It was freaking Aaron from Walking Dead? that I did not realize.
Well I’ll be hornswoggled. Definitely fooled me. He looks a bit like him too.
When I heard the voice, I didn’t think it was Weaving, I thought it was the guy who plays Littlefinger on Game of Thrones (which is also wrong). But it was a nice surprise anyway.
Saw it last night. The ending was disappointing as hell. If they hadn’t killed off Spider-Man and Black Panther, I might think they’d let some of the deaths stick, but since they’re contractually obligated to make Spider-Man 2, we know that the next film is going to be Infinity Gauntlet and that most of the deaths are going to be reversed.
That said, the rest of the movie was incredible. It’s just frustrating that those two minor choices totally hamstring the expectations for the next movie.
I thought it quite nicely subverted expectations. I expected Cap and Tony to die and not the “new” heroes like Spiderman and BP, and that was a big surprise. Even if they’ll obviously be brought back.
And, given the storytelling so far, I’d fully expect those restorations to come with a price.
I’m kind of thinking that the next one won’t pick up where Infinity War left off: I’m expecting more of a parallel timeline thing, where we see what characters who weren’t in IW were up to. Granted, there aren’t many - but whatever Hawkeye was doing, the Russos have hinted it was more than just knocking out the east wall in the dining room at the family farmhouse. Then, third act or so, they’ll join up the stories and pick up from the current end-of-IW position.
I don’t know…I think having them die knowing they’ll be brought back for future franchises cheapens their deaths somehow. It’s like their sacrifice didn’t mean as much (for the informed viewer). Maybe they should have picked someone else to die that could just…stay dead?
Maybe they’re not dead, and they’re just in a parallel universe.
Having said that, I think the ones that did actually die, like Loki and Gamora and Vision, will not be returning. Those were probably permanent.
Did anyone else see during the credits “Character from Arrested Development used with permissions from blah blah blah”?
I agree…except I think Vision comes back as a slightly nerfed model.
How many times did they use the:
Good guy: “I’m not giving you what you want!”
Thanos: “Fine! Watch me hurt a loved one!”
GG: “Fuck! Here you go… take it.”
sequence in this film? 5? 6?
Just Loki and Gamora.
Yeah, that annoyed me a bit too. I also found it out of character for some of these characters (Loki and Gomora mostly).
What Dr. Strange is concerned, it is pretty obvious to me that all this fits in his “one in 14 million” scenarios. He has no reason to care about Iron Man that much, hell he told him explicitly that he would let him die to protect the stone. When he gave the stone up, he says something like “this had to happen” to Tony.
Off course the list of dead or vanished characters makes it clear that things will be undone, although disappearing in thin air is not exactly a “sacrifice”, but I think it sets up a nice sequel. Pretty sure we are going to see the original avengers (from the first movie) taking on Thanos, Hawkeye comes back because he lost a kid or something… maybe even led by Colson. And to make it happen, Cap and Iron Man sacrifcie themselves (for real this time).
The only character I’m sure is not coming back, is Loki. They even say it in the movie!
Both Thanos and Thor said it, which actually makes me think the exact opposite.
Saw it last night and thought it was great. I need to see it again to process everything. The action was nonstop from the opening scene to the ending and I couldn’t take my eyes from the screen.
I always hated how the comic book series ended with Thanos living as a fucking farmer, but I can kind of see how the movie ends with Thanos’ sense of contentment and feeling of a job well done as being the sort of feeling the comics were going for. The other major change in the general plot I noticed (it has been many, many years since I read the series) was that Thanos was trying to get Death to love him in the comic where in the movie he is trying, in his mind, to help the universe and prevent over population.
Anyway, I thought it was a good movie, but the ending, even though I expected it and knew the deaths were coming left us all with a sunken feeling. So, the movie makers succeeded as that was obviously what they were going for.
The only permadead character in Marvel is Ben Parker. 
That said, I think the MCU will leave anybody not dusted dead at the end of Avengers 4. But, as you mentioned, I also think the fix will require great sacrifice by Tony and Steve, among others.
Except of course the “job” was completely pointless even from his own ruthless standpoint. I wanted to yell at the screen “Dude, have you ever even heard of the concept of EXPONENTIAL GROWTH in population dynamics?”
I mean ffs, the Earth’s human population more than doubled just in the 40 years from 1950 to 1990. Killing off half of all humanoid life isn’t going to save anybody’s environment: at best it just buys you a few decades’ delay while the populations bounce back to where they were before. That’s not even the blink of an eye on cosmological time scales. Not even the flicker of an eyelash.
In short, Thanos’ great Genocide Quest would have been a complete futile bust as an ecological measure, even if you leave out all the catastrophic trauma and suffering.
Human(oid) societies become environmentally sustainable for the long term not by taking a one-time massive hit to their population, but by making deliberate choices about their environmental policies and birthrates. (Massive hits to the population can even result in societies ultimately becoming less environmentally sustainable long-term, as in the Thanos-like impact of the Black Death in late 14th-century England, which destroyed something like a third of the population in two years and hastened the process of “enclosure” and conversion of diverse environments to pasture.)
Thanos would have been far more effective in his stated aim of saving the habitable universe by just handing out condoms on a galactic scale and teaching the assorted peasantry about simple renewable-energy technologies. But I guess you can’t make a superhero movie about that.
Well, we also can’t forget the fact that the infinity stones make him basically omnipotent, just having them makes the whole over population problem easily solvable by infinite other ways besides killing half the population. Killing half the universe had to be the actual goal for the killing itself to make sense, the moment you make it a solution to a different problem the whole plot falls apart.
Okay, but it was Thanos himself who consistently represented the 50% genocide as a long-term solution to environmental destruction caused by overpopulation. Was he just fooling himself, or did he think he was fooling his adversaries? I’m pretty sure that Stark and Banner and Strange, for example, are familiar with the concept of exponential growth in population dynamics.
The Gauntlet is not a single-use item, and Thanos is immortal. Maybe he plans to snap his fingers every 50 years or so.