This article contains spoilers from Avengers: Infinity War
So after years of waiting, it’s finally here, the countdown to Avengers: Endgame is underway. It’s been a long time since Infinity War came out so I just thought I’d write a quick reminder of why it set up a disappointing narrative and overall why it sucked. Believe it or not, this is the contracted version.
1. Loki dies
So in the first two seconds of the movie, Loki dies. I mean he really dies, no cloning tricks, no fakery (as far as we know), nothing. He’s just dead. This was not only an unbelievable thing to happen, it was also futile. It’s the first example we have here of cheap and lazy writing. It was unrealistic and blatantly only included for Thor’s character development. Here’s the thing however, Thor really doesn’t need any more character development. The entirety of the first Thor movie maps his emotional journey from obnoxious heir to worthy hero. The only thing that marvel writers can think of to further his character any more is death. The death of his parents friends, planet and his brother. The irony of this though is that there’s only so many people you can kill until he hits rock bottom. Death is easy to write, and evidently judging by how Loki died, really not a lot of effort was put into writing his death scene. Death worked at first, the Odinsleep spurred Thor on to pursue his self-discovery but now his development has reached it’s peak with nowhere to go. Not only this, but we’ve gone through a billion hours of Marvel movies, we’ve been dealing with Loki for what feels like a decade and the one constant part of his character is the trickster figure that he embodies. Trickery is in fact the very essence of Loki, whether it be positive or negative. You want me to believe, he didn’t think Thanos would kill him and didn’t prepare any way to escape from him? Sorry no thank you.
2. Thanos as a character literally makes zero sense.
His motivations are ridiculous. And the thing is he’s not even pictured as crazy, if he was an irrational villain with no proper purpose then hey maybe I could get behind that. No, marvel made him cold, collected and prepared. His motivations were that his planet was overpopulated and somehow was thus destroyed. So now his mission is to do the same to the entire universe. Please someone tell me how this makes absolutely any sense at all. You’re telling me that this huge ass guy now has access to control over everything in the universe and all that he’s going to do is cut in half. There is potential for so much more, real proper apocalypse style tragedy, uncontainable power, so much other than just balance. That’s his thing, all his personality is balance. Then you want us to believe that he actually cares for this girl he adopted out of nowhere, again not buying it. Also I really don’t care about Thanos and 70% of the movie is him staring at things.
3. Did anyone even die?
Even if we do accept this idea of balance, nothing is really balanced in this movie as all the main avengers are still alive. I’m sorry I didn’t realise that the infinity gauntlet is directly corelated to Robert Downey Jr’s requests for screen time. Literally what are the odds of that happening, also if Thanos was that smart a villain he would have just factored in all the avengers into the half of universe to get rid of. It’s easy, of course they’re alive because they’re the only people who could feasibly fix the situation.
4. Marvel isn’t fooling anybody…
The PR for the movie was terrible. Marvel is obviously always shrouded in secrecy. Their stance in the build-up for the first film was that everyone who died was permanently dead and not coming back. So they warned everyone not to get their hopes up, because if someone is dead there is no hope. However, half the people who died had confirmed sequels in the works, fair enough they could be set before the events of infinity war. But then that’s stupid because nothing is freaking chronological. You’re also telling me after Black Panther was marked as such an important film because of the representation it gave to black actors that they’re going to kill of the main protagonist and stop making money from the hype that it produced, again not buying it.
5. Too many explosions, not enough exposition
There is no attention to story and only attention to CGI. I know I’ve complained about this already with Disney but I’m going to keep complaining about this until it stops becoming an issue. Fight scenes and special effects are not substitutes for entertaining narrative. I’m not going to look past crappy writing because a really ugly alien managed to burst through a window on a motorcycle and it’s almost insulting that these writers think I would. Also, as much as I love all the characters being together, it’s pointless when you have to cut to a thousand different superheroes interacting with each other every second that you don’t get any meaningful relationships blossoming between them. We get one liners, and greetings but no real connection. I mean, just take a look at the poster it’s like a freaking Where’s Waldo.
6. Why so emotional?
The last thing, and the one that angers me most is that after all the spiel Marvel gives about wanting their heroes to seem more human, it is all the human actions in the movie that cause Thanos to win. Bear with me here: Peter Quill lashes out at him out of grief, causing Thanos to wake up from a sleep and win one fight; Thor attacks him out of anger, but doesn’t hit his glove and fails to kill him causing him to win another fight; and then Wanda fails to kill Vision fast enough, out of love, and causes Thanos to gain the soul stone. In all these actions, human emotion drives the characters to furthering the destruction of half of the universe. Therefore, the human audience is being made to lose empathy for the characters who act from an emotional place because all their actions fail. Call it far-fetched, but for me as a viewer this sent a message of disregard for the human experience and a testament to the cold-hearted, rational nature of heroism that marvel was trying to get away from.
Images obtained from:
https://www.screengeek.net/2019/01/03/loki-marvel-bio-change/
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/10/17553864/reddit-thanosdidnothingwrong-mass-ban-dusting
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/forums/battles-7/rematch-in-the-forest-iron-man-vs-thor-1946131/
https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/14/18266126/marvel-avengers-endgame-poster-danai-gurira-credits https://screenrant.com/avengers-infinity-war-mcu-sad-moments/2/