestionably central character, and there’s no doubt it is THANOS’ story. And it works. They bet on the idea that people would hang onto this movie even if their favorite heroes were always one step behind in his wake, and they bet right. It’s this relentless “He’s really going to do this, isn’t he?” feeling that doesn’t work if he has a standard Marvel Villain POV where he’s only here or there.
Fantastic post, I agreed with pretty much every point, despite being a misanthropic cynic generally. I love Infinity War for all of the reasons you put into numbered format.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I kinda wish Thor: Ragnarok had come out before Doctor Strange. Strange’s scene in T:R is just more interesting and fun to watch than 3/4 of his origin story, and I feel like it would have helped if his solo movie had been something of a flashback after we’ve already gotten a little intrigued, if not outright invested, in the character.
Ooooh fun
I’m also a teacher and have taught “Thanos = protagonist” before as well. It’s such a good, accessible example.
My issue with the “Quill costs them the victory” bit isn’t that I don’t think characters should make mistakes, it’s that I really, REALLY hate the writing trope of “the characters are sure to win now!—unless one of them does something REALLY DUMB!”. Like, they’d come up with a totally workable plan, and it was working, and the only way it could NOT work was for someone on their side to screw it up. So it was narratively NECESSARY for Quill to mess up right there, because if he didn’t, good guys win, movie over.I really hate when stories use this structure, because it feels so cheap and lazy to me. Plus, it really makes the character left holding the idiot ball (Quill, in this case) seem like liabilities who by all rights should be left out of any future plans.
While I enjoyed IW overall, just as I enjoy most of Marvel’s thoroughly (but reliably) mediocre output, I felt like it fell into this trap a few times. I was also annoyed by the whole “If you don’t give me the thing that allows me to kill everyone, then I’ll kill Tony Stark” bit. That seemed so transparently dumb that I was sure it was setting up some kind of sneaky double-cross on Strange’s part—like, he couldn’t possibly fall for a threat that stupid unless he had some kind of plan to use the Time Stone against Thanos, right? ….Nope, he just doomed the universe to temporarily save Tony Stark. Good work, Strange.Again, overall, I liked the film and would happily watch it again. But it seemed like the writers wrote themselves into a corner a few times and couldn’t figure out a way to let Thanos win other than letting the heroes totally drop the ball, and while there’s nothing wrong with fallible heroes, setting up the plot so that they HAVE to fail in order for the movie to continue just seems like weak writing.
I thought Infinity War was better than Endgame. It had more gravitas, pathos and emotional impact. The scene where young Gamora asks in the Soul Dimension on whether the deed was done and what was the cost. Thanos replies that it cost him everything. In that moment one feels a little bit of sympathy for this mega-villain. It’s a shocking end with half the population of the Universe extinguished with the snap of a finger. Great stuff.
It was the highest earner. Second highest was Black Panther. Disney also had another top 5 earner in Incredibles 2 that year.
This series is picking from the domestic totals. The worldwide totals have only really been significantly divergent for the last fifteen years or so I think, and probably only affected the top spot maybe five times, though this year was one of them.
Rhodes Scholar, I am sure that your reply to me was deep and trenchant, but unfortunately Kinja is so fucked up I can only read the 2 lines that appear in the notification, and can’t approve it because Gizmodo appears intent on sabotaging their own comment sections.I didn’t used to believe it was intentional, but I do now, I just can’t figure out the business sense of driving away clicks in a click based business.
That’s so annoying-I can’t seem to access the comment either (and am too tired at the end of the day to recreate it) 🙁 Rest assured that it was full of amazing insight.
I don’t understand how the commenting system’s functionality seems to regularly deteriorate over time, but alas.
This is the only Marvel movie I would call borderline great. If there is something I hate about these movies it is “the final, epic battle”, overloaded with tiresome action with characters that have to be there because fans demand it, making the whole thing an overlong slog (I had the same problem with the last Harry Potter film that fans mostly loved but I loathed). Here they split up into manageable sideplots and an ending that means something. And Thanos is a great villain. “Black Panther” is not half the movie this was, though that one also had a good villain.
Why waste an article on The Lion King? Surely you could review literally any other film in that top ten then Disney’s Psycho.
Plus Endgame despite the endless articles will get the clicks. Bad business move
Yea, I would prefer an examination about Joker over The Lion King, which was certainly a hot topic movie from that year. Or, we could finally deep dive Rise of Skywalker, and round out the Sequel Trilogy discussions in this column.
