I went into The Avengers: Infinity War with very low expectations, and they were met, so I guess I can’t complain or ask for my money back or scream that Marvel must die, so I’ll just note that comic book movies are facing the same problems that superhero comic books have always had: when you start with a protagonist with incredible powers, where do you go from there? The answer is usually…ever upward. More powers, more powerful villains, more allies with equal or greater powers, and before you know it, the hero who was stopping purse-snatchers and bank robbers in the first issue is now deciding the fate of the entire universe with a league of demi-gods. And gods are boring.
To counter the boredom in the audience and, I’m sure, the writers, there has to be a series of metamorphoses. The name on the comic book is what sells, so you can’t just abandon 1930s Superman or 1960s Hulk, you’ve got to start changing the characters into brand new beings. New powers, new weaknesses, new conflicts, but the same old label. You know the Superman I read as a kid was not the same Superman kids read in the Depression years is not the same Superman kids are reading in the 21st century, right? It’s protean chaos.
And then there’s another part of the recipe: if the story is getting stale, bring on the crossovers! Mix and match different comic books with different formulas and different tones — it doesn’t matter. Sure, team up Spider-Man and Thor. Set Batman against Superman. Mix up the psychedelic weirdness of Dr Strange with psycho Rocket Raccoon. None of it makes any sense, but nerds love that “What if…” crap.
Infinity War is all that and more. So many characters, each with their brief moment in front of the camera. So many locations — I was getting lost, with sub-groups splitting off and charging on to sub-quests on different planets, different imaginary places on Earth, and absolutely no attention paid to time. Apparently, in the Marvel Universe, everyone who matters has their very own personal faster-than-light travel device. So many plotlines, so many different maguffins (6 arbitrary colored stones means we can easily try to achieve 6 different goals at once! Exactly what makes for an insightful movie). They’re in Wakanda for a yellow rock. They’re in New York for a green one.
Then with that buffet of chaos, they resolve everything in exactly the same way: punch stuff. Lots of punching here. There’s a gigantic set-piece battle with hordes of trans-dimensional demons led by space wizards against the futuristic technology of Wakanda and Tony Stark, and it’s just a brawl with everyone punching everything else in hand-to-hand combat. The main villain, Thanos, doesn’t seem to have any qualities that make him particularly potent, except that he’s very, very big and strong and can beat up the Hulk in a one-on-one fight. Somehow, I just don’t think that’s a quality that would be particularly valuable in a ruler of the galaxy.
And then there are the stakes. The stakes have become so unimaginably high that they’ve become cheap and petty all over again. Thanos’ goal is to kill half the people in the universe for what, in the movie, are simultaneously vainglorious and altruistic reasons. He’ll save us from ecological collapse, and everyone will praise him for it. So — and this is no spoiler, I won’t say who — he kills some of the heroes. In fact, I think he kills more than half, and he wipes out entire vast swathes of the Asgardians and the Dora Milaje. It’s a total bloodbath in there.
Which would be an interesting way to reboot a stale ensemble, and also make the risks the heroes are taking seem genuine and important. The death of a major character should be a huge pivot point for story.
Unfortunately, it’s not. None of them are. The slaughter was so wholesale that it took me right out of the movie. Marvel has just disintegrated multiple, massive profit-making franchises, series that made billions of dollars, in one grand gesture? I can not believe it. Not for a second. Also, if this were a genuine creative decision to reshape their movie universe to go in a new direction, we’d have known about it when the news got out of dozens of Marvel and Disney executives clutching their black bean-counting hearts and dying in apoplectic fits. Therefore, none of the major outcomes of this movie are real. There’s going to be another big budget movie in the near future in which they magically rewind everything and reset it back to it’s diversely profitable state.
We got a hint of that in this movie. One character dies, literally vaporized, and Thanos uses one of his magic rock powers to reconstitute him, take some treasure from him, and kill him again. Trust me on this: none of the deaths in this movie matter to Marvel’s bottom line, and they will be restored and repaired to go on and print more cash. It makes this whole effort futile.
