Avengers: Infinity War

"When someone with more time and commitment than I pressed him on it, guess which two shots he very specifically hated about the movie?"

the scene with all the women heroes advancing and....beats the fuck out of me but probably something with Captain Marvel.

and her new butch haircut

That she’s had in the comics for years

america’s ass was the other one, i’d guess

i'm assuming the "cap moderates a survivor's group" bit

God knows. Cap passing off the shield to a non-white person? Or perhaps the fact that he didn't make an 'ew' face when a dude talked about dating another dude? Who knows what's gonna trigger these emotional infants, and, frankly, who gives a fuck? I hope the Avengers will have made the full transition into the Rainbow Squad of Inclusion five years from now just to give the regressives a series of debilitating coronaries.

Old Lunch hit it with the first guess.

I'm assuming Captain Marvel just pissed him off in general, but he was really insistent that Captain American has to be white.

i'm curious if Sam is really going to be Captain America given that we already know Falcon is getting his own show on Disney with Hawkeye. Or will it be Hawkeye and Captain Sam? I dunno!

I"m glad Anthony Mackie will be around longer though and get some more character development since I think he's a good actor.

He's going to be super pissed when Tessa Thompson becomes Thor in the next phase xp

Yeah, Sam was one of the characters that really grew on me as I was rewatching the other movies with my son.

Oh god, yes. I unfollowed him today, so he'll have to rage without me. I can't deal with these comicsgaters.

those bits were eye-rolly and lame because cynical and forced but feeling any more strongly than that about em is desperately sad

lots of the movie was eyerolly and lame, pick yr battles like

He's going to be super pissed when Tessa Thompson becomes Thor in the next phase xp

For those who didn't already know, Sam Wilson was Captain America in the comics for several years

So, if you knew anything about the source material, you saw that transition coming when they introduced Sam in the first place

(Particularly when Bucky, who has also been Captain America in the comics, was all "no dude, this is you" when old Cap showed up)

btw I really liked this movie a lot, I just wish it had put in more super pissed Wanda

Old Lunch hit it with the first guess.

I'm assuming Captain Marvel just pissed him off in general, but he was really insistent that Captain American has to be white.

Probably read Art of the Deal lately

Has he... read a comic book recently? Sam’s run with the shield is canon.

Of course he probably hasn't. I'd be shocked if he's ever cracked a comic book, I'm sure it's any excuse to bitch about "PC culture run amok".

These are really weird in that there are about 12 movies-worth of potentially interesting material they couldn't film or show in order to fit the 3hr run-time (e.g. Cap's Excellent Replacing the Stones Adventure, Black Widow's Superteam Management Seminar, Hawkeye Murders the Remaining 50% of the NY Mets, etc...)

I wonder if it's possible to compress a comic book movie to the point where almost everything happens offscreen and cut half the budget in effects savings.

Kinda cool

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-fun-story-behind-an-avengers-endgame-cameo-you-pro-1834418343

i noticed that and i thought i was going crazy

anyway, this was fun--up its own ass in a good way.

i'm told howard the duck is in the final battle scene somewhere.

when the wasp shows up

he's to her left/our right with a gun?!

Now he's on Earth he can cameo in every future MCU film more easily.

the behavior approvingly described in this article is just shy of psychotic

https://news.avclub.com/mans-year-long-quest-to-pay-back-the-troll-who-spoiled-1834487235

it's totally psychotic. he also had his phone out taking pictures of the screen throughout the movie

Ehh, this sounds fake.

Making this up would be almost as pathetic

we, a culture-consuming society,

Was gonna make a snark but what can you even do with a line like that but transcribe it verbatim, really.

what kind of mind is that

It's a story on the internet. It is being sold to us as a true story. It's a simple revenge fantasy that could be made up with a minimum of imagination, but making it come true would require the sort of obsessive behavior very few people would ever engage in. Plausibility says it is faked. Who knows? Ultimately, who cares?

hey guy we just paid $1.2 billion to see a simple revenge fantasy...

I wish they’d given Hayley Atwell a few speaking lines in the movie, that would have made the Cap/Peggy reunion perfect for me. Such as it was, I loved that Cap went out the way he did.

