Harrington, I liked your thoughts, but I think you may have thought about it more deeply than the screenwriters. I had forgotten about the Shuri thing, but now that you remind me, that was unfortunate how her efforts were apparently a waste of time.
Ohhh, I like this. It’s plausible, if unlikely, and would reconcile the two biggest annoyances I had with the movie: Loki stupidly attacking Thanos (I want his words to Thor, “I assure you brother, the sun will shine on us again,” to have meaning), and Bruce Banner saying “Duh huh, we didn’t think about it, duh huh. You’re so smart, Shuri, duh huh.” (paraphrasing).
You’re probably right. I’m fanwanking. It would be awesome if Shuri saves the day in the end with her quick wit. Maybe Markus and McFeely will read this post in time to do a little rewriting.
Finally got round to seeing this.
Enjoyed it, but before I went in I thought there were too many heroes for it to work; too many separate stories to tell, and I still think that now.
I had no idea it would have a dark ending (though I knew how important infinity war is for the MCU, so knew it wouldn’t be by the numbers), so was suitably stunned by that.
The one thing I wanted to say: many upthread have said that Thanos’ plan is stupid. But of course it is: did you want to leave the movie theater thinking “Yeah, genocide is the answer! I’m going to phone my congressman”.
IMO, it’s an original enough motivation for a movie bad guy, and it’s something that some actual humans in the real world genuinely think would be a good idea (:smack:), that it works well for the plot of a movie.
I don’t think his plan is stupid…It’s a good motivation… It’s just if your reasoning is there are FINITE resources…and you are going after something called the INFINITY stones…and putting together an INFINITY gauntlet to be able to harness the INFINITE power of the stones… Ehhhh… Wait…his plan is stupid.
Unless that was just his reason he told people to justify it and really he just likes power and death… and that would have been fine too… but the movie told us by way of seeing things from his POV and it being as much his story as anyone else’s…that those WERE his reasons. It’s a big flaw in the movie.
There is of course another explanation in the comics.
But my fanwank for a pure in-MCU explanation would be this: he has had this ideology/mission for years and years (most of his life, right?), and it only later began to take form as a realistic goal as he learned about the Stones and began to plan on how to collect them all. By which time he was so obsessed with this paradigm he had been worshipping for all these years, he was psychologically unable to shift it to “well, if I have this much power, I can just make the resources infinite”.
He could also rationalize it as “if I just boost the resources, people will become even more wasteful and expect more and more, whereas by doing it this way, they might learn a lesson about population control’s efficacy, or at the very least keep their population in check out of fear that I’ll repeat the process again if they do not.”
He doesn’t really want to save the universe, he just wants to prove he was right all along.
I only recently saw it, too. I haven’t had a chance yet to read the whole thread, but some thoughts:
On paper, Thanos isn’t sympathetic at all. But given that handicap, the guy playing him did a good job of selling it, as well as he could. The end result is that you still can’t sympathize with his plan at all, but you can at least feel a little for him (but not so much that you’d be at all upset to see him defeated), which I think was a good balance.
When Strange did his bit about there being only one timeline where they win, I thought “Well, that’s good news, then”. If there were a dozen of them, then you might be paralyzed with indecision trying to figure out which one was best, and end up missing the chance for all of them. But with only one, well, you know exactly what you need to do.
I think that the key moment for the reset button is going to be when Thanos used the Time Stone to undo the Mind Stone’s destruction. By doing that, he created a cosmic “save point”, right before the Time Stone’s destruction. Which would still leave Loki and Gamora dead, but it’s not like Loki hasn’t faked his death before, and Gamora is probably in the Soul Stone (she was able in some sense to talk to Thanos right after the finger-snap). And I’m not sure just who is supposed to take advantage of that save point, with Strange out of the picture, unless that’s somehow Marvel’s job.
I never picked up that the Guardian of the Soul Stone was supposed to be Red Skull. It felt like, when we saw under his hood, it was supposed to be a dramatic reveal, but it wasn’t distinctive enough. You sort of expect a mystical wraithlike guardian in a hooded cloak to have a skull for a head.
And yeah, a 15-foot-tall Peter Dinklage was clever.
Also, he has actually been doing this for years already and apparently it works. Unless he was lying to Gamora about her planet being a utopia after he culled it.
I wonder if Lokis attempted knife attack was just a cover for something clever that put a flaw into Thanos’ plan. That would be cool and Loki wouldn’t look like just a desperate idiot.
Something that just occurred to me.
Do we KNOW Loki died? His most established power is that of illusion. Maybe he intentionally had his illusion do something dumb so he could do a slow fade into the darkness.