But I will say this for The Avengers: Infinity War, it packed the house. I’ve never seen the Morris theater that full of people. It was also an enthusiastic crowd. The whole theater cheered when fan favorites made their first appearance: judging from the whoops, Thor, Captain America, Bucky, and the Black Panther are immensely popular. Too bad at least one of those four is going to get killed by the end.
The audience also applauded mid-movie when heroes made really good punches in the frequent slugmatches. They laughed at some of the laugh lines (there weren’t many, and they weren’t that great — a sense of humor was one of the casualties of the cosmic scope). It was a wonderfully responsive and enthusiastic audience. I definitely liked that part.
It was also amazing how, at the end of the movie, there was this tremendous hub-bub of conversation. I saw people spontaneously get into excited discussion groups, whipping out their phones and engaging with each other and the world at large, gushing and arguing about the movie. That’s a good reaction. They were not leaving, of course, because as everyone knows, Marvel always puts a teaser scene at the end of the credits, so you have to stay and wait for that. They went completely silent when the scene started — we also got to watch even more beloved movie characters die — and then just erupted and went totally nuts at the reveal of a single simple logo on Nick Fury’s cell phone. I guess we got a hint about who is going to reassemble the fractured mess this movie made of the Marvel/Disney business model.
Except, wait, the next movie is set in the 1990s. That can’t be the restoration, can it? Are they going to milk this comic book tragedy for at least two years?
I have no idea why you waste your money and time going to see superhero flicks, you always hate them.
Hmmm…. Ever read E. E. “Doc” Smith’s _Lensman_ series? In the last one, Our Heroes create a supernova as part of taking out the second tier bad guys (“physical means” won’t work of the top tier). Taking out the top bad guys is a bit anti-climactic.
And–FYI–Lucas couldn’t get the rights to do a Lensman series, so he wrote Star Wars instead.
So are superhero movies and the Marvel universe in particular the closest thing to shared art/culture that we have in the world?
I don’t always hate them! I liked Thor: Ragnarok and Deadpool for instance.
I just like to write about the ones I hate. The ones I like I have to admit are a bit on the fluffy time-waster side.
Nothing wrong with some fluffy time-wasting from time to time, it would be nice to hear why you do like those ones.
I wouldn’t actually be so sure that everyone who gets killed is going to come back in a few years.
Unlike comic books, where nobody ages or they only age in a vague fuzzy means, actors do age and some of the actors in the MCU have been doing this for a decade now. I’ve been expecting that characters like Iron Man and Captain America will pass on the mantel to someone new at some point. And the popularity of Guardians of the Galaxy proved that the movies are still big moneymakers even with relatively obscure characters.
I much prefer the Marvel Netflix series like Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and Luke Cage. Iron Fist was pretty cringe worthy. My wife, who is of Cantonese/Chinese decent found it especially enraging at times. I found Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2 entertaining, and really like Thor: Ragnarok. I couldn’t really tell you about the other two dozen movies in the MCU because they seem to coalesce into a maelstrom of plots and special effects that boggle my mind. I’ll wait for this one to come out on Netflix in a few years.
FIFY.
I just looked at the death list. Yeah at least half of those are not remaining dead because at least half of them haven’t been rung dry yet and the actors have several films on their contracts remaining.
This reminds me of the epic failure of writing when in book 6 Rowlings tried to convince use that Snape was dead with a certain death scene.
Sorry we know context…
I’ll be skipping the hot mess.
It is so funny to me that superbeings wind up flailing away at eachother with fists and medieval melee weapons. They surround themselves with technology but eventually it boils down to clubs and fists and spandex.
A realistic superhero movie would involve getting them in one place for a big punch-fest, then using an H-bomb to vaporise them. Then we would not have any more superhero movies.
They haven’t disintegrated anything. They have the mother of all reset buttons – the Infinity Gauntlet. If the movie is anything like the comics, everything is going to get reset at the end.
-RM
You might consider seeing Phantom Thread, Mano Singham recommends it/
My pre-teen daughter read Marvel Girl for a while. She was a Muslim teen in a New Jersey ghetto, struggling between honoring her parents’ faith and finding her own way in the world. I read the first several, and the plots were refreshingly small and local and borderline credible (ya know, once you get past the mutant powers). Moreover, there was emotional relevance.
