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May. 21st, 2018 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eleanorjaneSo tonight I saw Infinity War, and - I enjoyed it heaps more than I expected to!
That said: my expectations were pretty low. So I didn't come out of it dancing on clouds or anything, but I didn't hate it - which is more than can be said for the last two ensemble MCU movies. :)
+ I liked the humour and the one-liners - and they felt like the normal (fun) MCU flavour of quippy, rather than Thor Ragnarok style, which sacrificed characterisation on the altar of comedy.
* On the other hand, IW sacrificed characterisation on the altar of ... well, a really fucking jam-packed ensemble, I guess. I don't know that they could have done any better given the number of characters they had to give nods to.
* Which is actually probably why I didn't hate it: there wasn't (much) room for characterisation I disagreed with, or really stupid decisions to drive the plot forward. :)
+ I realllllly liked the fact that Peter pulled the trigger on Gamora. I was fully expecting him to welsh on that promise out of love for her, and I was legit very happy that he didn't. (Undermined by him fucking up the plan later, but he's hardly the first MCU character to fuck up thanks to Manpain (*cough*Tony*cough*).
+ Unlike most other reactions I've read, I didn't hate that Thanos loved Gamora and she was a valid sacrifice to get the Soul Stone. Love doesn't have to be healthy or reciprocated to be love; I did buy that he loved her (thanks to some pretty great acting work from Zoe Saldana and Josh Brolin), albeit very toxically. Sometimes people are all kinds of toxic and horrible to people they do genuinely love, and although MCU is not here for the Deep Social Commentary, I appreciated this note.
- I am SO BORED with Tony Stark and his issues. I think the movies have been deeply unfair to Tony Stark - because RDJ sells tix like nobody's business, the PtB have not allowed Tony to have any kind of emotional growth. Everyone else gets to grow as a person within the scope of a single story and across the MCU as a whole (compare Thor then and now!), but Tony's progress is erased at the start of every movie so we can watch RDJ act out the same story over and over again. Wouldn't it be way more interesting to be watching Tony a la Iron Man 3?
+ But: props to Tony and his bravery. The most genuinely affecting part, for me, was Tony going up against Thanos alone on Titan.
- Relatedly, I want Rescue!Pepper Potts. COME ON, MARVEL.
- Also also: GIVE US SOME FUCKING FEMALE-LED MOVIES YOU DICKBAGS. Seventy-five percent of the heroes in IW were male (fifteen to five). Zero of the female heroes have had their own movie. Nineteen movies across ten years and it's STILL A FUCKING SAUSAGE FEST. #toomanydicksonthedancefloor
+ Relatedly, Shuri: Still Great. I want a Teenage Geniuses movie with Shuri and Spider-Man, I think.
* CEvans is really Done with Cap, isn't he? He was just not present for this, in an indefinable way. He stood there and said all the right things, and it wasn't a bad performance per se, but Steve had none of that intensity we've seen in Cap 1/2/3 and the two previous Avengers ensembles. Maybe that was a side effect of IW apparently being filmed simultaneously with A4, and CEvans giving his all to that? I hope so. (I could say the same of ScarJo as Nat, too.)
- I was unimpressed at the lack of intensity between Steve and Bucky; Steve greets Bucky with the same level of enthusiasm as Vision or T'Challa, and Bucky's similarly low-key. Given that SebStan had previously said he was basically playing Bucky as in love with Steve, after CA2, I assume he got a #nohomo kick in the ass from TPTB.
+ Surprise Red Skull cameo! That was pretty cool, although a bit random.
- Like pretty much everyone else, I found the mass death scene pretty un-affecting; the Infinity Gauntlet is such a blatant Chekov's Gun we all know everything is going to get totally un-done at some point in A4. Hell, we even saw Thanos unwind and redo time to suit his purposes, to underline the fact that the Time Stone can do that. Which takes away any amount of gut-punch the scene might otherwise have had, for me.
* I really wish, as others have said, that they'd killed all the Original Flavour Avengers with the mass death scene, and left the newer ones alive - it would give us some amount of doubt about what plot they were planning to go with.
