Maybe more than Hulk, but I’m not sure. That puts the screen time at:
White dude
White dude
White dude
Robot (white?) lady
Green (white) dude
instead of
White dude
White dude
White dude
Green (white) dude
Robot (white?) lady
I don’t at all remember that being true about Infinity War, and a lot of her screen time was being captured and then murdered by a grayish purple (white) dude. Black Widow definitely had less screen time than any of the four main Avengers in the first and second movies.
But in any case, I’m talking about in this one.
Maybe–and under her leadership, the Avengers had become so boring that Captain Marvel, publicly unsubscribed from their mailing list. Her role seemed to be “boring administrator”, not anything thrilling or inspiring.
When things started happening, it’s because Ant Man (a white dude) had a cool idea, which he took to Iron Man (a white dude), and then when he got no traction, took it to the Hulk (a white dude). Later, things really got under way when Iron Man (a white dude) figured out how to perfect Ant Man’s (a white dude’s) idea, and got his wife’s permission to go off and be a Big Damn Hero.
I don’t remember Natasha having a huge move-the-plot-forward role in any of that, although I may be forgetting something.
The rules for time travel that they established were that if anything important comes from the past, it must be put back where it came from. Thanos came from the past, wasn’t put back where he came from, and was most definitely important.
I don’t think that there’s any coherent way you can try to use alternate timelines to fix what they did, but even if you try, you can’t say that Steve Rogers grew old in one of the alternate timelines. The timeline he grew old in was the main one, as evidence by the fact that he shows up on that bench (he did not get there through the Pym portal thingie).
Nor were the time travel rules the only ones that they broke. According to the first movie, the Infinity Gauntlet, even before any stones were added, was already something special: Thanos had to go to the greatest craftsman in the Galaxy, who crafted it using a neutron-star forge, to be able to channel the power of all the Stones at once. And then Stark goes and not only makes his own Infinity Gauntlet, but ends up embedding the stones in the hand of his standard armor and uses them that way.
And they also just completely ignored all of the effects of the Snap. When half the population of the planet suddenly vanishes, the other half don’t just go on living. The death toll in the following minutes, hours, and days after the Snap would have been nearly as large as from the Snap itself.
While it wasn’t perfect it’s pretty impressive how well the image was merged with real people.
I’m guessing CG is used to such a large extent because the technology has grown enough to overwhelm the viewer. There are to many things going on at once to fully comprehend that’s a draw to bring people back to watch it again and again.
Right. And that created a parallel timeline where Thanos disappeared sometime around 2014, and never collected all the stones. That timeline still exists at the end of the movie - there’s no way that they can close that one. Likewise, there’s a timeline where Loki escaped with the tesseract, and a timeline where Steve married Peggy right after the war. And arguably a timeline where one of Hawkeye’s kids lost a baseball glove, but I think that one’s probably covered under the “minor changes flatten out” exception to creating branching timelines.
No, he grew old in the alternate timeline. The handheld gizmo that Stark invented that allowed them to time travel (as opposed to rapidly age and de-age, like Scott did on their first test run) gives them full control over their position in the time line. We see this plainly, when Steve and Tony fail to get one of the Stone in 2012, and use them to jump again to 1970, without having a platform to launch from or return to. Steve spent decades in an alternate timeline with Peggy. Then, when he’s old, he uses the time travel gizmo he’s been saving for decades to return to the moment he went back into the past, except a few feet off to the side, instead of right on the platform. Because Steve used to be in show business, and he knows how to make an entrance.
Stark doesn’t have a “standard” armor at this point in the franchise: his armor is a swarm of nanobots. He designed the glove that Banner used to reverse the snap - clearly, the tech that went into that glove was also programmed into his armor, which can reform itself to suit whatever function Tony needs from it. Granted, it doesn’t have the mythic romance to “forged in the heart of a neutron star by a really tall Tyrion Lannister,” but Tony is explicitly one of the greatest inventors in history. It’s not actually a discontinuity that he can build an Infinity Gauntlet. Particularly given that he had access to Thanos’ damaged one from Infinity War to work from.
So, you’re saying that the film’s depiction of the effects of magic wishing stones wasn’t sufficiently realistic? This part is admittedly a fanwank (whereas the other stuff I’ve argued here is textually supported) but Thanos wished for half the universe to die, and the Gauntlet apparently doesn’t work by “hyper-literal genie dickhead” rules, so it made sure that half the universe died, and no more. The stones are supposed to be literally omnipotent when gathered together, so nudging a few trillion falling helicopters (or the local planetary equivalent) to hit only empty apartment buildings shouldn’t be a real problem.