Such as shortly after the X-Men became the All New Uncanny X-Men (1980-ish?), and Nightcrawler struggled with his devout Catholic faith, after meeting beings whose existence and behavior and powers called it into question. In those editions, the encounter with “god-like” adversaries (or allies) actually were a driving narrative for character development, rather than bigger explosions.
I’d love to see a Marvel Girl movie with my daughter. Presuming they don’t cancel the strip after sub-Reddit whining.
Dr. Myers, I know you are a science fiction fan and all that, but your tendency to run off and pay good money to see the ludicrous crap that’s being churned out these days is very annoying. The ongoing spate of whoosh-bang CGI superhero bullshit and violent shoot-em-up video games is just another indicator of how adults have become infantilized by the entertainment industry. Even worse is the ubiquitous use of smart phones in every god-damned place one looks nowadays, just another way the powers that be are distracting us from the country’s real problems.
Dr. Strange, Spiderman and the Hulk? Jesus H. Christ, people, grow the hell up!
While reading about the enthusiastic audience response to the punch-fest I kept flashing on some orange guy in a suit pummeling a WWF actor out of the ring. Never mind that defeat and death accompanies losers and victims in brawls. Making sense is irrelevant. Story and plot-line logic is irrelevant. Got casualties with deceased heroes? No problem! Hit the reset button and go again. Its a game-playing, not a story. The whole point is to continually supply the audience with a proxy of their own fantasies to smite anybody they love to hate or who crosses them, thereby gratifying the appetite of an audience mind stuck at the age of 12 on the threshold of hormonal transition. Its a very effective formula for wresting lots and lots of their money from them. Juvenile fantasy gratification is very lucrative.
I like the humorous ones that realize that comics are kinda dumb and fluffy at their core. Ragnarok, Deadpool, Guardians, Ant Man. I may skip Infinity War in the theater, but I WILL see Deadpool 2 and Ant Man/Wasp.
#15, weylguy: My sentiments exactly.
Weylguy: “Dr. Strange, Spiderman and the Hulk? Jesus H. Christ, ”
You appear to have mistyped “Dr. Strange, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Jesus H. Christ.”
FWIW, in the original Infinity Wars story, lots of heroes died, were brought back, died a different way, rinse repeat. It was due to the time stone being used to try to re-write timeline until they won.
I don’t know how the ‘MCU’ handles it, but I suspect it’s similar.
I won’t get to see it until next weekend, though. :(
Crimson Clupeidae @20:
Looks like an idea stolen from The Worm Ouroboros.
PZ
I mean, yeah? They kind of literally do. Everyone in the movie who travels long distance very fast does so using teleportation of one flavor or another, transport gates, or ships with FTL drives.
@15, weylguy
Lighten up, Francis.
For crying out loud, people. I will post this in every superhero thread from now until my death:
The kind of entertainment you like and the kind of hobbies you do do not make you more or less mature. You like independent films? Great- you do you. You prefer to read instead of watching cinema? Awesome, I can probably recommend some books. You want to watch people perform amazing feats of athleticism? I might worry about the fact that they are killing themselves, and cost me lots of money (depending on the sport) but I can understand the appeal. You want to watch giant cgi monsters punch other cgi monsters, like the great big fireworks show it is? Equally valid form of entertainment.
Fun fact- Can’t Stop the Serenity every year raises money for the Equality Now every year at dozens of theaters. Most of the cast of the Avengers have visited sick kids through Make a Wish. You can actually worry about politics, and still want to have entertainment.
The world continues to exist despite the fact that people like different things than you.
@15
Nice long-form version of the “Old man yells at clouds” meme, as if Leave it to Beaver wasn’t a critically acclaimed bit of mindless fluff.
You also realize that most of those aforementioned heroes have their roots in the 60’s and 70’s, right?
If anything, their plots have gotten less infantile and simple – you don’t generally have whole comics devoted to selling Hostess Fruit Pies anymore.
This is Marvel. They will do a few backstory films, then kick off Avengers 4 by saying, “Meanwhile, back on Earth-1218….”