* That said, I was surprised to read everyone's assumptions that we'd see Gamora back again; I genuinely thought Gamora was gone for good; I assumed they'd just undo the shit Thanos did after getting an axe to the chest. I hadn't thought from a Doylist perspective and contemplated Zoe Saldana being contracted for GotG3.
* I just ran out of energy to list my reactions and thoughts, because I had a neat idea - as follows!
HUH. Okay. I have a theory. I don't think they're going to undo Gamora's death with the Time Stone (nor Heimdall's, nor Loki's). Undoing Gamora's death would feel cheap. (That's a problem they risk with any use of an Undo mechanism, but worse when applied to people who died before the end of the movie.)
And for maximum moral conundrum angst mileage, I suspect in A4 they're going to tackle the moral issue undoing death. "Okay, so where do we stop with the resurrections? Do we resurrect everyone Thanos ever killed? Because, um, that's a shitload of people and actually genuinely could fuck with quite a few planets, given how long he's been at this. Okay, so we don't do that. Do we get to resurrect everyone whose deaths we're sad about? Well, that would just be hypocrisy. Okay, fine. We'll just undo the Mass Death Event - that's a fair levelling of the scales, since we're using the Infinity Stones to undo the work of the Infinity Stones."
So that leaves us at the end of A4 with Gamora still dead. Except unbeknownst to everyone, including the audience (possibly teased in a post credits scene), Thanos has resurrected Gamora himself, because he Loved Her and that makes her Special. Probably with a side order of mindwiping or brainwashing fuckery courtesy of the Mind Stone. So Thanos gets shanked during A4, and that leaves the way free for GotG3 to be, basically, The Search forSpock Gamora. Bonus points if the brainwashing has made her the Big Bad they have to defeat in GotG3, to get their Gamora back (which also nicely answers the issue of "how the fuck do you come up with an opponent anyone will care about for GotG3, after the intensity and scale of IW/A4?")
I don't know if that hangs together in light of any other casting news or plot spoilers but it makes sense to me, and it's how I'd do it. (Though I think we've already established I don't think like the MCU PtB!)
Anyway, movie. *nods*
That said: my expectations were pretty low. So I didn't come out of it dancing on clouds or anything, but I didn't hate it - which is more than can be said for the last two ensemble MCU movies. :)
+ I liked the humour and the one-liners - and they felt like the normal (fun) MCU flavour of quippy, rather than Thor Ragnarok style, which sacrificed characterisation on the altar of comedy.
* On the other hand, IW sacrificed characterisation on the altar of ... well, a really fucking jam-packed ensemble, I guess. I don't know that they could have done any better given the number of characters they had to give nods to.
* Which is actually probably why I didn't hate it: there wasn't (much) room for characterisation I disagreed with, or really stupid decisions to drive the plot forward. :)
+ I realllllly liked the fact that Peter pulled the trigger on Gamora. I was fully expecting him to welsh on that promise out of love for her, and I was legit very happy that he didn't. (Undermined by him fucking up the plan later, but he's hardly the first MCU character to fuck up thanks to Manpain (*cough*Tony*cough*).
+ Unlike most other reactions I've read, I didn't hate that Thanos loved Gamora and she was a valid sacrifice to get the Soul Stone. Love doesn't have to be healthy or reciprocated to be love; I did buy that he loved her (thanks to some pretty great acting work from Zoe Saldana and Josh Brolin), albeit very toxically. Sometimes people are all kinds of toxic and horrible to people they do genuinely love, and although MCU is not here for the Deep Social Commentary, I appreciated this note.
- I am SO BORED with Tony Stark and his issues. I think the movies have been deeply unfair to Tony Stark - because RDJ sells tix like nobody's business, the PtB have not allowed Tony to have any kind of emotional growth. Everyone else gets to grow as a person within the scope of a single story and across the MCU as a whole (compare Thor then and now!), but Tony's progress is erased at the start of every movie so we can watch RDJ act out the same story over and over again. Wouldn't it be way more interesting to be watching Tony a la Iron Man 3?
