Oh snap!
Understandable. How could you possibly have known that it would end in a CG fest at the end? Talk about plot twists!
Ima dive back into that girl power action sequence, and object to it from the opposite direction. Had that scene not happened, I probably wouldn’t have realized how tokenist the female characters remained.
Think about the major female protagonists:
-Potts
-Natasha
-Valkyrie
-Scarlet Witch
-Captain Marvel
-Nebula or whatever her name is
-Green lady
It looks like a lot, right? But add up all their screen time together–and add in screen time for every other non-white-dude–and I’m pretty sure that you’d get less screen time for all of them combined than you’d get for any one of the four main white dudes (Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk). Despite the strides Marvel has made since the series began, it’s still unquestionably a series about white dudes, and the women are second or third stringers. This gang-up shot just hammered that point home to me.
As another objection, look at the narrative roles played by the women prior to the final battle sequence:
-Potts: makes Iron Man’s sacrifice meaningful and soothes him as he dies.
-Natasha: coordinates the gang of mostly white dudes in an administrative role, and tells another second-stringer who’s a white dude that he’s more important than she is, since he’s a parent and she’s not, and then dies for him
-Valkyrie: gives a white dude (well, currently green, but actor’s a white dude) directions to find another white dude
-Green Lady and Nebula: Angst over whether to be loyal to, or betray, a grey dude played by a white dude
-Scarlet Witch: did she have any non-battle scenes? I forget
-Captain Marvel: okay, she’s an exception. Her narrative purpose was to save people offscreen.
I’m pleased Marvel’s making efforts to diversity, but the gang-up scene drove home how poorly integrated the movie is. It remains a really great story about four white dudes and then a diverse cast of second stringers.
Edit: Oh, I should emphasize the word “great” in the above sentence. Storywise this was my favorite of all the Marvel movies except Spiderverse (which was in a league of its own), and it had more effective emotional beats than any other. I’ve got a daughter about Ironman’s daughter’s age, and watching her mourn her father’s death hit me pretty hard. It was a great movie, which doesn’t change my criticism of its curt nods to diversity.
Hey, you left out Mantis!
Who, uh, isn’t exactly going to flip your argument on its head.
Oh, right! She rejoices over two white dudes having a knife-fight! I guess it could be a symbolic explanation of her likes-to-watch kink, but yeah, my argument stands :).
Oh and Scarlet Witch empathized with Hawkeye at the funeral about feeling BW’s sacrifice since she lost Vision as well. But she was resurrected just before the fight so it’s not as though she had a lot going on before that.
(Not debating your greater point, just saying since you asked)
They also shared a connection from the events of Age of Ultron.
Appreciate the reminders! I just saw it last night, and I missed why SW wasn’t in more scenes earlier.
Also, side note, I decided to go see Avengers last night instead of watching Game of Thrones, figuring I could avoid GoT spoilers for 24 hours until I can watch it tonight. GODDAMMIT WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE WRITERS FUCK YOU ALL
Where, precisely?
Well, at least it wasn’t computer CG graphics. I agree that would have been unnecessary.
The rules:
You can’t take the stones from the past because it will make a branch timeline.
Branch timelines are bad, according to the ancient one.
You can’t change the past. Everything done stays done, all you can do is create new timelines that are different.
You can take the stones if you put them back precisely when you took them.
So what do they do? they take the stones from the past, and create new branch timelines. And worse, they DID alter their own past. Thanos of their timeline came forward and died in the final battle. So their own past has been altered. Who dusted people five years ago if Thanos came forward?
There’s no way Steve can put the stones back where/when they came from, because they have already created new timelines. How is he going to put the stone back in the tesseract/scepter/well of souls/Jane Foster/the sphere-thingy in the force field so that the timeline isn’t affected? He can’t, of course.
He can give the timestone back to the ancient one, plausibly, because maybe that already happened. She’s probably good at keeping secrets.
Plus, Pym particles have been stolen from the past, and they were probably used (or now, not used?) in their future. I bet they got used twice in the same timeline.
That’s not what she was saying, she was saying without the time stone their branch would be bad because it is needed to stop the bad guy from the Dr Strange movie. That would have been worse than Thanos winning.