(At one point all the many time lines and variations and deaths and crises reached a boiling point. Marvel resolved all this by introducing a multiverse — Golden Age Wonder Woman took place in a different universe than Silver Age Wonder Woman, etc. Pretty much every reboot or revival of a character now involves a cross-over from a different reality. Earth-1218 is the reality we live in.)
@rgmani #12 – D’oh! That actually sounds a lot better than my “It was all a dream in a different universe” theory.
gregory in seattle @28: “Marvel resolved all this by introducing a multiverse — Golden Age Wonder Woman took place in a different universe than Silver Age Wonder Woman, etc.”
Nope—Wonder Woman is a DC character, not a Marvel character. And DC’s multiverse dates back to 1960, or thereabouts, long before “all the many time lines and variations” and yada yada yada. What happened was that National Periodical Publications (as DC Comics was known back in the day) had some old Intellectual Property that hadn’t been published for a few years, so the decided to reboot some of those old characters. And since a gent named Julius Schwartz was, first, a long-time SF fan, and second, an editor at NPP, it wasn’t too long before Schwartz got the multiverse going in various titles he edited.
Shorter: Old man shakes fist at clouds.
Like it, don’t like it, who gives a fuck? Don’t you have anything better to be doing with your life? You choose to spend two hours of the only life you’ll ever have on this, whose fault is it if you’re not satisfied? What, exactly, did you expect? What else were you planning on doing with the time?
Perhaps Ovid was just bored too. But I bet there are better explanations than that.
You make it sound like the usual thing drama/literature has been up to for more or less all of recorded history. Is there a problem? Feeling uneasy about protean chaos?
That does make it seem like they’re trying to pack too much story into not enough film. You usually report hating the experience, so I don’t know which branch of this self-created dilemma you’d think is preferable. But would it be better if the whole timeline was maybe still a bit iffy (i.e., you don’t know how characters manage to do it all, and you don’t really mind), although in telling it to the audience, they rather patiently allowed each separate story some room to breathe and to take as long as it takes? On the one hand, that does mean more film to watch (which quite possibly you may dislike), but on the other, it might end up better that way.
I mean, nobody with any sense would think they could get the most out of the Iliad by skimming through it in a couple of hours. If you’ve actually got this big epic story with all kinds of shit going on everywhere, then the issue isn’t exactly about having an overabundance of shit – bring it on, I say, if you can come up with a container big enough for it. They apparently just didn’t come up with one. (Wagner, for instance, had the opposite sort of problem, I would say: a lot of very nice well-crafted music, but it takes way too fucking long for basically nothing to happen, over and over again.)
I don’t buy the line that this is something only books could do, that it’s actually a limitation of the medium of film itself (often it’s all digital now, but you know what I mean). It has something to do with certain people who don’t understand (or care about) the medium they’re using (because tickets are sold anyway). If you have a huge epic to tell, you can certainly do that with huge load of film. It’s that simple. That’s how things work in The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, let’s say, or Game of Thrones for another recent example. What they don’t do is try to cram it all into two hours — you get dozens of hours of film to play with that way, which is what you need. You’re not painting a miniature or something; it’s a mural. So make it big.
#28
Sometimes people do things, like commenting about a movie they watched. You chose to complain about someone doing something they felt like doing.
Good job I guess.
Oops, the same can be applied to quite a few people here beyond Dunc.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the American Superhero genre, either in its comic form or in the cinema. I’ve tried learning a bit about it, so I can have conversations with my beloved about it (he is rather fond of them), and I’ve seen a couple of the films, but it has never really grabbed me. Like the Japanese giant monster film, the Bollywood musical or the Scandinavian bleak crime drama it seems rather keyed in to a particular culture and particular values that are not my culture or my values. I cannot get over the fact that at every moment it feels like media made for someone else. I don’t think it transcends cultural boundaries very well. Which is not a charge that can be leveled at all media.
