New Movie Times: avengers

Showing posts with label avengers. Show all posts

Sunday, 4 August 2019

Holy Shit, Avengers: Infinity War Actually [Redacted] [Redacted] [Redacted]

Hey, have you seen Avengers: Infinity War? No? Stop reading, get the hell out of this post, leave your work early, get tickets, and then come right back here. Go, and go soon, because holy fucking shit, once people see this film this weekend there is no way you’re going to avoid spoilers.

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SYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

YO!

They did it! They did The Snap!

Okay, okay, let’s back up. Just for a second. I know all anybody wants to talk about is the ending. I honestly was not sure whether we’d get the snap in this movie, or if this one would be the heroes briefly holding off the Mad Titan, but man, they really committed to it. Look at this list:

Gamora. Heimdall. Loki. Black Panther. Falcon. Vision. Bucky. Star-Lord. Mantis. Drax. Groot. Scarlet Witch. Dr. Strange. Spider-Man.

They’re all dead. They’re gone.

“Mr. Stark, I don’t want to go.”

Fucking stab me right in the heart and rip it out.

Let’s just run through the big moments, then we can comb through the finer things, because good lord, this film felt like nothing but big moments stacking on top of each other until the screen mercifully and frustratingly cut to black after that final dastardly content smile on the sunset.

From the moment the “Marvel Studios” logo disappears, one thing is made plain to viewers—this movie is not waiting for you to catch up, and it’s damn sure not going to do it for you. It opens after Xandar has already been decimated and the last of the Asgardians are being slaughtered. We’re introduced to Thanos, the film’s protagonist, in a way. He’s stunningly large, carrying Thor around like a sack of potatoes, and they show early on with a quick-but-devastating UFC match with Hulk that Thanos has the brawn to back up his high-minded talk.

This is just the first of many times Marvel shows off their high-tech motion-capture final product, and man, Thanos looks good. The subtle smirks, squints, smiles, strains, tears, all of it looks realistic, at least within the context of the MCU. Josh Brolin’s performance is pitch-perfect—if Thanos were just a raving genocidal meathead, the movie would crumble beneath its star power and nonstop narrative. But in a movie that clearly values every second, they allow Brolin quite a bit of room to introduce us to the inner-workings of a character that’s only ever been on the MCU’s periphery, through both flashbacks and some expository dialogue with Gamora and Dr. Strange. His home planet, Titan, was overpopulated and everybody except him died, and since then he’s been going around trying to wipe out half of the universe’s population. The Infinity Gauntlet and the Infinity Stones are the quickest route to that end goal. Over the course of the film, his motivations aren’t perfectly crafted to the point that you cheer for him, but they root themselves as believable enough in your mind early on, so that when he does the things he does in the latter half of the film, you feel at least part of the weight he feels when he makes some fairly dramatic decisions.

Back to the Asgardians: Loki and Heimdall are toast, as far as I’m concerned. My coworker Eric Van Allen pointed out that you can’t really have Thor movies without Loki, but for some reason, even though they allude to a hopeless revival a couple times, my feeling is that Loki is gone for good. (If that’s the case, this movie just wiped out essentially everything Thor: Ragnorak set up for Thor’s future story lines.)

The New York battle sequence with Iron Man, Wong, Spider-Man, and Dr. Strange is fast-paced, hilarious, and entertaining. And given that we’d just seen Loki snuffed out, the hindsight knowledge that everyone makes it out of this fight alive wasn’t quite as clear while everyone was getting their ass kicked. (We’ll come back to the Hulk’s low-T issues in a bit.) The most important thing the fight did was give us some much needed quality time with Ebony Maw, the clear standout among the Black Order. The Black Order seem to be Thanos’s top-four warriors, all with different strengths—Maw moves things, Proxima Midnight is a good fighter and can telekinetically control weapons, Black Dwarf is basically a dumb, scaly version of Hulk, and Corvus Glaive is Midnight’s boy, and he has a glaive.

It’s unclear just what the upper limits on Maw’s powers are—he splits a car in half, seamlessly controls metal objects, bests Dr. Strange pretty quickly—but he’s the only one among the Order that’s really given any sort of opportunity to voice his role, which is that of a devoted acolyte. He talks about how it’s “salvation” to be killed by Thanos; the other members of the Order just seem to really enjoy the killin’ part. (I’m sure there was a romantic goodbye scene between Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive that didn’t make the cut, but without it, Proxima and Black Dwarf are just bodies for the Avengers to punch and do slightly cooler Finishing Kills with than the six-armed aliens.) Maw’s build-up is short-lived, though, because he gets pretty easily disposed of on the spaceship back to Titan.