Honestly, I want the Lion King entry because it boggles the mind how that movie made so much money, and I think that will be an interesting discussion. I guess we should’ve seen this coming when Tom avoided any real discussion of the animated Lion King in the Forrest Gump edition of this column.
Because there’s “top 10 box office hits” and then there’s The Lion King 2K19, which did (please be seated for this) $543 million domestic, $1.6 billion globally. That domestic total is 11th all time (uandjusted), globally 7th (trailing only the two Cameron pics, the Infinity Saga, Furious 7(!), and The Force Awakens).
$543 million domestic, $1.6 billion globally. That domestic total is 11th all time (uandjusted), globally 7thMan, does Rabin still do Forgotbusters on his site? Because, wow.
How the hell did that piece of shit make more than $1 billion globally? That’s just mindboggling to me since visually it’s such a lifeless film and the weird CGI animals never really convincingly seem to talk or sing or in any way engage in a story. I wonder if the non-english versions were cast and dubbed differently when it came to the voice acting.
I am genuinely shocked.
I kind of agree, as there are so many better options for that year to discuss.On the other hand, it could be a great opportunity to discuss everything great about the original film.
DISNEY’S PSYCHO!!!!!
I regret that I have but one star to give. Amazing.
Kevin Feige and his braintrust had conditioned everyone to cheer at the entrance of a sullen teenage tree-man playing a portable video game and only ever saying his own name, a sight that would’ve confounded anyone from any previous generation of cinema.
That’s a weirdly reductive way of saying “successfully created a memorable character that connected with fans.” It’s not like audiences were indifferent to Groot but somehow were trained by Feige to whoop whenever he come on-screen in Pavlovian fashion.
This is why the MCU hasn’t introduced Squirrel Girl. Having a character who can take down Thanos off screen while the opening logo is showing would have ruined the build-up.
This is an incredibly watchable film. I am frequently guilty of sitting on the couch, putting on a movie, and then opening up my laptop and phone and paying much, much more attention to those.I tried this with Infinity War, a movie I had already seen, and my eyes were glued to the tv.
Please don’t do The Lion King, Tom.
I’m pretty tired of people scoffing at jokes. Like, okay, Captain Edgelord, I get it, humor is the worst thing in the world, it’s totally fake and people never make jokes in real life. Let me have my humor and you can go watch the end of Requiem For A Dream on repeat as much as you want.
You don’t have to be Rex Banner to think that the humor in the MCU films is generally one of their weak spots. From what I recall that isn’t an issue with Infinity War (kind of the opposite if anything), but some of the films undercut so many of their dramatic moments with (IMO) weak jokes that I found it hard to get at all invested in anything that happened in them. The two MCU Spider-Man films would be exhibit A for me, especially the first.
I think I only saw the two Spider-Man films once each, but I don’t remember anything that reaches level of distracting, definitely nothing that undercuts drama, like Bender making wisecracks while I’m in tears after Fry discovers how much his brother loved him. I feel like the humor generally lands, so it’s hard to mind. I loved the whole “Mr. Doctor” bit from Doctor Strange. I loved the smash cut to Vision cooking after Team Cap gets arrested, which doesn’t undercut the drama so much as relieve the tension so you can move onto the next scene with little fuss. Not everything works me, though. Michael Pena’s character is supposed to be funny, but he’s just the guy who won’t stop talking, he didn’t actually say anything that made me laugh. Yet, I enjoy Ant-Man both as a dramatic and a humorous character, especially when he’s not in his own movies.I feel like the, “Ugh, jokes,” movement came from Snyder cultists. To make it known how sophisticated their tastes are, they have to attack Marvel films by saying the near humorlessness of the Snyderverse is a virtue, a feature, not a bug. Weird how they don’t talk about the cringey stuff from Star Wars.
Wow, Lion King ‘19 was the second biggest film of its year? I thought it was either Rise of Skywalker or Frozen II, but that tracks. And an opportunity to finally address the biggest box-office hits of the last decade that at the same time aren’t liked by people who wholeheartedly enjoy film as a medium, the Disney remakes, should be entertaining. I really feel that there hasn’t been enough discussion of why those movies are so colossally popular (the odd Pete’s Dragon aside) and manage to avoid the foaming “ruined childhood” discourse stuff like the non-original trilogy Star Wars films or Ghostbusters 2016 endured.
