Thoughts on Infinity War

I saw Avengers: Infinity War last night, so I can finally respond to repeated pleas for me to write something about it. Warning that I will go fully into spoilers (including one spoiler/speculation at the very end about Avengers 4) and also that I saw it late last night and am running on not much sleep.

Non-spoilery version: it’s really good (but not perfect), it’s a really daring gamble with the entire cinematic universe thing, although I feel like you’ll get more out of the movie if you’ve seen at least the first Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, at least the first Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Black Panther. (But given that those films made either almost or over a billion dollars each, I’m going to guess that there is a huge audience that has.)

Plot

The basic plot structure is pretty simple – Thanos wants to acquire all six infinity stones so that he can wipe out half the population of the universe in the name of Malthusian economics, and the heroes are racing to try and stop him in a number of ways:

Thor, Rocket, and Groot travel to Nidavellir to forge a weapon that can kill Thanos.

the rest of the Guardians race to Knowhere to find the Aether/Reality Stone before Thanos can take it from the Collector.

Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange try to keep the Eye of Agamotto/Time Stone from Thanos and decide to stage an ambush against Thanos on his home planet of Titan.

and the Vision and Scarlet Witch are attacked by two of Thanos’ goons and Cap and the rest of the Secret Avengers take them to Wakanda to try to remove the Mind Stone from Vision without killing him.

Towards the end of the film, these strands re-integrate as Thor and co. show up to try to save the day in Wakanda, and the rest of the Guardians pursue Thanos to Titan and join in the ambush with Tony and co., and finally Thanos shows up in Wakanda to get the last stone from Vision.

Character Interactions

In part because they’re working with a much larger cast, Infinity War is not as fleet as Civil War was in terms of balancing screen-time and pace so that (almost) every character gets a fully-realized arc. Some characters – Tony, Gamora, Star-Lord, Vision and Wanda – get much more developed arcs than another characters. (I was surprised by how little dialogue Cap gets, for example.)

What the Russo brothers give us instead is an incredible kalleidoscope of character interaction, throwing together different knots of characters so we can see them bounce off eachother – Doctor Strange and Tony Stark’s arrogant-off, Thor palling around with Rocket and Groot (he calls Rocket a rabbit, learned Groot’s language as an elective), Star-Lord’s outrage that Spider-Man doesn’t really think Footloose is the best movie of all time…I could go on forever. When you have ten years of building up a relationship between these characters and the audience, there is an enormous emotional payoff in getting to see all of them react to one another on a scale that’s as big or bigger as that scene from the first Avengers movie.

I do have one critique when it comes to character arcs, which is that this movie undoes a LOT of the work that was done in Thor: Ragnarok – Thor’s refugeed Asgardians are seemingly wiped out, his repaired relationship with Loki is ended by the latter’s death, Thor even gets a new eye and a new axe to replace what he lost in the film. This heightens the already-existing risk of the big tentpoles undermining the individual character movies, and will make it much harder to keep talented filmmakers like Taika Waititi coming back if they feel like their work is being disrespected.

However, as I’ll explain below, I think there are ways of rowing this back.

Thanos as a Character

One of the biggest open questions heading into this movie was whether Thanos would be a worthy enough villain to justify the hype and the stakes of the film. While he’s been a Doctor Claw-style presence from Avengers on, the audience hasn’t really seen Thanos as an active character before. Add to that the difficulty of pulling off a CGI/Mocap villain, which can be done very well or very badly and almost never in the middle.

I would argue they broadly succeeded in a number of areas:

Thanos is a terrifying presence, who manhandles the main characters with ease, shrugs off seeming deaths repeatedly, and only becomes more terrifying as he acquires more stones and generates momentum until by the end where he is a runaway freight train that cannot be stopped.
By leaning heavily on Nebula, Gamora, and Josh Brolin’s weary conviction, emotional intensity, and underplayed charisma, Thanos gets as close as you can get to being a real character when it comes to a universal population control fanatic who’s trying to become god. But by the end of it, you do get the sense of someone utterly determined to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to achieve his ideal.
In terms of plot structure, he’s absolutely the driving force of the film, a clear case of a villain protagonist on a dark version of the well-trod Hero’s Journey-by-way-of-Collection Quest. At every step, he’s one step ahead of the good guys, alternately using brawn, brains, and introspection to achieve his ultimate goal.

