Avengers: Infinity War

Didn't you hate Black Panther? Cannot get a read on what passes muster in the MCU for u and Shakey.

i thought it was bad yeah.

i mean its a different movie different movies can be bad or good within a 30 movie connected arc i dunno what to say rly

The only aspect in which I could see Infinity War competing with Black Panther is visually, and even there I think BP's aesthetic was fresher, pretty as the Cube-ing of sundry heroes was in IW.

Apart from that you've got a film that's basically entirely set-up, and a buncha deaths that only carry emotional weight if a) you've gotten affection towards the characters due to previous MCU films and b) you manage to make yourself forget that all of these characters will be back in the next one. And terrible banter.

having spoiled a 30-year-old issue of thor for darragh on another thread, i might as well pick up the question here: cap's gonna pick up thor's hammer and beat the shit out of thanos with it at some point in the second part (possibly giving up his life in the process) isn't he? they've got to pay off the hammer-lifting scene in age of ultron eventually and it would be a hell of a moment

Mjolnir is toast (see Ragnarok). They have yet to establish, though, whether mere mortals can wield Stormbreaker.

I guess I would like to see Steve Rogers chucking the shattered fragments of an uru hammer at Thanos, though.

good point

thor's right eye was toast at the end of ragnarok tho and they got around that pretty easily so i remain unconvinced that mjolnir won't show up again with time gem shenanigans or something

The hammer-lifting scene paid off inside of Age of Ultron, though.

well thats the thing, none of it has any emotional heft because there's no real version of events once the gems and time magic etc are involved so those scenes and appeals to emotion are.....eh.... optional. for me, the rest of the package should flow, look good, zing, satisfy. this did.

xps to daniel yeah look, black panther, for me,........didnt. not much point appealing to someone about why that is or isnt now is there? perhaps unwise of me to even go so far as to say most of the affection for it is....idealistic projection. the movie falls apart if you arent cheerleading it. i can cheerlead a movie with the best of em but thats not a pretence of objective excellence now is it.

oh yeah, i'd forgotten about that

mods pls delete my posts from today itt so i look like less of a dumbass, it's v embarrassing

Just from today?

(Sorry, bruv, the goalie was totally looking the other way on that one.)

damn ol dirty lunch protect ya neck

https://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/55/2016/07/ezgif-1-8615ce3a62.gif

to daniel yeah look, black panther, for me,........didnt. not much point appealing to someone about why that is or isnt now is there? perhaps unwise of me to even go so far as to say most of the affection for it is....idealistic projection. the movie falls apart if you arent cheerleading it. i can cheerlead a movie with the best of em but thats not a pretence of objective excellence now is it.

I mean if you're asking me if there's any real point to discussing the subjective value of movies then sure, there isn't really, but I'd assumed anyone posting about movies in a thread discussion would've been game for it anyway.

fwiw I went into Black Panther expecting to hate it (as I did hate Wonder Woman, the other big recent movie where you could call idealistic projection as a motivation). But it turned out to me to be a well told narrative with characters I could care about and much visual flair. And I suppose you can make the case that Infinity War is trying to do a different thing than BP did, that making sense or having good character development is all besides the point of a big cosmic x-over movie, fair enough. 8 out of 10 still feels crazy high tho.

im not arguing bp vs iw on those terms, you are

im saying that bp failed in plot, resonance, sense, pacing for me.

not that it was better at those things than iw, but that they dont matter to me: that it was worse at those things.

much, much worse.

bg, my biggest general takeaway from rewatching all of the movies prior to seeing IW was that I should probably get an MRI to see how big the holes in my Swiss cheese brain have become. I couldn't believe how many essential plot points I'd forgotten.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/You_Are_Not_Alone.jpg

fwiw i watched wonder woman expecting awful and was pleasantly surprised, and went into black panther expecting the best marvel yet

xp "essential"

I couldn't believe how many essential plot points I'd forgotten.

yeah i happened across a tv broadcast of iron man 2 recently and i'd completely forgotten that's where scarlett johansson first shows up, god knows what else i've quantum leaped away in my journey towards fanboy senescence

(cue someone telling me that actually she shows up somewhere else first)

Thanos acquires reality-shifting powers relatively early on, and yet he spends much of his time punching about, when he could basically eliminate anyone he would want to with the blink of an eye, incapacitate them at least.

As I griped about earlier, we have *three* occasions of someone getting the dilemma of sacrificing the one they lost for a greater good, and they don't even play out in ways that comment on each other. Bad writing.

There is not a second spent in trying to make the hero's deaths, temporary though they are, resonant from an emotional pov.

"No real version of events" doesn't make sense to me - there is a real version, consisting of what happens in that story and what will happen in the next movie. The fact that it needn't behave like our reality doesn't eliminate that; your "optional" assesment seems more to me like the movie allows you to mourn the heroes if you feel like your baggage w/ these characters outweighs what you know the story is going to be - which is its own kind of (non ideological) projection.

On the one hand, it's kinda nice to be able to rewatch things and enjoy them as much as if I'm seeing them for the first time, but on the other hand, having that shitty a memory is occasionally...um...

Hi, my name is Old Lunch, who are you?