It would give him leave to go back to the, “Are you ever NOT going to fall for that?” line that was so impactful before. And Loki’s pretty sharp about his own survival instincts. He had to know he’d no chance against Thanos on his own. But buying time so he can think of something else and build a power base? That’s him all the way.
His illusions aren’t usually tangible. Usually.
True that. But he had significant incentive to up his game.
While I don’t find a relationship between a 29 year old and a 47 year old “creepy” – certainly not in comparison to the creepiness of a 29 year old being involved with a “synthezoid” simulacrum of a 47 year old, yeesh 
– I do think “Are you a racist, too?” is perhaps a bit of a harsh response.
I think many people would find a relationship between a 35 year old and a 17 year old to be “creepy”, and given that, I wouldn’t necessarily expect the “ick” factor to go to zero for everyone after aging them up by 1 year. After aging them up by 12 years, sure, it doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore to me, but I can see how this is a bit subjective.
(Edited to add: Actually, I’m wrong, it turns out a 29 year old dating anyone over 44 is objectively creepy. It’s math. ;))
Of course, in the real world “It’s none of your business” is a reasonable response, but here we’re talking about audience reactions to a relationship between fictional characters. It’s none of my business if a real-life couple has “chemistry”, either, but that doesn’t make such things off limits for a discussion of a relationship in a film.
The fact that both Thanos and Thor made a point to say he really was dead this time makes me think that he probably didn’t.
Loki was dead the moment he referred to himself as “Odinson”.
Oh, and on the question of Thanos’ motivation: I think that the reason they abandoned the “courting Death” idea was precisely because of Hela. Death, in the comics, is such an incomprehensibly powerful Entity that it’s plausible that killing half the Universe would be the sort of thing that would be needed to get her attention. Hela is awfully damned powerful, but she’s not remotely at that level, so she wouldn’t work as the object of Thanos’ obsession. But on the other hand, given that they’d just had a Goddess of Death as the villain in the most recent movie, it’d just be confusing if they introduced some other lady who is Death.
When Loki first looked at Thanos (in the background just before he picked up Thor by the breastplate), his visage was not that of fear and dread, which you’d expect. It appeared to me that he had a knowing, mischievous smirk, like he had some trickery in mind. Maybe he was just anticipating the Hulk.
After watching the scene again and paying close attention, I am convinced Shuri did something to the Mind Stone that will be important later. Of course I could be wrong, but it didn’t appear that the device she was using to extract the stone was hard-connected to the stone or Vision. It appeared to just fire lasers when she was touching the screen. And if she was not touching the screen, there was nothing. No lasers, no connection. If that’s true, her last second button presses, clearly not to continue extracting the stone (it was impractical at that point) or disconnect the device from the stone (if it wasn’t connected), would have another purpose. I like to think she implanted a transponder into the stone (if that’s possible) to track the gauntlet later. “How do we find Thanos?” “Let me show you brother.” That would be awesome.
I acknowledge that I could be attributing much more to Loki’s and Shuri’s actions than were intended by the writers, but man, their actions don’t make sense otherwise.
I know this discussion has petered out, but I cannot withhold my thoughts regarding Starlord (literally) galactically fucking things up. There are at least three others that should share the blame with Starlord.
Mantis: We don’t need an emotions play-by-play right now. Shut the fuck up and do your job. Telling others that Thanos mourns has no benefit, and will only incite people.
Nebula: You didn’t know that Thanos had to sacrifice Gamora to get the Soul Stone and you don’t know that he didn’t bring her back from Vormir. Of course Thanos isn’t going to bring Gamora to Titan and have her turn on him. She could have been resting comfortably at Chez Thanos.
Drax: What are you doing, holding Thanos’ boot? That’s utterly unnecessary. Get up and confront Quill and stop him from ruining the Universe, like he did to you on Knowhere (payback).
I know they had to get close to getting the gauntlet off and fail, for dramatic purposes, and I know they couldn’t have succeeded, for narrative purposes, but damn if Quill deserved all of the fault for waking Thanos from his slumber.
Also, why did Tony have Cap’s cell phone on him?
Cap’s left it for him, in case of emergencies, at the end of Civil War. As to why Tony happened to have it on him while jogging… the man has issues, remember?
I know how he got Cap’s cell phone, but I’m confused why he carried it on his person seemingly at all times. Even when confronted with a doomsday scenario, he was reluctant to use it, and had to be convinced by Banner. Even then he found it distasteful (he gave out a “pshht” sound). If he didn’t want to use it in an end of the world scenario, it doesn’t make sense he would carry it on him when he never predicted an end of the world scenario.