They made a point in both Infinity War and Endgame that Thanos has to close his hand to use any of the stones on the gauntlet - that’s why in the fight on Titan Dr. Strange told the Cloak “Don’t let him close his fist”, and why he had to take the power stone off the gauntlet to punch Captain Marvel while she was holding the gauntlet. So it makes in-movie sense that another gesture is needed to use all the stones simultaneously.
And another thing. Space is big. Really big. While the space occupied by humans and the other intelligent species is tiny. So why was his solution to eliminate half the life when he could have found existing livable planets that some of them could move to? Heck, with the power of the stones, he could terraform dead planets to make them livable. (Go back a million years or so, seed a planet with some plant life and wait for the oxygen atmosphere to develop.)
Once upon a time, Thanos’ home planet was going belly up. Thanos said “We should totally kill half the population” and everyone said “God damn, that’s some fucked up stupid idea-making, Thanos”. Then everyone (less Thanos) died.
So now Thanos just wants to prove that his idea was right. He doesn’t want any other ideas because those aren’t the idea that everyone told him was stupid and wrong. He wants to prove how he was right and everyone else was wrong and now everyone should be telling him what a great thinker he was and willing to do the hard thing for the greater good.
Ironically, when his plan doesn’t work out, he’s convinced that it’s only because everyone is hung up on 50% of life being killed. Meanwhile, he’s still hung up on no one liking his dumbshit idea from once upon a time.
YES! That was what I was asking! But Thanos went for the snap, and the Hulk went for the snap, and Iron Man went for the snap, and everyone was fighting, not just to get the gauntlet OFF of Thanos, but to stop him from snapping his fingers. WHY DO YOU HAVE TO SNAP to set things off?
(ETA: Right. Or close his fist. With the Mind Stone, why would you need to do anything but *think *at the damn things?)
Thanos’s plan will never make sense. Don’t even try to make sense of it. There’s no point in asking “Why didn’t he…?” or “But wouldn’t…”
The problem is that in the comics, he does it to impress the living embodiment of death, who happens to be female and who he is in love with. That wouldn’t have worked in the movies, so they came up with the motivation you saw. Maybe they could have come up with a better one, but I can’t think of any. (Note: they hinted at the original motivation in the mid credits scene in the 2012 Avengers movie)
If you must have an explanation, let’s just say that Thanos was a psychopath who wanted to play God, and was granted the ability to do that beyond any psychopath’s dream. He was just giving himself an excuse with the resources thing.
Except that, in the comics, Death wants half the universe killed for pretty much exactly the same reason Thanos does in the movies. It’s not something Thanos settles on like he’s John Hinckley and Death is Jodie Foster - Death resurrects Thanos and sets him with the task of killing half the universe before the universe runs out of resources.
It’s been decades since I read the comics, but I thought Death’s motivation was that she was annoyed that the living outnumbered the dead in the universe, and wanted to correct that. I don’t recall the Malthusian thing being a part of it. I do recall that Thanos had a thing for Death that went beyond being a loyal servant. I remember when the heroes attacked Mephisto convinced Thanos that he’d impress Death more if he gave the heroes a small chance of victory. But like I said, it’s been decades.
Also kudos to Scarlet Witch for making the most out of a power set that is basically just flight, telekinesis and pew pew. And i think the ‘pew pew’ is just more telekinesis. AND she cant particularly fly and go pew pew at the same time. So basically she’s just got telekinesis but is very imaginative with it. Kinda like how Sue Storm reallllly makes the most out of her power set.
Thanos is infatuated by Death. Before the start of Infinity Gauntlet, he’s been dead for a while. Death picks him from the afterlife to carry out her plan to halve the population of the universe, but doesn’t have any specific idea how he should do it. He settles on becoming omnipotent by gathering the Infinity Stones, and then uses that power to A) Kill half the universe, B) mess up the heroes who respond real, real bad, and C) creep on Death in a really uncomfortable way. Death is very much not down with C, but Thanos being omnipotent means there’s not much she can do about it except standard there in contemptuous silence while Thanos rages that she has to love him now after everything he’s done for her.