In Scotland, Scarlet Witch and Vision are chilling under the radar, thinking about running away together (like I said, this movie is not spending any time on the family farm) before one of the best jump-scares of the MCU, with Glaive stabbing Vision through the gut out of nowhere. This fight is honestly small beans compared to everything else, but it’s necessary to set up Vision’s tragic story, intro the Disgraced Avengers, and also get us to Wakanda.

The Guardians-Thor meet-up was a natural choice given the direction Taika Waititi took Ragnarok, and the humor here felt natural. The whole part about Star-Lord trying to establish male dominance in front of Gamora was cheesy, sure, but the two Chrises are good enough actors that it was fun for the brief moment it lasted. The Rocket-Thor pairing worked a lot better, if only because they both seem to possess a more grounded understanding of the reaches of power possible in the universe. Star-Lord, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to quite comprehend it, even joking around when Gamora begs him to kill her should Thanos get his hands on her. It takes her forcing him to swear on his dead mother to get him to finally stop deflecting and start accepting the gravity of the war they find themselves in. Of course, when he tries to do so, and saves his life by impressing Thanos, it doesn’t even matter thanks to that little red stone—that whole Collector fake-out sequence was amazing. Given that we’d already said farewell to Loki, I sincerely thought that was the end of Mantis and Drax.

The Thanos-Gamora setup is obviously what the writers and directors were banking on as one of the pillars holding up this movie. Only providing a single flashback asked a lot of us, as we had to then infer from Gamora constantly hurling insults at the big purple fella that their relationship deteriorated after he won five-year-old Gamora over with a shiny switchblade. But Zoe Saldana is, thankfully, a skilled enough actor to convey all the middle, unseen history between then and now—Thanos took her, killed her parents, made her his daughter and main assassin before she ran into a half-human named Peter Quill.

Cards on the table, I didn’t instantly remember how the Red Skull could have ended up on Vormir (he fell through a wormhole when he tried to hold the Space Stone in the first Captain America), but there he was. Some more cards on the table: I did not think that was when Gamora was going to die. I thought Gamora and the Soul Stone would be last, in terms of how and when Thanos figured out what the ultimate secret to obtaining the stone was. I had also convinced myself there was no way she would take Thanos to the one place the Soul Stone was, but then it kind of made sense when she tried to convince him that his path was doomed to failure because he didn’t love anybody. Given that she insisted on having Quill kill her, I have to think that final grasp on the ledge was an act, and that she realized too late that Thanos would indeed instantly realize that he did love her. But nope. It was as simple as that—Gamora, the most fierce, calculated, morally emboldened of the Guardians is no more. Barring a giant undoing of the entire movie’s events (certainly not unfathomable given what happened in this one), Gamora is gone.

The battle on Titan is split up over a series of cuts between the initial assault on Wakanda and Thor’s smithying side-mission. And here’s where the most frustrating part of the movie comes: When Star-Lord breaks down, refuses to believe Thanos, and then punches him, everyone in my theater groaned and gasped, because it is totally believable if you’re invested in Quill’s character. Over the course of the two Guardians films and his role in this movie, Quill often fails to comprehend matters outside of his immediate sphere; he’s riding high from realizing he’s part-Celestial and being a respected galaxy-guarder—even after Thor tells him Xandar is gone, he continues trying to one-up him. It is made quite clear that he has neither of the dread and anxiety of Iron Man or the pragmatism of Dr. Strange, and in this instance, it costs the half the universe their lives.

The first half of the battle on Wakanda is both very cool and very Avengers, which is to say we never really have a fear of either the Black Order or the aliens besting our heroes—by this point, we know they’re setting the table for the titan. There are plenty of great action shots, and even when the point predictably comes where the music takes a darker turn and the alien army seems to be overwhelming our heroes, the payoff of Thor coming through with his new Groot-Axe somehow still works, because that’s just what happens when you have Chris Hemsworth and an unlimited special effects budget. Both the Axe Throw and the Big Slam rule hard, and neither are top-5 moments in this movie.

