I agree. The Stones have been set up as the uber-powerful genie of the Marvel Universe, especially when you use them all together. I don’t know why it’s hard for people to imagine that the user interface for wishing on them would be at least as sophisticated as the one Stark uses to command F.R.I.D.A.Y. The genie does what you really want it to do, with no unforeseen consequences or bad side effects. Otherwise you’ve got a movie about people writing out 400 page wishes with all of the contingencies covered before submitting them for execution. There’s nothing in any of the movies or the comics, as far as I know, to even hint that that kind of thing is necessary.
Honestly I think people are just too wrapped up in their own cleverness, or poisoned by years of playing D&D with sadistic GMs and Rings of Three Wishes. It doesn’t add anything to the movie, and subtracts a lot, to imagine that after Bruce’s wish people are starving or falling out of non-existent planes or materializing in outer space because the solar system has moved on.
Now if earlier on we’d seen examples of people trying to use the Stones and ending up with horrible consequences because they weren’t clever enough to do it properly, that would be a different story, and a whole different kind of movie. But we haven’t. We’ve seen that you need a certain amount of physical resilience to avoid deadly consequences, and they played true to that through the end. Throwing in a different kind of consequence is just nonsensical. Nobody ever says anything like “Bruce should be the one to make the snap, because he’s the smartest one and he won’t end up accidentally causing a bunch of lethal side effects”.
And to cut off the argument that we did see unintended consequences when Thanos used it, like the helicopter crashing into a building in NYC after the snap - remember that Thanos doesn’t care if he actually kills more than 50%. As seen on Gamora’s planet, first he kills as many people as he has too to get the rest of the population to listen to him, then he kills half the survivors. So he wouldn’t even bother casting his wish to make sure there isn’t any collateral damage, because that isn’t important him.
I didn’t really get that bit, its not as if the snap brought a boat into existence for every person it dusted, there would still be the same amount of boats in the world. If you can park them all today you would still have room to park them all tomorrow…
Yeah, his whole schtick was “Random fifty percent – Boom” which would include crashing airplanes and stuff just to make the point that it was a random half gone because no one listened to him when they had the chance. Thanos wasn’t interested in soft landings as a result of his snap.
I feel like they did that to give themselves some breathing room. The other movies haven’t always exactly lined up with release date (and they screwed up the date in Spider-man). GotG probably won’t be out until 2021 or 2022, but will probably take place right after Endgame. Same with Black Panther and Doctor Strange. I bet by the next big team-up movie, they’ll be roughly in line with the actual year.
He also didn’t care about snapping populations that he just recently halved, like the Asgardians or the Xandarians.
Did they explicitly state that Infinity War was in 2018? I don’t remember. If they didn’t then you could scooch that side of the timeline back a year or so to make Spider-Man: FFH happen in 2022-2023.
Vision says in Civil War it’s been 8 years since Iron Man (2008) and Rhodey says it’s been “a couple years” since Civil War in Infinity War. And Ant-Man was under house arrest for two years between Civil War and Infinity War.
I’m not sure i agree, I think the complete omnipotence the gauntlet granted him provides at least some degree of accuracy and i think he would want to be precise.
I can definitely see it either way: Thanos doesn’t care about anybody’s life, so the gauntlet doesn’t care either, and his snap is 50% + ancillary deaths. Or, the gauntlet takes him literally, and makes sure that when it snaps a helicopter pilot, it also snaps all the people who would otherwise have been killed by the falling helicopter, so that exactly 50% of life is destroyed as a consequence of the snap. The latter seems unlikely, but it does provide a justification for things like all of Spider-Man’s friends getting snapped, so that they’re still the same age in the next Spider-Man movie - they were all on a schoolbus when the driver got snapped (or something similar) so they got snapped as well to maintain the 50% limit.
Honestly, that piece is not that unlikely. It’s basically flipping a coin getting heads five or six times in a row. (I don’t remember how many friends we see in the trailer. Pete, Ned, MJ, Flash, and maybe that blonde girl? Anyone else? I don’t think we’ve seen Liz, maybe she’ll turn up five years older.)
It was my understanding that there would be no math
I suppose it’s possible that the gauntlet kept it to 50% by making sure everyone on a plane got dusted and anyone in the building the plane hits or on the ground or otherwise fatally impacted was also dusted, etc but I don’t find it likely. For one thing, that sort of screws with the idea of the Snap taking people at random.
