It wasn’t half of all families, superhero groups, species, populations of galaxies etc.-It was randomly half of all life, period. I’m thinking there were a number of planets that were weren’t touched at all, some that were totally decimated, and maybe one or two where all the politicians were disappeared.
Thanos has already snapped everyone (well, half of everyone) in the main timeline. That can’t ever be undone. They know that before they even start time travelling - that’s why they try to get the stones and bring them into the future, instead of going back and smothering baby Thanos in his crib. Time travel can’t change your present, it can only split off a new timeline.
What changed from talking to the Ancient One was the realization that they can’t just steal these stones and doom billions of lives in the alternate timelines to whatever fate might consume them if the stones didn’t exist - for the Time Stone in particular, losing it means that Dormammu wins in Dr. Strange’s solo movie.
The movie implies that small changes will get smoothed out. The Ancient One having a conversation on the roof of the Sanctum Sanctorum with Bruce Banner during the Battle for New York is a minor time alteration that isn’t sufficient for the creation of an entirely new timeline. Which isn’t my favorite thing about how time travel works for these movies - does the Ancient One we see in Doctor Strange remember talking to Bruce Banner or not? I’d rather they were just explicit - “Yeah, you just created a bunch of new timelines. Can you please try to avoid making them apocalyptic hellholes if at all possible?” Steve’s trip would then not be about “pruning branches,” it’d just be about making sure the heroes in those timelines have the tools they need to save their worlds.
“How Steve Gets the Stones Back” could be it’s own entire movie. I’m okay, for the purposes of this film, to say, “He figured it out somehow,” and leave it at that. Maybe they can do a comic book about it some time.
This is the way I understood the time travel rules to work as well, but there seems to be a lot of disagreement about it, so maybe I’m wrong. I could make an analogy to the idea of a fixed point or stable orbit. After a small change the system evolves back towards its original state and a new timeline is unnecessary, but a large enough change causes a break into a new timeline.
This seems to be the only way the plot makes any sense. There must be multiple timelines, because Nebula kills her younger self, and Thanos dies twice. But if every single change causes a new timeline, then Steve putting the stones back doesn’t solve anything, he’s just creating a new new timeline where the stone is back, and the first new timeline still has the stone missing.
I’m not sure whether I like this idea for time travel, but it’s a great storytelling trick. You get to tell both types of time travel stories, if you want to. You can have your multiverse stuff, but also do the jigsaw-puzzle style. Maybe old Steve has been living in another timeline and came back, or maybe he’s been living in the main timeline but his being there is a “small enough” change.
The law of large numbers prevents this. Sure it could happen but it would be like flipping a fair coin seven billion times and having it come up heads twice.
Poop normally contains dead as well as live bacteria, so it was probably not particularly notable, particularly given that they were attending to more salient issues like “what happened to my wife and kids?”
So Cap returns the Soul Stone, and gets a loved one of his choice in exchange–hence the return to Peggy.
It all makes sense!
People keep saying that the snap wiped out half of all life, not just sapient species, and I know the movie states it, but it clearly didn’t. The end of Infinity War took place in a forest. Lots and lots of trees and plant life. Not a single plant got dusted.
I sort of doubt that. Leaving entire planets untouched would go completely counter to what Thanos was doing. On the other hand, we saw Thanos deliberately culling specific populations by 50%. Why would you just go “random half of everything as a whole” rather than “random half of each species”?
Well, yeah, but four pounds of dead bacteria? Gotta leave your body somehow. I can see the threads now… “OMG, in addition to losing half my family I JUST CAN’T GET OFF THE TOILET! Anybody else having this problem?”
Because the description was “half of all life”.
Half of each species is still half of all life. It also actually makes sense with Thanos’ intent (demented and illogical as his intent was) and with what we’ve actually seen Thanos do.
“Hey, you guys are using up all your resources so I’m gonna snap and… hey, haha, wouldja look at that I guess you’re all still here. Well, I guess there’s an empty planet somewhere in another galaxy so, uh, good luck with that. Remember, I’m like your savior now, Thanos out!”
And again, the law of large numbers prevents this anyway. (Assuming the snap was truly random.)
It was subtle, and it could have just mis-seeing the character blocking, or the cinematographer or editor made a mistake, but when Steve doesn’t come back while Dr Hulk and Sam are standing around the time portal, then they look over and old Steve is sitting on a bench, we thought Sam was standing in a different position.
My take (assuming it was really there and also not just an error by the filmmakers) was that when Cap went back in time and married Peggy, he changed the main timeline very very subtly. So Cap didn’t pop in from a parallel timeline, he lived through the entire events of the 22 movies and didn’t interfere, but still made a teeny tiny change. And that change led to people being slightly but nearly unnoticeably different.
Could be.
But they were there already anyway…and is it dead bacteria, or just bacteria dust?
The average person’s colon is holding onto maybe 2-3 pounds of poo, half of its weight water. So 25-50% of its dry weight is bacterial–alive or dead, the rest fiber and other indigestible content. So let’s say generously, you have 1.5# bacteria in your colon and only 25% is already dead. Half of the remainder gets dusted–say half to 3/4# “extra” material that is now dead, but was alive for the Snap. All you’ve done is tilted the “alive” to “dead-or-inert” ratio a bit more toward the dead side–probably still within the range of normal variance of a week’s course of dietary changes.
you sure do know your shit.
Saw it this weekend. This movie will have legs because there’s plenty of people like me who want to see it, but don’t want to deal with opening week mania.
It’s everything I expected it to be. Just enough plot to tie the awesome moments together. Great combinations of loss and victory. The emotions feel real and unmanipulated. The movie did a great job of treating the superheroes as humans, and not bundles of ego and pathos.
My single most favorite moment: Spider-man, who’s hiding in a hole, has Captain Marvel appear before him. “Hi, I’m Peter Parker”, he says exactly like a teenage boy who’s in a situation totally out of his league. And then she responds with “Hello, Peter Parker. You have something for me?”, perfectly nailing both motherly concern and respect for a peer.
I’d give best-acting awards to Ant-man reuniting with his daughter. Best few minutes of acting I’ve seen in a long time.
The producers totally failed by not having Black Sabbath’s riff incorporated into the background music at the “I … am … Ironman” moment. I don’t care what it’d cost, the buckets of money this movie is generating could cover it.
I don’t agree with your interpretation of the law of large numbers here. At least assuming there are billions of worlds in the universe with lifeforms on them. A random sequence of coin flips is more and more likely to have long runs of all heads or all tails in it, the larger the sequence is. (This kind of “clumping” looks non-random to the layperson, but even distribution is at odds with the very concept of randomness.)
That’s why when watching “The Leftovers”, I simply assumed that the town of “Miracle, Texas” just happened to be a place where this kind of “run” happened, and there was nothing magical behind it, even if that’s not what the show’s writers intended.
Right. Or even disturbing the air slightly for a moment. This is the kind of time travel logic that makes sense to me. But I understand why they don’t use it in movies and TV shows.
I don’t think that fits with the cheekiness they were going for there. Unless I misunderstood their intent!
Isn’t that special.
*That’s *the message you want to convey to people who have lost someone close to them (in my case, my father) to suicide, and who feel an emotional pang every time they see that word “committed”? Nice. Real nice.