Avengers: Infinity War

who is confused about anything there until past nebula being able to bring a country-sized spaceship into the future without any hassle

I enjoyed the heck out of this. I commented on facebook as I was checking in at the theater "If you google 'edging' the first result is the MCU wiki."

xp it was miniaturized by Pym particles, just like the Milano was so that Hawkeye and Black Widow could take it back and fly from the Power Stone planet to the Soul Stone planet.

hmm i dont like this i dont like any of it

tbh I thought the exact same thing about the finger-snapping stuff. When Thanos did it the first time he was just making literal his "with the snap of the fingers" boasting. But here it's made out like it's the only way the magic glove operates. It's a giant god-glove that gives it bearer unlimited power (including snapping at all with a giant metal glove on), yet the act of snapping is so goofy and mundane. I guess they had to find some way to show it doing its thing, and a finger-snap is better than a hi-five, though that would have made a pretty funny movie.

i amused myself by thinking of it as a particular dig at that bono campaign a few years back

Thanos only *thinks* he's Bono.

Finger-snapping is just fanservice for the comics nerds, re: Thanos putting the whammy on half the universe in Infinity Gauntlet to the tune of 'Finger Popping Time'. But it's established there and elsewhere that no snapping was ever necessary to wield the magics of the Power Glove.

well as long as it's established

Avengers: Endgame (2019)
(dir. Joe & Anthony Russo) pic.twitter.com/2ZvQtBST6w

— Simpsons Films (@simpsonsfilms) April 27, 2019

well played

Thought this was a useful read

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/movies/avengers-endgame-questions-and-answers.html

Why does Natasha Romanoff have to die?

McFEELY Her journey, in our minds, had come to an end if she could get the Avengers back. She comes from such an abusive, terrible, mind-control background, so when she gets to Vormir and she has a chance to get the family back, that’s a thing she would trade for. The toughest thing for us was we were always worried that people weren’t going to have time to be sad enough. The stakes are still out there and they haven’t solved the problem. But we lost a big character — a female character — how do we honor it? We have this male lens and it’s a lot of guys being sad that a woman died.

MARKUS Tony gets a funeral. Natasha doesn’t. That’s partly because Tony’s this massive public figure and she’s been a cipher the whole time. It wasn’t necessarily honest to the character to give her a funeral.

Wow that is a crock of shit. She should have gotten a funeral because the Avengers were her family and it's not like Tony had a big public funeral in the movie anyway.

They should just admit they just had no idea what to do with Natasha/Black Widow - early on, they kept hinting at a possible (past?) romance with Hawkeye, and then a flirty thing with Cap, and then it turned out she was in love with Banner the whole time? And then they blew it up by having Hulk disappear into space for a couple of years.

They never knew how to write her as anything other than as a potential love interest for the other male heroes. They could have done something more with her friendship with Cap/Hawkeye, her desire for family, just anything else other than what was shown.

I'm increasingly curious about what the impending Black Widow movie has in store. And I'm increasingly certain that it won't simply be a mundane prequel.

Keep in mind that both her and Gamorra's deaths involved the soul stone, a fate which the comics have demonstrated is decidedly Not The End.

Calling it now: Adam Warlock pulls the two of them out of Soul World in GOTG 3.

...

What a weird and confusing movie. I didn’t pee once though! Very immersive.

1. How did Captain America suddenly develop the ability to use Thor’s Hammer?

2. What happens to Past!Kemora?

3. Is it considered correct (as was our consensus after the film last night) that Strange gave the crystal to Thanos because he saw this extended narrative that involved half the population dying, five years going by, time travel being invented, Hulk going back in time to 2012 and meeting with Tilda Swinton and retrieving one of the power stones? And that this conclusion is so transparent that “Strange knows what’s up” that the mere mention to Tilda Swinton that “Strange have Thanos the stone” is enough for her to give the stone to Hulk?

(My phone keeps correcting Thanos to Thanks and Hulk to Bulk)

Like here’s Tilda Swinton committing to defend the power stone with her life but simply saying “Strange gave it to Thanos” is enough for her to say “oh, I see, I see” and give it to Hulk?

Sorry for blinking blinking I just find seers to be intrusive elements in storytelling. Time travel is so fun in fiction! Seers can fuck off tho I hate puzzling out these know-it-alls. It’s like playing D&D with a sullen and manipulative DM

1. How did Captain America suddenly develop the ability to use Thor’s Hammer?

odin enchanted the hammer with the words "whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of thor"

cap was worthy

I just saw this. first time I saw a movie in a movie theater in twenty five years. I dunno, I got tempted having watching Infinity War on a transcontinental flight last month. to a billion dollars & beyond!

yeah I'm still confused about the Dr STrange stone bit.

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

― Mahogany Loggins (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 11 May 2018 12:11 (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would like to point out that i have been otm in this thread

Ah OK Ultron was a movie I skipped

it was eminently skippable tbh but yeah there was a scene where each avenger had a go at trying to pick up thor's hammer and everyone failed except cap, who seemed to shift it very slightly (muchto thor's consternation) just before ultron showed up and tried to kill them all

WmC why u give me ellipses bruh

Seems pretty clear to me that they have further plans for Black Widow given the impending Black Widow movie whose existence would otherwise now be really weird.