His henchmen, by contrast, are pretty disposable, with the exception of Ebony Maw’s evangelical preacher, who gets some semblance of character.

The Snap and the MCU

So let’s talk about the ending: Thanos wins. He collects all the stones despite the heroes coming very close to stopping him, snaps his fingers, and half the universe – including Black Panther, Falcon, Vision, Bucky, Star-Lord, Mantis, Gamora, Drax, Groot, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury – suddenly ceases to exist. Even before that happens, Heimdall, Loki, an unknown number of Asgardians, Gamora, and Vision are dead at his hands.

This is the daring gamble I spoke of above the fold. The Russo brothers have blown up a huge chunk of the MCU: a good half of the Avengers, most of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the stars of Black Panther and Spider-Man are gone. And even though on a meta level we know that some people are coming back – there’s a Black Panther 2 and Spider-Man 2 that’s going to happen, Black Widow has her solo movie, etc. – on an emotional level the loss felt real in the moment, and that’s all that matters.

At the same time, Marvel have given themselves a huge number of outs:

Doctor Strange and the Time Stone: there’s a quite prominent narrative trick that happens in the Iron Man/Doctor Strange plot, where Doctor Strange explains at some detail that he will stop at nothing to defend the Time Stone, including abandoning Tony Stark to Thanos. Then Doctor Strange uses the Time Stone to see every possible alternate future to find the one in which Thanos can be defeated. Then, after the ambush fails, Doctor Strange simply hands over the Time Stone to save Tony Stark’s life and, before he himself disintegrates into nothingness, tells Tony that “now we’re in the endgame.” Conceivably, the Time Stone can be used to reset ANYTHING that happened in the film: the fandom seems to be coming around to the idea that this can only reset the people who died as a result of the snap, there’s no reason why one couldn’t go back further.*
Minds Set In Stone: while Gamora and Vision would seem to fall outside of the snap limitation, these two characters have specific outs. In Thanos’ vision, we see the soul of Gamora in the Soul Stone, so it’s quite possible that she could come back through that route. Likewise, Vision’s mind was actively being worked on by Shuri when they were attacked by Thanos’ goon, and it’s quite possible that she might have gotten close enough to separating Vision from the Mind Stone to have downloaded his consciousness or a copy thereof to her wrist computer. (And Vision has a history of reboots and upgrades to his consciousness in the comics…)
Just That Tough: on paper, a LOT of Asgardians died on their refugee ship before or after it was blown up by the Power Stone. However, as we see from Thor’s case, Asgardians are tough enough to survive in the vaccuum of space, so it’s possible that other Asgardians might have survived their wounds and gotten picked up. Heimdall and Loki are a more difficult case: we saw the light go out in Heimdall’s eyes, and although Thanos lampshaded Loki’s habit of faking his death, he could be doing it again. Then again, given the Time Stone, they could hit the reset button on either or both deaths.

So what I find so daring is not just that Marvel is risking fan ire by blowing up their franchise, but that they are about to attempt an in-universe reboot that would theoretically allow them to bring back or leave dead whoever they want in order to produce their preferred new status quo for Phase 4-6. And if they can get the fans to accept that, they can do anything.

***SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS 4:

Based on set and casting news about Avengers 4 – Steve Rogers being seen in his Avengers 1 uniform, Thor with his original long haircut, and Cassie Lang (Ant-Man’s daughter) being recast to an older actress from the one playing her in Ant-Man and the Wasp – it’s pretty clear that Avengers 4 will involve extensive time travel both backwards and forwards in time and possibly to alternate timelines. This is why I’m more bullish on the Time Stone being used for more than just reversing the snap.

How to Integrate the X-Men into the MCU, Take 2

So a while back I talked about how I would integrate the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but in more general thematic terms as opposed to plot and specific continuity.

A tweet by “Moviebob” Bob Chipman got me thinking in more detail, and I think I have some ideas:

Part of the issue I was having is how to combine certain timeline issues with the new revelation about mutants’ existence, and I think I’ve hit on a nifty solution. We already know from CA:CW and Ant-Man (and Hulk too) that the U.S Govt. had a covert superhero program from the 60s onwards, trying to replicate the lost Super-Soldier program.