No, the real fun comes after Dr. Strange turns over the Time Stone to save Tony Stark’s life—for a split-second, I was prepping for the end of Iron Man—and Thanos makes for Earth. That final walk, from the waterfall to the cliff’s edge where Vision was in a crumpled heap, is handled beautifully. By this point, we know none of the heroes in the frame have a chance. The closest thing to hope we get is Captain America surprising the towering monstrous villain by holding him back for a moment, and even then, it’s barely been two seconds before Thanos disposes of him with a screen-shaking right hook. Despite his Civil War activities, Vision is a completely sympathetic character this film, and it pays off when you watch Thanos smirk and simply rewind time and kill him, again, by plucking that stone, and a glob of wires and cables, from his forehead. And even then, you think that is the worst of it. When Thor finally appears and sends his axe several inches into Thanos’s chest, you think that this may be the end of the titan. But the camera lingers a moment too long—the first twinge of those purple lips was enough to signal what was coming, but by then your breath is gone. Then, Snap.

Everybody in the theater said something as each character floated away (Black Panther elicited the loudest cries) but for 30 seconds, everyone sat motionless and silent as Iron Man held Peter Parker in his arms, as the kid from Queens slowly drifted away. That moment, that one where Spider-Man fades—shit, I don’t think I quite have the words for it, even almost a full day later. I knew they were milking it, and damnit I still couldn’t stand to watch it. That’s how you do the damn Snap.

Here are my nitpicks and assorted thoughts:

The Black Order had no backstory, no motivations, and were basically just there to be people other than Thanos that our heroes could punch. Black Dwarf mumbles and grunts roughly three words; Proxima Midnight gets one line about how Black Widow stabbed her lover; and Corvus Glaive gets a good jump-scare and a couple decently frightening close-ups. That is largely it from this bunch, and while they make for some decent filler fighting, you can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something more that could have been done here—then again, I’m not sure where you’d find the time to do so given this movie’s length and density.
I could have used a bit more time on pre-apocalypse Titan. Again, I’m not sure where we’d find the minutes for this, but I thought the single flashback to Titan with Dr. Strange sold short his commitment to this whole mission of population control. The Gamora flashback was quick, but the movie committed a powerful actress to convincing us that her experience with him was hell, in large part because it was a one-way relationship. The Titan-Thanos backstory only has Thanos to lean on, and while it’s still moving, maybe just one more convincing shot of Thanos pleading with his planet elders to hear him out may have made the mission more palatable. That it was as acceptable as it ended up being is a credit to Brolin and the CGI wizards.
Let’s talk about the banter, and this isn’t precisely a complaint. Infinity War is hands down the best in-theater experience Marvel’s put out. It’s grand, somber, insane, beautiful, and fun as hell. And a big part of that is because Marvel was able to handle each one of these characters so carefully and maintain the established tones and character quirks of each one. That’s naturally expressed via jokes and quips. So, if I have to shoehorn a very specific qualm in here, it’s that some jokes were too funny and made me and other people laugh a beat too long and miss a line. I will note that the Russos did a decent job of leaving laugh pauses, where we get a non-speaking shot of another character raising their eyebrows or laughing; I was just part of a particularly invested opening-night crowd, with one guy sitting near me that laughed at 100 percent full-volume for every fucking joke. Learn when to chuckle, my dude.
I’m not sure how people who aren’t at least halfway invested in the MCU will consume this film. It’s got numerous beautiful landscapes and set pieces, a couple excellent fight sequences, more than its fair share of truly emotional farewells, and pretty tight subplots that lead us to that magic moment. But so much of the emotional heft came from the baggage I carried into this movie, and I have a hard time understanding what these stakes would mean to someone who really didn’t care much about Captain America or Star-Lord or Gamora or Spider-Man as characters. As long as someone is a general superhero movie fan, I think it’ll still land, but hoo boy, as a 10-year fan, that final 30 minutes had my palms gushing sweat.
The “Iron Spider” suit and “Bleeding Edge” Iron Man suit both ruled very hard. I was curious how they were going to get nanotech from Wakanda into Stark’s hands, and they found a pretty slick way, melding together that info with the additional sting of realizing he’s ready to start a family and a life with Pepper Potts. Love the use of the extra spider legs and that we don’t have to spend any time exploring its new tricks.
Hulk has some stuff to figure out, it seems. After Thanos gives Hulk the ass-whooping of the lifetime (I half-expected Jim Ross to make a cameo when Thanos slammed him), Hulk is no longer interested in fighting, or even coming out to play, telling Bruce Banner “No!” multiple times. I’m not sure where this is building to for Avengers 4, since we’re not getting a Hulk cameo in either Ant-Man or Captain Marvel. All of our heroes have lost someone they care about by the end of the movie; for Banner, that just happens to be the big green beast that’s now hiding inside him, refusing to come out.
Hawkeye and Ant-Man are NOT in this movie! They’re under “house arrest,” according to Black Widow, who says they took a deal with the government after things died down from the Civil War debacle. So, expect Clint to show up on the family farm, either in Ant-Man & The Wasp or Avengers 4.