Really enjoyed IW but was shocked by how much of a letdown Endgame was following that up. They time travel solution harkens back to: Brie Marschz : Hamlet 2?Dana Marschz : The Deuce. Correct.Brie Marschz : Doesn’t everybody die at the end of the first one?Dana Marschz : I have a device.Brie Marschz : [reading the script] “The time machine. Door…Dana Marschz : That’s the device.No movie ever should make me rehash the experience of seeing Hamlet 2.
I have always appreciated how much this movie commits to the heroes losing. And not merely losing, they lose in a way that turns the standard MCU formula on its head, in that there are multiple threads about characters going through all kinds of development and making the hard choices, the things that are normally supposed to guarantee victory in most storytelling (and especially superhero storytelling) only to lose anyway. Because Thanos can just cheat.This doesn’t last in the next movie (nor should it), but that kind of nihilism can be fun in the correct dosage.
Endgame was satisfying, but Infinity War was my favorite. The fact that you know Batman and Superman will punch their way to victory in the end takes something out of the story – it’s not a question of if they’ll win, but simply how. Infinity War broke the mold, and the feelings it inspired are unique within the superhero genre: a comic book movie that ended with grief and despair. It was glorious.
I’ll die on this fucking hill:Thanos should’ve lost a straight fight with Hulk. Nothing major would’ve had to have changed.Thanos decides to have a straight fight just for fun.He loses.He takes his lumps somewhat gracefully, but then uses his stones to cheat because, well, he’s got a job to do.He tries to exile Hulk to the ends of the universe, because he doesn’t want to risk such a force of nature being on the loose during Serious Business Time.Heimdall uses the last of his power to redirect Hulk to Earth.Thanos now has a legitimate reason to get pissed off and start killing people willy-nilly on the ship, which, in the original script, felt off.So began the lazy, cheap process of giving everybody exactly as much power as the writers needed them to have for their fucking “moments.” Oh hey look, now Captain America’s heart-power allows him to stand toe-to-toe with Thanos even though Thanos bitch-whipped the fucking Hulk. Sure! Okay! Fine!“Nobody cares about nerd shit” is the ultimate copout for when writers want you to care about their lazy shit. Lazy shit should be worse than nerd shit, people. Fail to hold that line, and you will end up losing more and more until everything is just brainless, treacly, swelling-musical-score-backed tripe.
Guess I’ll have to be the contrarian and go Infinity War was ass. It was two and a half hours of wheel spinning in order to reach an ending that, while shocking, telegraphed its impermanence. It didn’t tell a story, it set up a different story, it was everything that I hate about Marvel. I want to watch a movie. I don’t want to watch a feature-length ad for another movie.I did like Endgame, and I think Marvel has done a good job of using the events to spin its tales going forward, but if I’m going to sit for three hours to hear a pointless story about a guy who dies (but we know will get better) I’d just be Catholic again.
I know there’s too many comments already at this point, but I don’t see anyone talking about the double gut punch that was Vision’s death. I mean, holy fuck. Wanda has to kill the man she loves, only to have Thanos undo it and kill him in front her her, completely negating the horrible thing she just had to do. That had me so emotionally wrecked that “I don’t feel so good…” landed a lot harder than it should have. I get why they wanted Tony to be the one to end Thanos, but they really should have let Wanda it. I was glad that WandaVision dealt directly with the emotional wreckage those events caused.
What I love about the MCU is that it’s set in our world but technology is somehow just that little bit more fantastic. Iron Man suits, Helideck-Carriers and now thanks to a background Easter Egg in Infinity War – Deep-Fried Kebabs!“What’s that? Yes, I am Scottish, why do you ask?”
Oh really? It’s just that Greg the Stop Sign is a very Australian thing so I thought … well, you know …
I’ve been living in Melbourne for the last 20 years if that’s any help.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2018 Post: The Numbers1. Black Panther, Disney, $700,059,566 2. Avengers: Infinity War, Disney, $678,815,482 3. Incredibles 2, Disney/Pixar, $608,581,744 4. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Universal, $417,719,760 5. Deadpool 2, 20th Century Fox, $324,512,774 6. Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, Universal, $266,280,410 7. Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, Sony/Columbia/MGM, $235,506,359 8. Mission: Impossible—Fallout, Paramount, $220,159,104 9. Ant-Man And The Wasp, Disney, $216,648,740 10. Solo: A Star Wars Story, Disney, $213,767,512Wikipedia1. Avengers: Infinity War, Disney, $2,048,359,7542. Black Panther, Disney, $1,347,913,1613. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Universal, $1,309,484,4614. Incredibles 2, Disney/Pixar, $1,243,805,3595. Aquaman, Warner Bros., $1,148,661,8076. Bohemian Rhapsody, 20th Century Fox, $903,755,2597. Venom, Sony/Columbia, $856,085,1518. Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Paramount, $791,215,1049. Deadpool 2, 20th Century Fox, $785,146,92010. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, Warner Bros., $654,855,901
going by the horrible reaction at the time, i assumed Solo was a huge failure, but seems it made Tom Cruise Mission Impossible money. Huh.