+ But: props to Tony and his bravery. The most genuinely affecting part, for me, was Tony going up against Thanos alone on Titan.
- Relatedly, I want Rescue!Pepper Potts. COME ON, MARVEL.
- Also also: GIVE US SOME FUCKING FEMALE-LED MOVIES YOU DICKBAGS. Seventy-five percent of the heroes in IW were male (fifteen to five). Zero of the female heroes have had their own movie. Nineteen movies across ten years and it's STILL A FUCKING SAUSAGE FEST. #toomanydicksonthedancefloor
+ Relatedly, Shuri: Still Great. I want a Teenage Geniuses movie with Shuri and Spider-Man, I think.
* CEvans is really Done with Cap, isn't he? He was just not present for this, in an indefinable way. He stood there and said all the right things, and it wasn't a bad performance per se, but Steve had none of that intensity we've seen in Cap 1/2/3 and the two previous Avengers ensembles. Maybe that was a side effect of IW apparently being filmed simultaneously with A4, and CEvans giving his all to that? I hope so. (I could say the same of ScarJo as Nat, too.)
- I was unimpressed at the lack of intensity between Steve and Bucky; Steve greets Bucky with the same level of enthusiasm as Vision or T'Challa, and Bucky's similarly low-key. Given that SebStan had previously said he was basically playing Bucky as in love with Steve, after CA2, I assume he got a #nohomo kick in the ass from TPTB.
+ Surprise Red Skull cameo! That was pretty cool, although a bit random.
- Like pretty much everyone else, I found the mass death scene pretty un-affecting; the Infinity Gauntlet is such a blatant Chekov's Gun we all know everything is going to get totally un-done at some point in A4. Hell, we even saw Thanos unwind and redo time to suit his purposes, to underline the fact that the Time Stone can do that. Which takes away any amount of gut-punch the scene might otherwise have had, for me.
* I really wish, as others have said, that they'd killed all the Original Flavour Avengers with the mass death scene, and left the newer ones alive - it would give us some amount of doubt about what plot they were planning to go with.
* That said, I was surprised to read everyone's assumptions that we'd see Gamora back again; I genuinely thought Gamora was gone for good; I assumed they'd just undo the shit Thanos did after getting an axe to the chest. I hadn't thought from a Doylist perspective and contemplated Zoe Saldana being contracted for GotG3.
* I just ran out of energy to list my reactions and thoughts, because I had a neat idea - as follows!
HUH. Okay. I have a theory. I don't think they're going to undo Gamora's death with the Time Stone (nor Heimdall's, nor Loki's). Undoing Gamora's death would feel cheap. (That's a problem they risk with any use of an Undo mechanism, but worse when applied to people who died before the end of the movie.)
And for maximum moral conundrum angst mileage, I suspect in A4 they're going to tackle the moral issue undoing death. "Okay, so where do we stop with the resurrections? Do we resurrect everyone Thanos ever killed? Because, um, that's a shitload of people and actually genuinely could fuck with quite a few planets, given how long he's been at this. Okay, so we don't do that. Do we get to resurrect everyone whose deaths we're sad about? Well, that would just be hypocrisy. Okay, fine. We'll just undo the Mass Death Event - that's a fair levelling of the scales, since we're using the Infinity Stones to undo the work of the Infinity Stones."
So that leaves us at the end of A4 with Gamora still dead. Except unbeknownst to everyone, including the audience (possibly teased in a post credits scene), Thanos has resurrected Gamora himself, because he Loved Her and that makes her Special. Probably with a side order of mindwiping or brainwashing fuckery courtesy of the Mind Stone. So Thanos gets shanked during A4, and that leaves the way free for GotG3 to be, basically, The Search for
I don't know if that hangs together in light of any other casting news or plot spoilers but it makes sense to me, and it's how I'd do it. (Though I think we've already established I don't think like the MCU PtB!)
Anyway, movie. *nods*