This project could easily have included more forceful and less savory attempts to recruit mutants into the national security state, i.e Weapon X, with SHIELD trying to cover up the existence of mutants and HYDRA infiltrating the unethical human experimentation side. In response, mutants go underground to avoid being turned into weapons of war against their will and have remained underground ever since. This solves the problem of how to combine secrecy and the mutant metaphor.

The mutant “Masquerade” to borrow from my White Wolf days continues until the emergence of the Avengers and the collapse of SHIELD, since now the public is starting to warm to the idea of superpowered people as good and the institution that’s been hunting them is deinstitutionalized. Xavier (who’s updated to be a Vietnam War veteran) begins to recruit and train the X-Men into becoming an Avengers for the mutants.

However, the events of CA:CW creates the basis for “a world that hates and fears them” through the backlash against the Avengers and the creation of the Sokovia Accords, which looks very different to mutants. Now the whole world is out to get them, not just SHIELD/HYDRA. At the same time, the events of Infinity War and A4 convince Xavier that the X-Men are needed to save the world, since mutant registration is moot if someone like Thanos kills half of the world. However, this stance is controversial within the mutant community, not everyone agrees, but after the first appearance of the X-Men the cat’s out of the bag…

Which brings in the X-Men’s own protagonists. Personally, I wouldn’t bring in Magneto as the primary villain in the first film – he’s been really over-used by the Bryan Singer X-Men films and needs a break. Rather, I would start the X-Men off with someone who hasn’t been seen yet in the X-films:

Yes, the mad scientist Mr. Sinister, who brings in all the same eugenics/Darwinian theme as Apocalypse but with glam rock stylings instead of ponderousness. And the best part is, the X-Men can totally kill off Sinister in the first film without wasting him, because Mr. Sinister has INFINITE CLONES. Hell, if they want to, they can even do the gender-swapped Miss Sinister thing, because Mr. Sinister doesn’t care about gender norms.

So how do we deal with Magneto’s timeline thing? Well, to begin with, I’d keep him in the background and build him up through mentions in dialogue and post-credit scenes until they’ve built him up enough (especially if they need to recast Magneto). And there’s a couple of ways you can hook Magneto into setting while still keeping his origin:

We know that HYDRA was operating human experimentation programs during WWII, and that they used human cryonics to deal with potentially dangerous subjects. What if HYDRA were experimenting on a young Erik Lensherr (a bit older than the child the Singer films had him, more like a young man in his mid-20s, closer to Claremont’s continuity), he rebelled and they flash-froze him to prevent him escaping?
He’s stuck in an abandoned HYDRA lab for however many years are necessary, but at a useful time, the systems keeping him frozen fail and he wakes up. They could go the amnesia route (he’s been down that road before), or you could have Magneto hunting HYDRA from the shadows as in First Class.
At some point, he meets Xavier, they become friends but disagree about the possibility of mutant integration into human society. Then sometime around A:AoU, Magneto finds out that the wife and/or kids he thought died in the camps survived and settled in Sokovia…and Wanda and Pietro were his grandchildren, experimented on by HYDRA to unlock their genetic potential.

This gives him a good hook into a main cast member of the existing MCU – he’s the grandfather of an Avenger – but also a good reason to be an anti-villain: he hates HYDRA and the Sokovia Accords, but also blames Stark and the Avengers for the death of his kin.

Do you think Marvel will cross X-Men into the MCU smoothly?

I think they’ll definitely take their time at it; for one thing, there’s still Fox films that have been filmed (Deadpool 2, Dark Phoenix, New Mutants) and in development (Gambit, X-Force, Deadpool 3, New Mutants sequels, an X-23 film, the James Franco Multiple Man movie, the Kitty Pryde movie that Miller and Bendis are working on), etc. Likewise, Marvel’s got the rest of Phase 3 (Infinity War, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel, Avengers 4) and Phase 4 (Spiderman Homecoming sequel, Guardians 3, the Black Widow project, etc.) in the works.

So I don’t think you’ll see any integration until after 2020, which means that Feige and his crew will have some time to figure out how to integrate the X-Men into the MCU. Hopefully that allows for a smooth entry.

