The original attack on the Asgardians leads to the Black Order flying to Earth and Thanos flying to Knowhere which took them maybe a day.
The flight from Scotland to New York to Wakanda is probably at least 12 hours even with Quinjet tech. The flight from Earth to Titan is also probably a half a day at least. So you have to assume there’s a day or two transitioning from Act 1 to Act 2.
The Black Order also needed to gather the army of Outriders and get them to Wakanda for the big battle between Act 1 and Act 3. Not something that snaps into place.
I suppose Thanos has the Space Stone at this point, but they show them all travelling in ships so I’m going to assume he didn’t teleport everyone everywhere.
I actually didn’t hate the motivation in the movie. I get the arguments against it being effective, but that’s a fact easily hand waved away. There’s a lot more suspension of disbelief needed elsewhere where science and math are concerned.
But I do think there’s something to be said for making Thanos a nihilist as opposed to a eugenicist. The zealotry that comes with infatuation and nihilism is a bit scarier and harder to reason with. In the movie Thonos claims he’s helping these worlds crumbling under overpopulation, but why the hell would he care about all these other races?
Ultimately it’s a small point and I can see that the exposition needed to make Thanos lovestruck and frame Hela as his muse or introduce another Lady Death would have weighed down the plot even more than it already was.
I’m not saying they’re teleporting, just that the ships are really really fast. Thor’s ship was already on it’s way to Earth so we don’t really know how far away they were, but they certainly didn’t take more than a day to get from Earth to Titan.
When Maw and then Stark/Strange/Peter were flying back to Titan, they clearly were at it for quite a while. Ships I’m sure are fast, but not Bifrost fast, which is pretty much what that scene implied.
Well, the problem is that we have no real idea what we’re arguing against. The Avengers still put up their best fight. Strange, after seeing the future, went from “I’ll totally let you chumps die for this stone” to trading it in to save Stark. Maybe he did it because he saw that was the path to ultimately stopping Thanos. Maybe his “Stone > You Guys” resolve wasn’t what he thought – which still wouldn’t make him any worse than the others who traded a stone to save a life. He sees the future, Thanos comes in, Execute Plan “Get the Glove”, Quill dorks it up, Thanos kicks everyone’s ass. Strange didn’t seem to be sandbagging it at any point during those events.
The “why does God let bad things happen?” question exists because it presupposes that God could, at a whim, stop those things. Strange appears to have given his all in the fight leading up to his defeat and wasn’t just saying “Eh, whatever. Here’s your rock”.
I do half expect that Thanos’ eventual defeat will NOT go 100% as Strange saw it with some quippy “Guess I should have looked at 40-million-yadda-plus-one timelines” remark. You don’t want to write it all off to predestination, after all.
The way i saw it was that there was no way to defeat Thanos at all, with just one single infinity stone he could have wiped out the Avengers with barely any thought like Ronan planned to do to Xandar. The only thing that kept him from doing this was that he sees himself as a hero for leaving half a planet alive. By the time of the fight on titan he had the reality stone, which meant he could have ended the fight instantly the moment he felt like it. That whole fight was Thanos just having fun, like that line from the trailer that got cut. Strange had to have seen that they never had a chance of stopping him, any chance of victory had to come after Thanos achieved his goal.
He does care about other species going extinct, though - that’s explicitly his motivation through the entire film. He’s killing 50% of the universe because he’s convinced that if he doesn’t, 100% of it is going to die. I’m not saying that makes him a hero, or “right” in any sense, but he does, indisputably, care about extinction. If he didn’t, none of his actions in the film make any sense.
Well, that’s not actually what I’m suggesting. He’d absolutely kill the last member of a species if it was necessary to complete his over-all goal. But his over-all goal is, “Reduce all species to a sustainable population,” and “one” is already pretty well below that threshold.
And looked right at Thor as he was saying it. I believe that was his way of saying “I don’t expect to survive this, but I want you to know that you are my brother and I love you.”
This feels like another way to come at my “Thanos was changed from Chaotic Evil to Lawful Evil” point. It changes things when Thanos isn’t liable to lose his shit, doesn’t it?
Again, I am good with the choice given the needs of the MCU - I am just surprised this wasn’t presented as a key difference, just like not including Death has been discussed.
I still don’t buy that he’s lawful. For one thing, he constantly prattles on about the need for balance. That’s the ethos of neutrality. For another, someone lawful wouldn’t randomly dust 50% of the universe’s population. Imagine the chaos and breakdown of order which follows having half the population instantly wiped out. But Thanos doesn’t care about that. He thinks that we (collectively) have gotten too far and too successful and wildly swinging the scales in the other direction is the best way to restore a balance. That has Neutrality written all over it. The couple little things like “He kept his word if you handed over the stone” doesn’t make him Lawful; Neutral aligned people don’t break promises for the hell of it. If Strange had handed over the stone and then Stark attacked Thanos and Thanos said “You’re lucky that he bought your life and I’m keeping my word” then maybe. But just promising something and then doing it in absence of a compelling reason to break it doesn’t mean much. And it certainly wouldn’t over ride the whole “restore balance by killing half of you all” thing.
Morally, of course, he’s all sorts of evil since his methods involve theft, murder, torture, kidnapping, etc. Neutral Evil.
I bow to your nerd expertise. I heard about it over the past coupla days for the first time. I am just trying to express that Thanos’s nature has changed in the MCU, I believe.
And furthermore, there’s really no way he wiped out only 50%; it’s gotta be some margin more, at least, since, as you say, the whole thing resulted in lots of chaos. Think about the helicopter we saw crashing into the building: even those spared a blowin’-in-the-wind fate in there are now gonna be dead. Or think of the people driving cars, flying planes, doing life-saving medical work, and so on.
My prediction for how this will play out in Avengers 4 is that Thanos will decide he misses Gamora too much and try to use the time stone to bring her back. Of course the soul stone won’t be happy about that, it will create some kind of alternative reality that the heroes use to undo some of what Thanos has done. I really hope they don’t undo everyone that was dusted, that feels cheap. Some of them need to stay dead, ie for whatever reason they can bring back some of the people dusted but not all of them. Otherwise the whole franchise just becomes, “time travel fixes everything” deus ex machina. Yawn.
Seems very odd to me that all of the Guardians of the Galaxy were dusted except Rocket (Nebula isn’t really core member). As an aside I thought I saw in a trailer where Rocket was commenting on how primitive Tony Stark’s tech and weapons were. I don’t remember seeing that in the movie, did I miss it?
And boo to Loki probably being dead for good. He’s one of my favorite characters in the whole franchise.
I thought he said “you should have gone for the hand”, as in cutting off the hand that was holding the infinity gauntlet. That makes more sense to me, given all we know of Thanos there is no guarantee an axe through his head would kill him. However we saw that Thor’s new axe could penetrate his flesh so it should have been able to cut his hand off as well.