Avengers: Infinity War

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.

Agree it's fundamentally shit that Gamora and Black Widow die as they did across the two films (regardless of where they go next). Black Widow being the only normal human top tier Avenger not utterly dependent on gadgets never really sat right either tho (at least partly why I found her the dullest).

It took me basically an entire year to realize that they already totally did the thing from Infinity Gauntlet where Thanos reduces Nebula to a shambling ruin, just in an entirely different context. Still would've liked to see her temporarily snag the gauntlet.

i did consider leaving t to answer that but look

― deemsthelarker (darraghmac), Friday, May 3, 2019 1:15 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

look at what? Somebody I tend to ignore anyway?

its endearing your brief moments of unfogged tetchiness, be well

gentlemen you can't fight in here this is the infinity war room

lol vg

*golf snap*

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)

― Tuomas, Friday, May 3, 2019 1:19 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.

― Tuomas, Friday, May 3, 2019 1:31 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for that.

So how many people have shown up to get the Soul Stone unaccompanied, then had to go all the way back to their home planet just to pick up a loved one to murder

— Steph Does Not Have Superhero Fatigue (@stephhasnoname) May 3, 2019

lol

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.

Yeah, this is how it was for me too. It was pretty much the same spine-tingling feeling that I had as a nine-year old, reading the final issue of Secret Wars, where (SPOILERS!) Doom has seemingly killed all the heroes and is savouring his new-found godhood, then Klaw raises the question of whether they died after all, Doom starts to doubt but still keeps on saying they are gone, and... BOOM! Thor's hammer crashers through the wall and the heroes charge on Doom. I never could've imagined I would feel the same sensation again, 30 years later, in a packed cinema, but there you have it.

xxpost Maybe it's all relative to the immediate circumstance. Like if you make the trip solo you just have to throw in your iPod Classic or something.

"I HAVE OTHER ERRANDS, RED SKULL, OK?? I MEAN GEEZ."

Skull: Come back! I was going to make espresso...

I'm interested in learning more about the chain of events that led to the Red Skull becoming a cosmic guardian of a magical stone. Like I assume it involved a lengthy apprenticeship with the In-Betweener involving the finer points of bearing and diction most becoming a demigod.

"Can I not just wear my uniform? Do I have to wear this ghost robe? It seems a little dramatic, and I'm a Nazi, for heaven's sake."

It's kind of poetic now that I think about it. The would-be conqueror managed to finagle stewardship of an infinity stone and an entire planet of his own. Just, y'know, a stone he can't use and a planet that's a barren rock. And he has to dress like a high school graduate for the rest of forever.

Or a high school student attending his graduation, rather. I forget sometimes that continuing to wear the gown is a choice I make daily and not a dictate imposed on all graduates in perpetuity.

It's kind of poetic now that I think about it. The would-be conqueror managed to finagle stewardship of an infinity stone and an entire planet of his own. Just, y'know, a stone he can't use and a planet that's a barren rock. And he has to dress like a high school graduate for the rest of forever.

― Ce Ce Penistongs (Old Lunch), Friday, 3 May 2019 14:40 (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is not a bad metaphor for how high-profile/ambitious failures end up in public sector orgs tbh

Yeah this was fine, especially Hulk and Thor.

Several things bugged me though:

SF has just about got its shit together but NYC is still a complete shithole after 5 years with deserted cars still in car parks etc. I get that narrative causality says that the 50% is weighted in favour of the plot (so all Hawkeye's family, all Spidey's school etc) but too many people to play baseball in a city that's been routinely destroyed in these movies? I guess there must be whole countries less 'important' completely unaffected.

Cap goes back in time with just the gems. Yes to the 'what happens when he meets the Red Skull, but how does he get it into Nathalie Portman's bloodstream?

The worst one is in the completely gratuitous A Force scene.
"How do we get this glove through them? <points at Thanos' giant army>"
Dunno, why don't you ask The Wasp? She was literally by the camper van in the preceding scene and has come here just to get in the shot so presumably she just waltzed through them. So give her the glove again and let her take her one step to the side to where it needs to be. (Or if she holds it and shrinks presumably that will work too.)

I didn't think about any of that. I’ve never seen any of the Ant-Man movies though.

New spiderman trailer is nice because it isn't stuffed with superheroes. I would be happy if it stayed that way for the whole movie. The universe needs a break from “everything is a crossover”.

It does have Spider-Man and Nick Fury and Happy Hogan and Maria Hill (and Mysterio) in it tbf

Chris McKenna wrote this, so I'll catch it for free one day and probably enjoy it

xpost Well...

CHRIS IN IN THE FFH CAST???? DONT PLAY WITH MY FEELINGS MARVEL pic.twitter.com/JUlNZguv2A

— hels (@nomadcevans) May 6, 2019

He was in Homecoming in the PSAs if I recall correctly