It could also be lazy—just dust as many people as needed so that the collateral amounts to 50% dead. Dust just the pilots of a plane, for instance; gives you the most bang for the dust!
Another possibility is that the driver of the bus got dusted (along with half the kids on board) and the other half of the kids died when the bus went over the edge of the bridge. But Bruce’s intent was to bring back everyone, so the Stones resurrected everyone who died around that time whether it was from dusting or ancillary causes. They don’t dick him around by saying “Well, technically Joe Brown died from choking on all of the dust in the air, so you don’t get him back. Didn’t think of that, didja Dr. Smart Hulk?”
If on Xylon VII the dusting happened to take the one alien whose job it was to push the “keep the planet from blowing up” button every seven minutes (and his backup guy), then Bruce brings back the whole planet.
Conversely, on the planet Fruitflyicus, where the population breeds so quickly that they can double their population in a year, maybe Thanos’ Snap took out 95% of the population. Or maybe it took out a disproportionate number of females so it all works out to be an equivalent amount of tragedy. Or maybe it sterilized a bunch of folks. Thanos didn’t seem particularly broken up that he hadn’t hit all of the edge cases correctly, so either he’s more of a big picture guy (very likely), or the Stones did more or less what he wanted them to do without having to spell out all of the details.
It doesn’t have to make legal sense, it has to make story sense. This isn’t a story about the tragic side effects of poorly thought out wishes. We have enough of those.
Lets face it - its a ‘reset’ that somehow fixes it all , but keeps all the previously dusted ones like peter (‘I fell asleep and it was 5 years later’) and keeps all the non-dusted ones memory intact. I bet there will be some stories about ‘what the fuck’ and ‘what do you mean you married my sister while I was dustnapping’ - but none of those are as interesting other than an aside - they fixed it - they avenged it - we move on.
(alot of people will be misplaced, out of sorts - need time to reconnect - I am willing to bet its touched on in the next SpiderMan)
I’m not worried about the overall infrastructure questions - they are important, but they will just fix themselves for the most part.
True. Also, about a million people died in traffic accidents the same year that Winter Soldier took place. It didn’t have anything to do with Thanos, but it’s still probably true, if the MCU world is like ours. But that’s not part of the movie.
There’s certainly material here if future Marvel writers want to use it, but in my opinion they’re under no obligation to do so unless it adds something to the story that they want to tell in that new movie. They don’t have to explain all of the repercussions unless there’s a dramatic benefit to doing so. Scott Lang has a teenage daughter and can mourn the time that he missed with her growing up. Clint can deal with trying to transition back into being a family man after he thought he had that part of himself burned out forever.
Or not. If they gloss over that completely or nod at it with a one-liner, it’s all the same to me. In a shared universe like this I think you have to let them jettison the baggage and move on to tell new stories, or they’re just going to collapse under the weight of historical trivia.
Maybe one of those new stories has a super-villain who turned to crime because when they came back from being dusted they found their beloved husband had killed himself in despair, and now for some reason they blame, oh I dunno, the Hulk for not fixing things better. Maybe there’s a way to make that interesting, much like they did with the Vulture. It doesn’t mean they have to.
Tony had the Infinity Gauntlet. He literally could have done anything he wanted to remove the threat of Thanos. He could have removed all his knowledge of the Infinity Stones and teleported him 200 Galaxies away. He could have changed them all to normal humans and threw them in a prison. He could have done anything. He chose to kill him and his army. It’s definitely morally questionable.
Firstly, I loved it. It was everything I wanted it to be. That said, and mostly just for giggles, I present a controversial theory.
Barton didn’t deserve to leave Vormir with the Soul Stone. My understanding, per Infinity War, was that if you want the stone, you have to sacrifice someone you love. That’s the awful cost. You have to sacrifice someone you love. Thanos understood this, and though it hurt him, he threw Gamora to her death. He * earned* that stone.
Hawkeye did not. He didn’t sacrifice Natasha. He did everything he could to prevent her death. She died despite him, not because of him. Per the rules as laid out in IW (or at least as I interpreted them), Hawkeye doesn’t qualify for the stone, because he didn’t choose to sacrifice someone he loves.
It’s kind of like if Voldemort got a horcrux just by being around when someone died - it’s the difference between being a passive beneficiary and an active perpetrator.