The whole core of it – the big, brash, powerful, larger-than-life protagonist with amazing abilities who saves the day on his own – seems very American to me. Many other countries don’t warm to this kind of protagonist. In England, for instance, we are much more fond of the good-natured everyman who is a little (or a lot) out of his depth, and gets through with the help of others and by capitalising on the mistakes of those who seek to harm him. Frodo Baggins is a quintessentially English hero in this regard – he’s got nothing special going for him apart from a desire to do what is right and a certain measure of stubborn drive to see things through (which wavers, but recovers with the support of his loyal friend Sam). One might note that in Celtic mythology the magic swords tend to do fantastical things – Caladbolg can cleave the top off a mountain – whereas Arthur’s Excalibur is a symbol of kingship and nothing else. An American Arthur’s Excalibur would shoot laser beams.
I think PZ’s complaint that, in the end, it’s all sorted out by punching is bang on the money too. If I wanted a scenario like that I would watch the boxing. It’s not that it’s violent and combative that is the problem for me, it’s that these things tend to focus and linger on the punching in a way that puts it centre stage and elevates it to an object of artistic consideration. Where in other genres we might get an act of some moral complexity or arresting impact highlighted for our appreciation, here we get two big men in silly hats hitting each other. It cannot sustain the focus placed on it. It’s just not interesting enough to be the climax and centrepiece of a dramatic story. I am reminded of how formulaic the actual combat scenes are in traditional ancient epics – in the Iliad, for instance, combat is rarely more than two spear-casts long, and while the great confrontations are important turning points in the plot, they’re not the plot itself. The big combat scene in Book 22 of the Iliad between Achilles and Hector is made poignant and memorable by the focus on the build-up and the aftermath, not by having them wallop each other at excessive length for page after page after page. And the fight doesn’t resolve the story – the final and most dramatic resolution comes at the end with a reconciliation, as Achilles sees in old Priam the image of his own father, and realises something of the common humanity between Greek and Trojan and the inhumanity of the actions his rage has given him over to. In an American Superhero Iliad we’d end with Achilles punching Hector into oblivion and that would be that.
Sigh.. I don’t even read the comics (or very few of them), and know that, “Most of the heroes are brought back.” Though, I have no idea how that took place. I seem to remember something like that, in which “some” of.. some heroes, but it was probably not Marvel, where brought back as clones by some bad guy, for his own purposes, with like.. alien control things in them, and some other hero uses a magic sword to destroy those, leaving some really confused heroes trying to figure out how to become the people they replaced, or something like that… I am not sure if this was in the Marvel universe though. Your acting like this movie was made out of thin air PZ, and not taken directly out of stories that where written a decade ago (though, maybe a bit modified to fit the “current” 2018 year they are now depicted as happening in).
So, yeah, that the heroes, or at least some of them, will be back, somehow, isn’t a huge surprise to anyone else.
#30: At least I have the excuse of being very, very drunk at the time.
From a strictly storytelling standpoint, it isn’t impossible to write a story involving characters with really amazing abilities. It only strains credibility when you build your conflict entirely around people who are so amazing in the specific area you’re challenging them in that you have to build a whole new reality structure to hold the conflict. CGI with a soundtrack only goes so far on that.
Generally you can build a much more engaging plot with less work by challenging a character in areas where they’re not incredible. The previous Civil War storyline introduced this possibility but then quickly swept it under the rug. It comes up in this film too and is even more rapidly dispensed with. I totally understand that focusing on these areas moves a film firmly into other genres but I don’t think they’re very well served by ignoring them completely.
I’m in the camp which thinks it was such a pity that meteor hit Marvel Studios just after the release of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier“. Killed everyone stone dead. So terrible. No more Marvel movies. Such a pity.
But yeah, this is the Marvel Universe. I believe the only character who died and stayed dead was Benjamin Parker.
I’m reminded of people who complain about “spoilers”…I don’t have this problem because I’m not so much interested in my knowing the ending but in seeing the journey. It’s why I can watch the same movie more than once and not be disappointed. I know the story, I want to watch it unfold.
So yeah, all of these characters are going to come back. Some of them have movies due out after this and that would be hard if they were no longer in existence. I’m interested in how they’re going to do it. I know it’s going to become a slug-fest…I’m interested in seeing how they’re going to do it. “But it’s all CGI!” Yeah…that’s artistry in itself and I’m interested in seeing how they’re going to do it.
But if you’re interested in something else, this isn’t going to be what you want.