Here’s the line from IW:
So the sacrifice is “You must lose a loved one” not “You must kill a loved one.”
Eh, the guy was trying to commit total universal genocide. I’m morally okay with disintegrating that douche.
Fair enough, I mis-remembered then. In that case, as you were. 
I do wonder how the conversation went when Cap turned up at Vormir to give the stone back to the Red Skull.
“You have returned the Soul Stone to its proper location. You may now retrieve any one of the entities from the bottom shelf. We have a green woman, an assassin with red hair, several puppies, at least a dozen children… Well, you can see for yourself. Just hurry up; I can’t do this all day.”
I’d like to see Cap returning the Stones and each one is some adventure. Then, for the Soul Stone, he just pops in and says “Hey” to Mr. Skull before flicking the Soul Stone over the cliff… “Here, you can have this back”.
I see the point though. If all you have to do is have lost that which you love than Barton already qualified before he even arrived at Vormir; he had lost his wife and children. He could have just shown up by himself and picked up the Soul Stone which would have been waiting for him.
I’m assuming that collecting the Soul Stone requires a more active decision to lose a loved one.
You could argue that Barton did make the sacrifice; that after Romanov had shown her willingness to die, he let her go. But rewatching the scene on YouTube, that doesn’t seem to be what happened. He was still trying to convince her not to fall right up to the end. And it was her decision, not his, to break way from him.
What if they had sent two avengers who were indifferent to each other, like Hulk and Antman? (And shouldn’t they have sent at least one powered or armored avenger on each mission?)
Which is why I think Nebula suspected what really happened and pushed to send those two together there.
The teams don’t make a whole lot of sense in general, other than narratively. Why do they all have to leave on the heist at the same time? Do the missions sequentially instead, and you would have the option of sending the same person on more than one. Also, Cap & Tony demonstrated that you can jump twice without returning home in between. That’s a much more efficient way to use their limited supply of jumps.
For the Vormir scene I was pretty convinced Black Widow would be the one killed, because I figured they were recreating the shot of Gamora at the bottom of the cliff. That ended up being right, but they had me second-guessing during the fight :).
I think they only had the Red Skulls word on that though. Maybe his job is just to hand out the stone, and the rest is him having a bit of entertainment on the job.
I don’t disagree with your first point (although it would have be easy enough to add some technical mumbo jumbo about why they had to do it at once) For your second point, the only reason they were able to jump twice is because they got more Pym Particles. They used their “return” jump to go back to the 70s. If they weren’t able to get the particles there, they would have been stuck.
Red Skull: “In order to take the stone you must lose that which you love.”
Hawkeye:* Pulls out vintage Luke Skywalker action figure.* “Don’t make me do this! It’s still in Box!”* Closes eyes, hurls doll off cliff*.
Red Skull: “How is this working!? That’s not a soul! That’s just a piece of plastic!”
Hawkeye: “It had a soul…to me.”
LATER:
Widow: “I had no idea you were such a dork.”
Hawkeye: “In a world of guns I fight with a bow and arrows. And sometimes a sword.”
Nazis can be real dicks sometimes.
After that taco sharing scene? There was clearly some real chemistry there.
What’s the deal with Thor’s eyes in this poster? If his eyes were different colors in the movie, I didn’t notice it.
In real life, Chris Hemsworth’s eyes are both blue so it was clearly a decision made by somebody to have one changed to brown.
I remember noticing Thor’s eyes being different colours at some point, but I don’t remember which scene.
Right, but that means they used 3 jumps each, to visit 2 time periods. With separate teams, you need 4 jumps to visit 2 time periods.
Spoiler for Ragnarok:
Hela ripped out one of Thor’s eyes. Rocket gave him a new one in Infinity War.
Jophiel’s post does make me wonder about the whales. Don’t whales grow very slowly? Why would there be more of them five years after half of them are wiped out, even with reduced shipping etc.? They should have used something like salmon as illustration of the environmental point.
I’d imagine very few reading this have seen the HBO show “The Leftovers” (since you presumably have HBO right now for “Game of Thrones”, I highly recommend it: but I’d suggest watching just the pilot, the first season episode “Guest”, and then skip to the second season premiere). In that show, three percent of the world’s population vanishes completely at random (the Pope, but also Gary Busey) and it has devastating effects. Fifty percent is quite another thing entirely. In the series finale, it is revealed, maybe, that there is a kind of mirror universe where the three percent stayed but 97% disappeared; it is described as losing the ability to have international air travel but still having ships and such; some fans of that show wondered if even that level of infrastructure would be possible to preserve under those conditions.
I see it, although of course I also understand how it can be justified.
Glen Weldon is the guy who covers comic books and such for NPR (he says he coined the snarky term “snapture” BTW). He also wrote a book on Batman. He insists that a true superho Does. Not. Kill.
Spoilers for the movie “Man of Steel”, as well as for 1980s Marvel comics:
This was why Weldon panned the movie “Man of Steel”. And indeed, traditionally this was the Marvel way at least (I never read DC). In “Secret Wars”, the first (AFAIK) assemblage of the entire Marvel pantheon in one comic, a semi-villain called Molecule Man has basically Infinity Gauntlet-type powers over the universe, and creates all kinds of trouble with said powers. Somehow the assembled heroes manage to surprise him and knock him out. So then they start to discuss what to do next. Someone (Cap, probably) says they can’t just keep knocking him unconscious, as it will cause brain damage. While killing him might seem the obvious move, this is not even considered by the heroes AFAICR. This is also why Jim Shooter declared that Jean Grey had to die after she casually incinerated an entire planet’s billions of sentient beings as Dark Phoenix.
I don’t remember how it was sorted out, but that discussion is imprinted in my mind as a clear delineation of the kind of ethos Weldon describes. Times change, ethical guidelines evolve, but I think it’s at least worth mentioning that the traditional understanding of Tony Stark and all Marvel heroes is that they wouldn’t do something like that.
This. Otherwise it’s just too handwavy and the whole thing is suspect.
Now, we’re dealing with a world that has lots of superheroes who can help. How fast can Quicksilver build a house? Can Storm bring rain to the right croplands to speed up food production? Etc.
Given that he died in Age of Ultron, not fast at all… (another reason MCU and X-Men universes should remain separate).
Nitpick, but it was two percent of the people in the world who disappeared in The Leftovers, not three percent. Still, the early part of this movie, with the abandoned houses in San Francisco and the support group that Steve Rogers was leading did remind me of that show, with the remaining people suffering trauma of various types. (In the show, there is absolutely no explanation as to how or why this happened. In the case of this movie, we the audience and the remaining Avengers know what happened, but I don’t think the movie made it clear if the general public knew the reason.)