Solo was a huge failure The only way Solo failed for me was that we know what Harrison Ford looked like as a young man, and Alden Ehrenreich wasn’t it. But I got used to that after a minute or two. I enjoyed the movie and Donald Glover was great.
Ehrenreich had an all-time thankless job, because looks aside, Ford is a really unique actor, and I don’t know anyone from Ehrenreich’s generation who’d be able to capture the lanky, at-ease-within-his-skin essence that Ford brings to Han Solo. Which is a shame, because Glover is pitch-perfect as Lando, even though he doesn’t look much like Billy Dee Williams. You go from Glover to Ehrenreich in a scene and the natural thought is: “And this Jack Black-looking motherfucker is supposed to be Han Solo?”The other bad thing about Solo is that it feels like whoever wrote the script watched the OT and decided to list every single thing Han owns or that we know about his past, and then decided this one movie needed to explain or give an origin story for every single thing on that list.The other other bad thing about Solo is that it kind of ruins Han’s character arc in A New Hope, because (spoilers, obviously) it turns out he’s always been the kind of guy to go against his own interests to help out a plucky group of rebels, which makes his turnabout to help Luke on the Death Star run just a little less special.All that aside, it’s kind of a fun film.
Solo cost at least 50% more than Fallout or Ant Man and the Wasp. According to Google, the budget wound up north of $275 million. Worldwide box office, Fallout stays at #8 for the year, but Solo drops to 24th, under the Mama Mia sequel. So yeah, huge failure.
Changing directors and doing all those reshoots really exploded the budget. If it had been made with the original budget, the box office take would have been OK.
Even if the budget had stayed below $200 million, I still think that Solo’s performance would’ve been an impossible pill to swallow.
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)The Avengers (2012)Toy Story 3 (2010)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Avengers: Infinity War (2018)Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)Independence Day (1996)The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Avatar (2009)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)American Sniper (2014)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
I really can’t argue with those rankings. I’d probably move The Graduate up. And 2001 is almost unrankable for me. It’s a profound experience but not really an enjoyable one.
have Infinity War and the first Avengers movie switch positions, and then we can talk.
I took my kids to the midnight show of IW, and the theater was just silent as we walked out. My 7 yo was like, this was the worst ever. And down the quiet street I heard man yell “FUUUUCKKK!” into the night. Just collective anguish that it ended that way. Marvel and Feige are genius.
Having recently had COVID and gone into quarantine (I got better), I had some extra time to rewatch IW and Endgame. Plenty of other commentators, along with the original article, have elucidated what is great about this movie, so I won’t rehash.I’ll just say, it holds up very well (even knowing what’s coming) and still held my attention throughout (I’ve become one of those disgraceful people who scrolls their phone while watching things, but I try not to do it for films, and it wasn’t hard here).Love them or hate them, it’s hard to argue with the assertion that what Marvel (and more so Feige) pulled off with these 22 films was a minor miracle of filmmaking. Maybe a major miracle, honestly.
I just love Infinity War – in fact more than Endgame. It’s dark, brave, competent, somehow mixes all of the different tones of previous movies deftly, and manages to establish a powerful villain in record speed while handling all of the individual characters. Nothing looks out of place. One of my favourite films of all time, and I say that as a fairweather fan of comic book movies.
I totally used this and endgame as an excuse to stop seeing marvel superhero movies and tv shows, not regretting the decision.
IW > EndgameI can rewatch IW a million times
“As soon as Black Panther dissolved into nothingness, I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t permanent, that all these characters would be back.” And then this truly cruel motherfucker known as Real Life reasserted its power…
Infinity War reminded me why I quit reading comics. There are no stakes. There are no consequences. Nobody stays dead. Nothing really changes. It’s just an endless series of fistfights.
Jesus Christ, Infinity War came out in 2018? This pandemic is really messing with my sense of time, that seems like AGES ago.Normally when I hear when movies came out it seems like they’re much farther back than I would have thought.