There is not a second spent in trying to make the hero's deaths, temporary though they are, resonant from an emotional pov.

if peter parker's final words being 'i'm sorry' didn't move the needle a little bit then i dunno what to tell you dude

i'm still kinda annoyed that they didn't address why thanos just didn't use the reality gem to make more resources if a lack of them was the reason he wanted to kill half the universe

xxpost Something that's elided a bit in IW but which is emphasized pretty heavily in the previous films is that the gems are something you don't fuck around with. They're super-powerful, can only be wielded by certain people/beings under particular circumstances, etc. Thanos certainly does a bit of pre-snap fucking around but I would assume he doesn't have a trivial regard for the power of the gems and also figures, hey, I'm pretty goddamn tough without these things so I can probably handle a pile-on with my own two purple mitts.

also, the guy's a seasoned warrior, he probably enjoys a punch-up every now and again just to stay sharp

You didn't really get to see anyone mourn, which would be the actual emotional stake in this situation - the deaths aren't permanent but the characters don't know that, they could've used that for emotional resonance.

If we're talking Thanos' plan there's also the issue that the remaining half of the universe would surely continue to procreate, and it might be twenty years or a century, but we'd arrive at the same unsustainable situation again. But I don't really mind Thanos' plan not making total sense - dude is insane and has delusions of grandeur.

xpost yeah definitley, and this is how it usually plays out in the comics, where (all moral complexity aside) he comes off as much more of a sadist. But in this movie it did feel like he just wanted to get those chaos esmeralds asap and the ppl in his way were nuisances, not so much entertainments.

Duuuuuuuuuudes.

Dudes.

People have been making predictions about a Thunderbolts movie for a while, and my basic assumption is that it wouldn't work because the villain pool is a little shaky and because there isn't really sufficient motivation for a group of them to get together and pose as heroes.

But.

What if the motivation becomes the heroes eventually wresting the Gauntlet from Thanos and safeguarding the gems (as we know they probably will), and then a group of Bad Dudes who have a first-hand understanding of the danger involved (eg Red Skull, Mordo, maybe like Ultron) rises up to denounce these so-called heroes and the unchecked power they now wield.

BRB, speed-dialing Feige.

(arguing over what we would have done with the gems is pointless, protagonists are always bound by their own worldview, but anyway:) The Reality Gem only appears to change reality while he's looking at it - Mantis and Drax return to normal after he's left.

There isn't any given or imaginable rationale what the interplay between the different gems is that allows him the power for the finger-snap - we're expected to just treat him as a video game boss levelling up And That's Fine.

I got to see everyone in the cinema I was in mourn Spidey.

The Reality Gem only appears to change reality while he's looking at it - Mantis and Drax return to normal after he's left.

that's a good point i guess but i assumed he'd used the reality gem to do the actual wiping out of the universe - if it wasn;t that what was it? the soul gem?

(i'm down with old lunch's t-bolts movie btw)

It was all six - we're not told how, we're just told by Strange that he can.

(one of my favourite bits of the film is the fact that we're told (maybe twice) that he could do this with the snap of his fingers, but if you don't know the comics it may still come as a surprise that this isn't a rhetorical turn of phrase)

yeah it was def a rule-of-threes thing iirc (but we've established already today that i don't always rc) - they mention it twice before the inevitable denouement

My going theory (which I think I've mentioned itt) is that whatever Thanos thinks he did to wipe out half the universe is probably not exactly what happened. All those people are actually in the Soul Gem rn (with or without Gamora's explicit assistance/control over the gem).

yeah, i think that seems like a reasonable assumption

lmao so apparently Lucrecia Martel took a meeting with Marvel. I'd love a transcript.

I hear fanboys had major issues with her cinematic adaptation of beloved hero Headless Woman.

Yeah, the Soul Gem is the one gem that we didn't actually see the use of.

i want it all to be solved by the little dude from captain planet whose power was heart

Paramount and Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions are teaming to recruit Captain Planet to take pollution down to zero.

The studio is in talks for the rights to the 1990s cartoon series, and is eyeing Jono Matt and Scream Queens star Glen Powell to write the script.

If the deal is made, Jennifer Davisson Killoran and DiCaprio will produce the project via Appian Way, which signed a first-look deal with Paramount in March, along with Powell.

I maintain to this day that Captain Planet was one among a number of similar propaganda efforts on the part of the pollution industry to make environmentalism seem as uncool as possible.

I read the Infinity Gauntlet just now and that would have made for a hilarious movie if done as is

mission v much accomplished xp

Caveats re: Infinity Gauntlet

1) Starlin is Starlin. He does a very particular thing and you kinda have to be onboard with his thing or you're likely to find it corny af. Zen-Hooberis. Pip the Troll. Afroed evil Warlock analogues. All that.
2) Infinity Gauntlet is not just Infinity Gauntlet. It's worth going back and reading Starlin's runs on Warlock and Captain Marvel first, but at the very least his run on Silver Surfer and Thanos Quest are pretty essential. He's been writing this story in dribs and drabs for 40+ years, and Infinity Gauntlet is just a chapter.
3) It's probably best to just kinda ignore Starlin's employment of any non-cosmic characters. The inclusion of the regular heroes always felt a little bit perfunctory to me.

The one nice thing about Infinity Gauntlet as an event is that, in complete contrast with the mega-events of today where much of the story seems to occur throughout the dozens of tie-in issues, the crossovers are completely perfunctory. Unless you feel that it's very important to see Silver Surfer preventing Rhino from releasing zoo animals.

i can think of nothing more important tbh *pulls up marvel unlimited*

You didn't really get to see anyone mourn, which would be the actual emotional stake in this situation - the deaths aren't permanent but the characters don't know that, they could've used that for emotional resonance.

the movie ended like 2 min after everyone died

I know! Which makes all the talk about how devastating the moment is even weirder to me.

None of the Avengers died under the Obama administration

— KIΠG KUΠT∆ (@RNB215) May 9, 2018

#quicksilverwasafalseflag