Actually, now that I think of it, the big moon* might just indicate he’s on a restored Titan. Dunno if he can still access some or all of the Stones’ powers with the Gauntlet all burned out and crumpled…but there’s no reason he couldn’t pluck out individual ones and use them to fix “his” world.
*I’ve been fanwanking that it is indeed our Titan, satellite of Saturn, and the big moon we see in the sky is a (grossly overscale) neighboring moon of Saturn. Too big - I doubt any neighboring moon would actually be visible from Titan, much less have a larger apparent size than Luna from Earth, but what the heck.
Now, why Saturn isn’t visible…if Titan is tidally locked, then they’re just on the other side. And if there’s no tidal lock, then they just weren’t around for planetrise. Simple!
Just don’t ask me about why Titan’s sun is so big and bright … crap, I just poked too big of a hole, didn’t I?
So does it strike anybody else as odd that we don’t see Thanos getting the power stone from Xandar? Seems strange that they’d undercut the entire first Guardians-movie, which was after all about keeping the stone out of Thanos’ hands, like that—their victory over Ronan doesn’t matter at all; Thanos apparently just went himself and grabbed it. All this with Xandar being a supposedly advanced planet, which didn’t seem to give Thanos’ forces any trouble when cosmic backwater Earth held up their own against them.
Indeed, it might have been better if the Guardians had lost, as Ronan had planned to kill Thanos using the stone, IIRC.
So I think this may be something we’ll revisit in the next movie. Perhaps there were some shenanigans with the power stone yet to be revealed? Part of Strange’s plan, with some added time travel?
It is odd, the Nova Corp is based on Xandar and they are a formidable power in the comics. However Infinity War is already very long, so they can’t show everything and it would have been a bit of a downer to have an earlier MCU movie about the Nova Corp where they lose at the end and Thanos gets the stone.
The thing is, if there’s nothing else than that, then rewatching Guardians is going to feel a little hollow—all the effort and sacrifice (OK, so they got Groot back, but still, he’ll have to relive his adolescence, which I’m not sure isn’t a fate worse than death for everyone involved) will be for nothing. In fact, it probably ended up helping Thanos in the end. I mean, it’s kinda like the Indiana Jones-thing: everything pretty much plays out the same if the Guardians just decide to fuck off for an extended holiday on some planet that’s composed entirely of beaches and margaritas.
The movie lost nothing by leaving Xandar out. Nor, IMNSHO, does it do anything to lessen Guardians of the Galaxy. Movies are very limited in time, and even a movie like this has budget considerations; they can’t afford an issue on the ransacking of Xandar like a comic series could. They were right to just handwave it.
I don’t think that’s a guess or speculation on his part.
I have heard, anyway, that Diesel actually did have a script with the dialogue that Groot was saying, so that his “I am Groot” could be spoken in the right context.
You make a convincing case. I suppose the idea that an infinity stone was in the scepter was probably something the MCU planners thought of only after the fact, because it would be extremely out of character for Thanos to have left it in place rather than cracked open the casing and filled the first hole in the gauntlet with it.
He was using the sceptre to get Loki to get him the Tesseract - 2 for the price of 1.
Loki didn’t neccisarily know it was an infinity stone - he might not have even realized the Tesseract was at that point. Similar to no one in GoTG knowing the orb contained one until way late into the movie.
I get that logic, but given Thanos’s behavior when he acquires each stone in Infinity War, and the fact that he wasn’t using the stone himself but handing it over to a lackey - in fact, a lackey’s lackey (who is, to boot, an individual famed for his duplicity), using it in that manner is out of character. Of course, it’s possible that the casing hides the mind stone really, really well and Thanos actually didn’t know he had it in his hand. But that could just be my impression. (More likely, it’s a non-anticipation, at the time of Avengers 1, of how the movies of the next 6 years would play develop).
I think at first Thanos was trying to be sneaky about it because there were still people around who could stop him. Then The Ancient One and Odin (and possibly Ego) died so he didn’t feel like there was anyone else that he should worry about.
Also, he waited until he knew where 5/6 were so he could grab them all in a short amount of time. Pretty much the only people who could stop him once he got started were other stone holders, so he had to move quickly to catch them off guard.
Absolutely, but actually knowingly handing to one of them an infinity stone he already possessed? There are any number of weapons Thanos could have armed a lackey with. Out of character to arm one with an item he wishes to possess for himself.
I mean, out-of-universe, it was clear they were not planning on making the scepter an Infinity Stone while writing the Avengers and didn’t come up with that idea until later on.
In-universe, I buy it that Thanos believed that only he could truly use the real power of the Infinity Stones and wasn’t worried about someone hanging on to it for a while, especially someone who didn’t realize what they had.
I mean, Thanos with just a power stone took down, Heimdall, Thor, Loki, and Hulk. Ronan with a power stone got beaten by a dancer and a racoon.