I was impressed by the little bits & pieces brought back from the first Iron Man movie, the cheeseburgers, the arc reactor that Pepper commemorated for him, etc. I was dreading seeing him go but I liked the way they did it.

RDJ really set a great tone for all the Marvel movies that came after (Favreau’s directing too). But acting-wise, being able to walk the line between naturalistic/comedic & emotional in a way that never felt corny, to make him human & weirdly relatable was an impressive feat. and I think he was a pretty great ambassador for the “franchise” in general. I said on FB that it’s wild to think there’s a whole section of fans who have only ever known RDJ as Iron Man, who have no clue how far he fell. Or his career before that! The guy who sang with Sting on Ally McBeal is some kid’s idea of a superhero. I think it’s kinda great.

speaking of $1.2 billion...

In 2019 Variety reported that Avengers: Endgame (featuring Mantlo's creation Rocket Raccoon) grossed $1.2 billion in its opening weekend. At the same time, Michael Mantlo was forced to initiate a Go Fund Me for $100,000 (0.0083% of $1.2 billion) of medical debt for Bill Mantlo's care.

^^^ a culture-consuming society

I saw this and I thought it was a bit of mess, with a lot great stuff going on, but with many odd or bad choices by the film-makers as well. So I'll try to break it down:

GOOD

* The slow beginning. It was great choice to show the actual effects of Thanos's fingersnap to detail, as it established the stakes of the story, and made the PTSD the heroes were suffering from as well as their choice to try and reverse it all more emotionally credible. People made fun of the length of the movie before it was released, but that slow first hour was completely justified from a story-telling perspective.

* The BttF-inspired parts of visiting the older movies was fun and gave them a good opportunity to reflect on how much had changed. And I loved it that it gave some of the better supporting actors in the franchise, such as Tilda Swinton and Rene Russo, a chance to do poignant cameos, especially considering how male-heavy the main cast was this time.

* Thanos. Bringing back the younger, more power-hungry Thanos as the main villain instead of the somber older version who had alread sacrificed Gamora and gained everything he wanted was a great move. It would've been kinda hard to explain why the older Thanos would even bother to fight anyone anymore, so it made total sense that he didn't.

* Nebula. I really like the character as well as Gillan's take on her, so it was nice that she was given so much space here, especially since, again, this movie was dominated by the male heroes. She provided a nice counter-point to the more light-hearted, wisecracking human heroes such as Iron Man, and I wouldn't have minded seeing even more of that dynamic. I hope we get that in GotG 3.

* "Avengers... assemble!" Yeah, I get it, having every hero alive come and fight Thanos was an utter fanservice moment, and logistically it doesn't really make much sense (how was Dr. Strange able to locate and organise them all in the 30 minutes or so between his resurrection and the battle?)... But I'm one of those people who started reading Marvel comics as kid in the '80s, when they were considered a weird and geeky hobby by the mainstream, and even more so if you continued reading them as an adult, so there have so many times where you have to justify your love for them and why they are (or at least can be) as valid form entertaintment as any other type of genre fiction. So having watched these characters slowly becoming accepted by almost everyone, and seeing the biggest blockbuster movie of recent decades culminate in a scene where you have dozens of them come together, including both characters I've loved since I was kid (like the Scarlet Witch and Thor) and ones I've discovered as an adult (like the Guardians of the Galaxy), it did bring a tear to my eye. It was cheap, it was emotionally manipulative, and it was AWESOME!

BAD

* The aforementioned male focus of the movie. I get it that this was supposed to be swan song of the original Avengers team, but since that team was criticized for being less diverse than the comic book Avengers have been for decades, and since the MCU movies and TV series after the first batch have done some effort in trying to diversify the cast, it was a bad choice to roll back to the old status quo. Especially since Black Widow dies mid-movie, and Nebula is replaced with her evil version, so a large part of the final third is just a bunch of male heroes with Nebula and Gamora on the sidelines.