Say what you will about the MCU but ending Infinity War with Thanos winning was pretty damn bold. Obviously most of us knew that there was another movie coming so it has to end with a cliffhanger, so that usually means it looks like the bad guy won. But Thanos wins it all. The choice of who got dusted was mostly the newer and less loved heroes but taking out Spider-man was a big deal. I know people love to shit on Marvel movies and even I’m at the point now that I think they are best served with maybe a break and reboot but I really can’t fault the majority of the 20 movie cinematic movie experiment. It worked and it worked well and it landed the ending perfectly(outside of screwing over Black Widow, both on screen and in the real world it seems)
I feel like anybody trying to dismiss the ending of this movie with “oh but comics” is completely missing the point that 95% of the audience did not have that context and were not prepared for what happened. And I genuinely don’t believe anybody who had that “oh but comics” viewpoint genuinely expected the ending of Infinity War because so many of those people also tend to say “MCU is so not like the comics”. You can’t have it both ways. Hell, I’ve read comics for decades. I may not have have collected series regularly until I was 16 but I read when ‘Ringo drew Ben Reilly Spider-Man. I collected almost every major available X-Men trade when Morrison and Claremont were writing the main X-Men runs (oh fuck off if you think I’d put Casey’s or Austen above anything else—yep title aside, I loved X-treme) and even I was surlsied Spidey was dusted.
“Kevin Feige and his braintrust had conditioned everyone to cheer at the entrance of a sullen teenage tree-man playing a portable video game and only ever saying his own name, a sight that would’ve confounded anyone from any previous generation of cinema.”
Tom?
This is that *bullshit* you’re always going to be flirting with when writing this kind of retrospective, and you put your foot directly into the center of this bull’s digestive system.
They didn’t reinvent cinematic language to the degree you’re demanding, and just…
1. Cartoons used to not have sound but could still tell visual stories that could make you care about literally anything.
2. This is a cartoon that tells a visual story and also that character has interpreters everywhere and there’s definitely sound.
If you want the most previous generation, pretty sure between Neverending Story, Labyrinth, and The Dark Crystal, every generation was properly acclimated to accepting whatever the fuck creatives wanna call a critter.
R2-D2 just beeped, dude. He was a beeping trashcan.
And you’re gonna try to use Groot for your bullsmallintestine?
This is a good question and I don’t believe they will. No more Cap, Iron man is gone, Hulk is a shell of the HULK we grew up watching, no more Widow, T’challa is gone and I’m sure Thor will have his next film and maybe a crossover event before hanging up his hammer. Then you look at the heroes coming up and Marvels complete lack of villain development. Let’s start with The Eternals… don’t know them , don’t give an F about them and I’m a hardcore Marvel fan. I don’t think the mainstream fans are going to even pay attention to the film. Shang Chi is a kung-fu superhero film with a plot that harkens back to the original Iron Man film- this film should do well. But who else do fans ( in particular ones that grew up reading comics) have to look forward to? Ms. Marvel is cool but IMO they messed up Capt Marvel’s storyline by removing Mar-vell from the plot. Took away a great love story as well from Carol Danvers, I’ll never understand why they did that. Then you look at the villains. Fantastic job by bringing back Zemo… phenomenal job by introducing Kang in Loki. Then that brings me to Taskmaster. I don’t know what they were thinking here. The alarming part about it is the lack of foresight. I’ll never understand changing a popular character like Taskmaster into a plot device for a dead character’s movie. This is this type of shit that Disney promised not to do again after the first Mandarin mishap. You could’ve had Tony Masters going up against Kate Bishop and Hawkeye in their series. With Deadpool coming to the MCU, you could’ve of had an awesome villain for him, but they ruined that. Then when you look at the villains that haven’t appeared ( in particular, ones that could lead a crossover event)… do we really want a Dr. Doom or a Kang vs. this leftover Avenger squad. Of course I want them but I find it kind of disrespectful to those characters and to be honest, they should wipe the floor with some of these rosters. Sure, you have cool characters like Blade, Moon Knight and the Fantastic Four to come and of course I’ll keep watching. However I have to admit my excitement level is nowhere near what is was for Infinity War.
Ugh. So many replies I want to engage with, so many I CAN’T FUCKING FIND. b/c kinjagoddammit, AV Club.
This “Marvel had terrible villains” thing seems to be a consensus that’s not questioned. Killmonger, Thanos, Klaw, Vulture, Hela, Kilgrave, Kingpin, Ego, The ‘Mandarin’, Obadiah Stane?
Ultron and Whiplash were good villains in messy films, and, sure, there are a few He-Man rejects, but the track record really isn’t as bad as the consensus has it.