Yeah but lots of people seem to think it's a prequel movie.

But why

I mean they blessed us by not re-re-re-representing Spidey's origin. A prequel without some meaningful impact on the larger story seems decidedly outside the MCU purview at this point.

By which I mean (as I said upthread): yes, it will likely be to some extent a prequel inasmuch as ScarJo is appearing as a character who has just died but it's likely to be a prequel in the same way, say, Captain Marvel or the first Cap movie were prequels. And also I don't think its status as a prequel precludes future employment of Black Widow in a present context.

Keep in mind that both her and Gamorra's deaths involved the soul stone, a fate which the comics have demonstrated is decidedly Not The End.

I think we're at the point where comics continuity is no predictor of movie continuity.

Seems pretty clear to me that they have further plans for Black Widow

Clear to you based on what onscreen evidence?

Based, again, on the fact that one of the very next movies after the movie where they killed off Black Widow is a film starring Black Widow. Does this not strike you as a peculiar decision.

It really doesn't.

Like Vision is seemingly capital-d Dead with seemingly no chance of resurrection in sight and yet there is a show coming soon entitled WandaVision which leads me, somehow, to believe that his story isn't quite complete.

ach don't worry tony will invent a not-dead machine in an afternoon

ok so i don't know how the soul stone works in the comics, but i did wonder why they couldn't just get BW back in exchange for returning it to Vormir.

her death didn't work for me (none of them worked for me until Morgan Stark asked for cheeseburgers tbh) i think because death seems so easily reversed in this particular MCU? like Bucky died and then he didn't, Pepper died and then she didn't, Vision died and then he came back and then died again, and then Thanos snapped his fingers and everyone died but we knew they were going to be unsnapped anyway. So I always assumed that Natasha would be back by the end of the movie. and then she wasn't. :/

Infinity War Gamora dies, but the 2014 new timeline Gamora has jumped five years into the future, presumably to restart whatever it was she had with Quill and the Guardians. I'm guessing this is what happens with Loki too, after he steals the Tesseract. So the version of Loki who had reconciled with Thor in Ragnarok and was killed by Thanos has now been replaced with the old chaotic Loki, back to stir up trouble.

i think it's clear at this point that the black widow movie will feature scarjo only in flashback and the movie proper will follow the training of the new black widow, who will be played by david harbour

It was gonna be David Harbour but then Hellboy tanked. Now it's gonna be Seth Rogen.

ant man will say "oh hey guys i dont know how it would work but if there was a way for dead people to be ...... not dead......?" and hawkeye would say "thats the plot of night of the living dead 2" and thered be a humorous beat it would be written into the script as just that CHARACTERS PAUSE FOR HUMOROUS BEAT then hulk would say "thats zombies" ant man would say " no i dont mean zombies" then pause for a HUMOROUS BEAT "ok yes i mean zombies" then somebody would just solve death

and everyone will watch it and say "look it was explained what a good movie"

I have been okay with the logic of resurrection in the MCU. I hope that they never solve death to the extent that the comics have (ie to the extent that I don't even understand why anyone in that world wastes any time on grieving).

im kinda there in this world tbh

same

roz otm that they never really seemed to get a proper handle on the black widow as a character - whatever they do with the solo movie i hope they get a chance to give scarjo a decent arc

also i really wanna see the gorgeous pouting david harbour squeezed into that black widow outfit

Now would be the time to employ the early-'70s trope of the Black Widow stripping nude at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, I couldn't help but think that if they absolutely did invent a time machine that could in fact be used to pull entire spaceships full of armies out of the past and into the present... and Past!Kemora is happily in the present to party with Present!Nebula and learn to love Resurrected!Quill again... then what's keeping them from just nipping back and grabbing a random Tony? or a random Widow? Some kind of Time Ethics?

GAmora

(sorry)

I mean, Dr. Strange could have travelled back in time and averted all of this in the first place, couldn't he?

The only real problem I have with the "rules" of these movies (and it's really true for all action movies, just more so with superheroes) is they do a pretty poor job defining the powers of said heroes, who seem to vacillate between degrees of selective invulnerability and immortality, not to mention that everyone appears to have the resilience and healing of a character like Wolverine. Whether Dr. Strange and Captain Marvel or, yeah, Scarlet Witch or even Vision (RIP), I never quite know what they are capable of or even supposed to be capable of. That's one thing, say, the X-Men movies got right: you generally know what everyone does. These MCU movies sort of coast on the iconography while skimping on the specifics.

One prequel (midquel? some dumb neologism including -quel) I wouldn't mind seeing, if done right, is Cap's solo adventures through time. Assuming something intersting occurred along the way which diverted him from Forrest Gumping himself into previous films.

Oh is it Gamora? I think I kept willing it to be Kemora because it's weird she'd be named after Sodom's sister city