* The self-deprecating and quippy humour that they were still trying to pull off, especially with Thor. I get it that it worked very well in the GotG movies, but they have a different tone, and James Gunn was excellent at finding a proper balance between bathos and jokes. This, however, is a story that takes place after a massive cosmic apocalypse where everyone lost so many loved ones, so including things like Big Lebowski fat jokes and Hot Tub Time Machine pop culture arguments felt out of place. Just because one of your movies found success with a specific formula doesn't mean you need to apply it to every following one; it's okay to have more melancholy and drama in a story like this.

SO-SO

* Black Widow's sacrifice. It made sense from character point of view, because we know Natasha would absolutely sacrifice herself for Clint and his family. But her dying so early contributed to the male-centricness of the movie mentioned above, and also I don't think either the writers nor Johansson have really managed to make her into an interesting character that we should care about. So, even though some fans apparently are mad that we saw Tony's funeral but not hers, I totally get why they omitted that, because losing her simply doesn't feel half as sad as losing Iron Man... It isn't even as sad as Gamora's equivalent death in the previous movie.

* The female Avengers fight scene. That was even more contrived and fanservicey than the "assemble!" moment, and while I appreciated utterly breaking the male focus of the movie and showcasing all these superheroines for a while, I couldn't help but think that almost everyone in that scene have so far only been minor or supporting characters, unlike the male team that dominated most of the movie. So while the scene itself was fun and cool, it didn't feel earned and it reeked of tokenism.

* The 5 year time skip not being undone. When the movie introduced Tony's daughter after the skip, my immediate thought is that it would end with Tony getting the Infinity Gauntlet, but then he finds out that the only way to reverse everything Thanos did was to rewind time back to a point before the fingersnap, meaning his daughter would cease to exist, so that's the sacrifce he has to make. But that didn't happen, and on the one hand I appreciate that the movie didn't cheapen the dark tone and deaths of Infinity War by resetting everything, the idea that the MCU Earth would still resemble our Earth in movies that'll follow is ridiculous. The next movies will be set in society where half of the population have lived through an incredible apocalypse and emotional trauma, while the other half hasn't. Infrastructures have collapsed, families have lost 5 years of being together, and what about all the people who lost a spouse, grieved, eventually found a new love, and now their spouse is alive again? Or all the suicides that must've happened because of loss and grief? Did Hulk's finger-snap also bring back of all of Thanos's secondary victims, such as those suicides, or all the people who died in an airplane/train/bus/car crash when the drivers suddenly disappeared? The effects of all this on the nations of Earth should be tremendous, yet I'm sure in the next MCU they'll be quickly explained away, since I'm sure they don't want to devote their next 8 movies to depicting what it's like to live in a post-post-apocalyptic society. So as a dramatic choice for this movie it works, but for the MCU as a whole it's a terrible decision.

but listen do you think the movie had a male focus

(you are otm in general)

Was this the first time Nebula got to be a full character? I thought she wasa bit of a cipher or instrument or whatever in the first GoTG and wondered how fulfilling that was for an actress, but here she's at least a fullspeaking part.

she is a fairly well featured character across at least two other of the movies iirc

i did consider leaving t to answer that but look

She's had more to do in all of the other movies than Falcon, but apparently he's earned the right to be Captain America.

Tuomas, you OTM re: the 'Avengers...assemble!' moment with scores of super-dupers rushing to the rescue. No lie, that was the closest this world-weary geezer has come to a feeling of child-like abandon and awe in quite some time. And for the reasons you describe. To have the crazy adventures and melodrama that enthralled me as a kid, sitting alone on my bedroom floor, suddenly recast on a giant screen amidst a crowd of people...it was something else.

xp you got a jockey promoted to god of thunder aint you ever happy

They fleshed her out more properly in GotG 2, and those bits were already well executed by Gunn and Gillan, but it was all still focused on her love/hate sibling relationship with Gamora. This was the first time they let her stand on her own.

(xposts)

Also, the movie Nebula is almost a completely different character than the comic book Nebula (both visually and personality-wise), who's already a minor character to begin with. So they don't have years worth of characterisation to draw from, like with most of the other characters, so you gotta credit Gillan and Gunn for making her so memorable anyway.