It may not have been to your taste, but you do recognize that you’re very much in the minority here, right? That the majority of moviegoers have really, really enjoyed and been drawn in by the MCU arc? And that, as money and box office records pour into the vaults, Disney is going to keep doing this exactly the way they’ve been doing it for the forseeable future?
I don’t believe that the Stones “grouped” people for death such as “This airplane counts for 200 people”. Thanos wanted the dusting to be random so no one could bitch that they were or were not chosen. Getting picked because your tour bus crashing into an orphanage would be a convenient way to kill seventy people in a bloc isn’t random.
Yeah, this means that you had a large post-Snap death toll and those people likely didn’t come back but I don’t think we were supposed to think of the end result as a ‘clean’ victory or else the movie would have been “Go back in time and stop Thanos so nothing bad happens” instead of “Try to bring back the Dusted people and deal with the consequences”.
Woo hoo! I thought I was Average Audience, but I’ve been promoted to General Audience. The Multiverse and other time travel worked for me.
It cracked me up when the heroes were realizing that all their time travel theories were from 80s movies. And what that meant to me was that it freed me up to follow The Most Important Movie Time Travel Rule: Don’t think too hard, and enjoy the ride.
Of course I am aware of the popularity. That doesn’t change what I would hope for. That’s what I used the word “hope” for.
Regardless of how popular it is now, people aren’t going to be watching this 20-plus feature series over the long run over and over and thinking that this plot was strong enough to carry 50 hours of attention.
It’s not really the plot, it’s the characters, IMO – from my conversations with other MCU fans, most of us love these movies because we love watching these characters interact with each other. The plots and action are sometimes good and sometimes meh, but the characters are usually great (as far as this type of movie goes), IMO.
Well, that supports my point then. Or at least doesn’t contradict it. You can easily have 20 films in which these characters interact in the absence of a long, connected plot.
Miller is right. Cap created a new timeline and then returned near but not on the platform. That’s the underlying canon, confirmed by the director, for sticklers like us.
But they definitely had him sit on the bench to please the non-sticklers who enjoy stuff like that and don’t get disgruntled about paradoxes. Thus they were able to have their cake and eat it too.
I respectfully disagree. I am not really the sort of superfan that sustains this franchise - I’ve enjoyed it well enough, and I’ve seen probably 75% of the movies at one time or another. But the people I know who really love it, love it because of the long, interconnected arc. They’re the people who started screaming when Falcon emerged during Endgame because they knew him and had context for him from the ongoing narrative; without the narrative, that entrance carries absolutely no weight and in fact, isn’t in the movie at all. And they do indeed watch the 20-plus feature series over and over; typically I see them binging the entire thing every time a new tentpole film comes out.
Also, the interconnection gives Disney incredible power to draw eyes to more of their content. "Oh, hey, everyone is talking about Endgame, and you really want to see it and figure out what’s going on? Great! Buy a ticket to the movie! But also, subscribe to Disney+ and watch all of the other movies! And then go watch our Falcon and Black Widow TV series, because we’ll give you fleshed out stories of characters we were able to introduce to you as a side note in a long-running narrative.
There’s a reason soap operas run for 30 years. The MCU is a soap opera with aliens and magic and capes, and I’d be stunned if it ever stopped being that.
Feels to me like watching a TV series run. You’re probably not going to settle in to watch a hundred episode series front to back on a monthly basis but it’ll still get watched. Even easier with the MCU run since you can say “Iron Man 2 isn’t worth it” which is easier than “Skip episodes 3-7 of Season Two…”
But even if nothing like it ever happens again, it was cool to be around for it this time.
Also because if he reappeared on the platform as an old man, the rest of the team would think the device was glitching like it did with Scott during the first attempt, and Steve didn’t want to risk them trying to un-glitch it and possibly mess something up.
Thinking about this, maybe the Avengers didn’t see the creation of that timeline as a problem. After all, the whole point was to undo the devastation of the snap. And in the new timeline created by Thanos’ time traveling into the future, that never happened. In that timeline, Thanos and his army disappeared one day in 2014 and never returned. So that timeline was saved at the moment of its creation and the Avengers saw no need to intervene in it. They only went back to timelines where something needed to be undone (like the disappearance of an infinity stone or Mjolnir).
This part is admittedly a fanwank (whereas the other stuff I’ve argued here is textually supported) but Thanos wished for half the universe to die, and the Gauntlet apparently doesn’t work by “hyper-literal genie dickhead” rules, so it made sure that half the universe died, and no more. The stones are supposed to be literally omnipotent when gathered together, so nudging a few trillion falling helicopters (or the local planetary equivalent) to hit only empty apartment buildings shouldn’t be a real problem.