Before he gets to all that, though, he spends an issue of Silver Surfer cruising around the cosmos, explaining to him just what he plans to do, and why - and it’s basically exactly what his motivation is in the movie. Here’s a Gizmodo article with the relevant pages.
ETA: You remember the bit about Mephisto giving Thanos bad advice correctly, though.
I don’t agree with this very commonly believed narrative. Either all animals (including humans) live “in balance with nature”, or there are other animals that do not. Elephants, for instance, knock down trees just for the hell of it.
I agree, but what are you gonna do.
Yes, you are correct that humans are part of the ecosystem and therefore part of the balance of nature. And yes, elephants might push down trees for no good reason but they don’t clearcut entire forests. I think it’s clear that humans have an outsize influence on nature. That’s especially true with seven billion of us consuming resources. But it’s been true for a long time. I believe before Europeans arrived in the Americas, many of the large predators were hunted to extinction by people.
They showed that different actions of the individual stones could be accessed. Power, space and time all had distinct ‘movements’ associated with them.
Seems the ‘snap’ was needed to activate them all in concert - and I doubt the ‘mind stone’ had anything to do with telepathy with THanos - seemed more of an intelligence /AI to control what the other stones did and how much.
In memory of Black Widow, I have thrown a peanut butter sandwich at your post on my screen.
Saw the movie yesterday and really enjoyed it. I had assumed going in that the six from the first movie would die, so when Tony died it didn’t phase me. Except when Pepper told him he could rest now; I did shed a tear at that. My favorite line in the movie was when Tony called Rocket Rachet. Nice shoutout to my favorite video game series.
I feel bad for all the unsnapped people who came back to find their loved ones committed suicide. I imagine the suicide rate over the five years had to be significantly higher than normal.
I believe you, and if so the snap becomes more excusable. Unfortunately for me, I missed anything that implied that certain physical actions were required to use a particular stone. Still leaves me wondering how, given that this was probably (?) the first time the 6 had been physically colocated since just after the Big Bang, who worked out that a snap was needed, and how? 
Don’t worry about figuring why you need to “snap”. Magical objects have always had rules tied to them. And even more specific actions needed to activate them. This has been “true” from early superstitions to medieval incantations. Modern wiccan and druid objects need specific rituals to be used in magic. Even in comics: Don Blake banging his walking stick on the ground turned him into Thor. He had to go to great lengths at times to make sure it hit the floor. Why couldn’t Dr. Don just wave it around like a flag? Because those are the rules.
Something I wonder about the “snap” and the gauntlet, what if the user doesn’t have a human-like hand? What if Groot, for one, tried to use it? It seems speciesist to assume that.
The gauntlet was made by the dwarves on Nidavellir specifically for Thanos. Had a creature with, say, tentacles asked for one, I’m sure they could have accommodated it.
My real complaint about the movie is that they set up rules for their time travel, and then immediately ignored them.
When they proposed the time heist, I pictured it like, go to where a stone is alone at two in the morning, take it, jump to the future, use it, jump back to 2:01, put stone back. The time line wouldn’t be affected.
But you can’t punch your way out of that, so instead we get an hour of fan service fights.
The Ancient One says “you can’t take the stone, you’ll branch the timeline”. Banner convinces her he needs to take it, and…he branches the time line. Why even bother with rules?
Well, if it is accurate, none of the stones return to the main timeline. So Thanos can’t get them and snapple everyone in the main timeline.
Of course, they handwaved away the details. How does Steve get the stone back in the tesseract, inside the scepter, inside the sphere thingy in the force field, and does he just toss the one to red skull with thanks?
One thing that still bugs me is how they are able to jump between timelines. But I guess if time travel works at all, it can work like that.
And fan service fights are the whole point of these movies.
For your last sentence, I think that would make a great animated flick.