A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 12: The Mutant Metaphor (Part IV) – Lawyers, Guns & Money

Face front, true believers! In the last entry in this series, I was intending to write about Chris Claremont’s stamp on the mutant metaphor. However, recently I got bitten by a (non-radioactive) different idea and so instead I want to talk about another aspect of the mutant metaphor, a metaphor-within-a-metaphor, one that’s cropped up in …

A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Week 12: The Mutant Metaphor (Part IV) – Lawyers, Guns & Money

Why ‘Im Relieved Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Writing Captain America – Lawyers, Guns & Money

Although it’s been widely rumored for months, Marvel only lately announced that the next writer of Captain America will be Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is excellent news for a couple reasons: first, because after Nick Spencer’s disastrous run where Captain America became a Nazi, the book and the character badly need not so much a “Fresh …

Why ‘Im Relieved Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Writing Captain America – Lawyers, Guns & Money

Are there any 90s era Captain America comics or runs worth reading? Or was Captain America badly affected by the Dark Age of Comics?

So here’s the thing…one of the first superhero comics I remember reading was Captain America Vol 1 Issue 388, which started in media res with Captain America and his teammates plummeting to their deaths because MADAM (the female MODOK) has cut the parachutes attached to their ejector seats…and it was deep and unironic love at first sight:

So the answer to your question is that, yes, Captain America was affected by the 90s, but more in a cheesy 90s RADICAL TO THE EXTREME way than a particularly grimdark way. As a result, you did get ridiculous stuff like Capwolf:

And there was a brief period where a meth lab explosion caused a chemical reaction with the super-hero serum which meant that his body began to deteriorate so he needed a powered exoskeleton (because power armor was big in the 90s), or the time that Cap got “vibranium cancer” in a fight with the Beyonder and was accidentally cured by Klaw, and a bunch of other 90s cheese.

But that stuff is mere rococo ornamentation on top of Mark Gruenwald’s 137-issue run, which gave us Crossbones, the Serpent Society (a villain worker’s co-op complete with health benefits and profit-sharing), Diamondback (Cap’s ex-villain longtime girlfriend), Flag-Smasher (a bizarre anti-nationalist terrorist), Left-Winger and Right-Winger, Cap resigning over the cover-up of Nuke’s attack on New York which leads to a right-wing Captain being put in his place by the Commission on Superhuman Activities, which leads Cap to take up a new identity as “The Captain” (which is probably Cap’s laziest secret identity ever), which leads the two of them to fight and ultimately Cap helps out the right-wing Captain who’s losing his mind.

As far as the rest of the 90s go, I wouldn’t bother with the Heroes Reborn arc, although Liefeld is apparently a nice guy who’s actually been working on his art in recent years and has learned to draw feet, so we shouldn’t hate on him so much.

Regarding mutants in the MCU: Ride the wave set up by the inhuman outbreak and the anti-inhuman persecution in Agents of SHIELD. We had some people randomly developing powers after consuming fish oil supplements… now we have hundreds of people randomly developing powers just because. Boom! Paranoia rise and you have the Friends of Humanity and Senator Kelly or the likes doing an extreme reading of the Sokovia Accords, demanding summary detention of suspected mutants

That’s certainly an option, even though the MCU has tended to avoid story filtering upwards from the TV shows to the movies, and the whole drive to get Inhumans to replace the X-Men is dead now that the deal with Fox has gone through.

If I were going to do it, I’d start from the Sokovia Accords: world governments were freaked out enough by a small team of superheroes, several of whom are baseline humans, and many of whom are sui-generis accidents, that they passed a global registration initiative, backed up by black site prisons, indefinite detention, and UN-backed death squads.

Now all of the sudden there is an entire population of people who are born superheroes, no one knows how many of them there are, and their most prominant public figure is Magneto, who’s loudly proclaimed that he views the Sokovia Accords as a genocidal threat to his people.

Thoughts on the Disney Fox deal?

As an MCU fan, I’m happy that the Fantastic Four and their Rogue’s Gallery can be a part of the MCU. The X-Men films will take a bit of finessing to bring into the MCU, because

A. I don’t think you want to lose the genre/experimental vibe they’ve been going with since Deadpool/Logan (otoh, the main X-Men films are not going in a good direction), and
B. getting the place of mutants in the MCU right is critically important, because if you get it wrong you get Inhumans and no-one wants Inhumans.