Nebula had the fourth most screentime after the Big 3. More than Hulk. Gamora had the second most screen time in Infinity War. Black Widow was up near the top in Avengers 1 + 2. Scarlet Witch near the top in 2 + Civil War.
I thought it was pretty clear that she had taken over as head of the Avengers from Steve.
Finally saw it this weekend. It was completely and absolutely meh
It was too long, slow, and somber to be a fun adventure movie.
The jokes were too seldom and weak for it to be a good comedy.
The drama was entirely to melodramatic for it to be a decent drama.
The acting was atrocious, particularly Scarlett Johansson.
The effects were generally okay, but Bruce Banner looked like a damn cartoon throughout the movie, which was really jarring.
It was too. damn. long. By the end I was wondering whether it wouldn’t be better off for everyone to let Thanos destroy the universe.
This whole MCU story arc has been a depressing burden on all the films. I hope now that it’s over, they dispense with the whole “every movie has to be in the same continuity and part of the same story arc” bit, and just make each individual movie as tight and as good as possible, without chaining it to all the other movies.
Yes, every point they went to the past made a new timeline. Even the one where Clint took a baseball glove. When Steve went to the past, he jumped back to those new timelines to put the stones back. No, they won’t play out exactly the same anymore, but at least they have the stones to “stabilize” as it were. But at no point did they change their own past.
Right, they created a bunch of multiple timelines, but after putting the stones back those timelines are now setup exactly the same as the main one. Cept for the one where Thanos dies, which is NOT the Thanos from the past. That Thanos is from the timeline where Rhodey Nebula Hawkeye and Black Widow traveled to. There is one timeline where Loki runs off with the tesseract and one in which Thanos and all his army is dead, those are the only changes. Steve went to live in one of those, I would assume the one with a dead Thanos.
That’s not quite what her point was. Taking the Time Stone from her, in particular, would be bad, because they need it in a couple years to defeat Dormammu.
When Thanos came forward in time, he created a new timeline. In that timeline, the Snap never happened. In the timeline we’ve been watching for the last decade, the Snap happened exactly as we saw it.
When she’s talking with Banner, the Ancient One indicates that minor alterations in the past don’t generate a new timeline. Only major stuff like, “There’s no Time Stone anymore,” or “Thanos disappeared into a time warp and never came back,” can split time lines. So, “Banner borrows the Time Stone for a minute,” won’t split the time line. “Loki escapes with the tesseract,” presumably, would.
It’s not clear if, “One of the Infinity Stones isn’t in a scepter anymore,” is a major enough disruption to branch the time line. If it is, I’m okay with, “Steve figured out something off screen, it doesn’t really matter what it was, it’s not important to the story we’re telling right now,” as an explanation. If nothing else, he’s going back in time to meet a literal wizard. Maybe the Ancient One helps out with some of that stuff.
Steve went off to live in a third timeline, one where Captain Rogers mysteriously returned from the dead after crashing the Red Skull’s plane into the arctic. That reality branched off the main timeline decades before the “Thanos is dead” branch."
I didn’t get the impression that the stone had to be put back precisely and exactly, just that it had to be back close enough that it didn’t alter events occurring around that stone. That was enough to ‘prune’ that branch and sort of ripple it back into the main timeline.
Thanos coming forward was an alternate timeline for that Thanos. It didn’t change their past; in their past Thanos never time traveled as evidenced by all the missing people (and birds).
But, yes, there were alternate timelines formed – in one there is no Thanos post 2014. In another, Loki is bopping around and having wacky adventures. But I don’t think it was supposed to be portrayed as a flawless victory, either (which the next Spider-Man flick apparently works off of).
My point isn’t to definitively answer time travel/multiverse theory, but to answer the point:
And I pointed those out.
General audiences probably don’t care about multiverses, they just like the film. But the movie created, what, five, six, seven new parallel realities. And apparently you can not only travel in time, but you can travel between these realities at will. If Steve put the stones back into each branch timeline from when it was removed, then he is traveling between realities (and branching each of those again when he reenters it!).
The average viewer would say, well, they got everything back to normal, I’m happy. But they didn’t, by their own rules in the film. The comics love their multiverses, so in that sense it’s not wrong. But the movie left a mess. The Avengers created parallel realities that could be even worse, and they won’t even know.
Except none of the things you pointed out violate the rules for time travel established in the movie.