However, I strongly disagree with arguments that the X-Men should be in their own universe. Wolverine started as a Hulk antagonist, the X-Men met the Avengers in X-Men #9 and hung out with Spider-man all the time, various X-Men join the Avengers, etc. We know that these characters can work in the same universe because they have for a half-century.

At the same time, as someone who doesn’t like corporate consolidation, I’m not super-thrilled about every part of the deal that doesn’t have to do with Marvel IP.

You prefer Marvel over DC? Is there any particular reason for this?

I don’t think there’s a reason, per se. As I’ve said before, when I started reading comic books as a kid I did so through trade paperbacks or through random issues bought off of card tables on the sidewalk. And I read a decent bit of DC – I remember Knightfall quite well, Death of Superman less well – as well as Marvel.

But it was Marvel that I gravitated to: most specifically to Claremont’s run on X-Men and Captain America, although I did read a bit of Spiderman (although the line was in the throes of the Clone Saga at the time and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what’s going on) and some other stuff.

As to why? I was a kid growing up in NYC, which meant that the Marvel Universe was happening right around the corner. So there was that instant feeling of recognition and familiarity that I just didn’t get from DC Comics, which has always preferred to keep its cities blandly abstract.

So what were your thoughts on Ragnarok? Did they give enough for Thor to do? Did they utilize Hulk properly? Did they tackle the concept of Ragnarok well enough? And what did you think of the Valkyrie?

So…thoughts on Thor: Ragnarok below the cut:

Overall Thoughts:

Right off the bat, let me say that this is clearly the best Thor movie. And while it felt absolutely like a Taika Waititi film – the sense of humor, the love of awkwardness, the offbeat timing – it also felt like an absolute love letter to Jack Kirby (Hela, the look of Sakaar) and Walt Simonson (Surtur, Skurge the Executioner, the brief mentions of Thor as a frog and the flash of Beta Ray Bill).

That being said, it’s not a perfect film and there were a few places where I felt like it needed a few more minutes to wrap up character arcs or have a bit more plot buildup (I would have liked to see an undercard fight or even just a montage in the arena).

Oh, and they earned the hell out of their use of Immigrant Song.

“Did they give enough for Thor to do?”

Thor gets the most complete arc of any of the characters, starting the movie as much the same arrogant young warrior-prince as he’s been before, albeit a little wiser now (hence seeing through Loki’s disguise). And then in the course of the movie he loses his father, he loses Mjolnir, he has to become the leader of a team, he saves his people, loses an eye, comes into his own as the God of Thunder and not merely the wielder of a hammer, and ends the movie as the All-Father of the people of Asgard. It works as a nice dyptich with the original Thor.

“Did they utilize Hulk properly?”

Yes. Indeed, Hulk specifically gets more characterization in this movie than he’s had in any of the Avengers movies, in no small part because he gets more than one line. We see him living in barbarian splendor on Sakaar being the crowd favorite, we see that he has made a friend, we see him butt heads with but eventually come together with Thor, we see something of his internal anguish in the wake of Age of Ultron, etc.

What we don’t get as much is enough Banner. We get a setup that he’s truly terrified that he’s completely lost control to the Hulk, that he might never come back, and we see him briefly overcome that fear to faceplant onto the Bifrost, but we don’t see what the news status quo is afterwards. We get the setup that he and Valkryie almost recognize that Hulk and Valykrie were friends, but there’s not enough of a payoff for that. I would have like to get a few more minutes of Banner.

“Did they tackle the concept of Ragnarok well enough?“

I thought they did a really interesting reversal through the line about Asgard being its people not the planet, with the heroes bringing about Ragnarok rather than trying to prevent it, in order to defeat a more insiduous evil. And given that it ends with pretty much all recognizable Asgardians save for Heimdall dead and the rest refugees, it’s hard to be more final than that.

And they even gave us a moment of Skurge standing alone at Gjallerbru.

“And what did you think of the Valkyrie?”

The Valkyrie was given just enough of a character arc to be functional – runs away from her confrontation with Hela and then comes back to get revenge for her fallen sisters – but more could have been done. Apparently there were some scenes they cut, some of which involved actually mentioning that Valkyrie was bi, and that would have been a nice addition.