There are only a couple for-sure things moving forward:

The Snap will go down as the single boldest decision Marvel’s committed to, narratively, in this entire 10-year run. Saying you are making a movie based on heavy source material is one thing in a reality where movies only get made if they can continue making you money—Captain America survived Civil War despite dying in the comic version. But to actually follow through with one of the most iconic comic book moments, that results in some of the most important (and yes, profitable) superheroes dying and not being resurrected in the same film, is a decision that’s earned, in part by having the source material as something to point to, and in part by making 18 preceding movies, of which the majority are fun and entertaining. Ending the movie with Thanos in a cabin on some random planet was a bold move that Marvel understood would not an acceptable cliffhanger if everything that preceded it didn’t earn it.
Tony Stark is going to be fucked up. Part of Civil War and the entirety of Spiderman: Homecoming made very clear how Stark felt about using what is essentially a child soldier in this greater war he’s seen in both visions and dreams since he first fell back through the wormhole in 2012. Now, to have Spider-Man die in his arms, pleading with him like the child he is, just hours after he spoke to Pepper about wanting a child of their own, that’s it. That’s Stark’s worst nightmare in the fading flesh. I’m not sure what Avengers 4 holds for him, but expect to see a broken, unhinged Tony Stark hellbent on saving the universe and not himself.
We’re absolutely still in the 1 in 14 million chance Dr. Strange told the team on Titan about. Everything from him telling Stark he’d risk “the kid’s life” and his life to protect the Stone, to his sudden willingness to turn over the Time Stone, to his parting message to Stark screams that The Snap was part of that larger plan.
I have little idea what that larger plan is. All we have to go off of is the knowledge that Ant-Man & The Wasp is out in July and Captain Marvel is out next March—so, some combination of the quantum zone, the B.A.R.F technology, and Captain Marvel’s Kree connections will somehow lead us to beating Thanos. I’m sure those movies will fill in some gaps, but for once, I feel pretty clueless.

I’ve only watched every second of Avengers: Infinity War one time. My judgment is bound to change once I see it a second time and can pick it apart beat-by-beat; I’ll think of ideas of what the movie could have been, and formulate theories on how it could have better spent its time or built its characters. But for the first time, for the first full 2 hours and 40 minutes I spent starting at a massive screen watching what was basically three third acts, I couldn’t have been happier. It’s a cliché, but movies this daring and grand and beautiful are the reason people still go see them in theaters.

Infinity War’s floor is so high, that when you start to nitpick the film’s various pitfalls—Dinklage wasn’t really all that special; half of the Black Order were basically just walking punch machines; not enough time on pre-apocalypse Titan—you begin to realize just how impressive this film’s accomplishments are. This is a movie with 18 prequels and 30-some stars, none of whom feel cheated in terms of screen time, and more importantly, the quality of that screen time.

The main critique I’ve heard so far concerns the cliffhanger, but there’s just no way you could smash the collection of all the stones in half and still have a halfway decent film. The constant ramping up of the action and the stakes—Thanos threw a fucking moon at Iron Man!—and the commitment to the characters while not weakening the action or stakes made this movie’s ending absolutely perfect for me. For all that the MCU is (a movie-making, money-printing machine), if the trade-off for movies this fun requires that I have to go see another this summer and two more next year, then I’m all for it. “Thanos will return,” and I couldn’t be happier.

Avengers: Infinity War was a double-truck book fight come to life over the course of a full movie. It was colorful—no drab grey-blue palettes, here—it was well-acted, it was respectful of the source material, and it grounded itself in real stakes and balanced itself with a levity established in prior installments. It is a movie a younger me would have never expected to see made so perfectly, and it’s a movie even current-aged me could only halfway imagine.

As my girlfriend and I staggered out of the movie theater, shell-shocked and dazed from the most epic, wide-ranging, charging, heart-ripper of a MCU movie yet, we grasped for words to describe what we just saw. For whatever faults you have with the capitalistic film-making system or the marketing campaigns or the glut of superhero movies, all I can say is no other movie series has come close to making me feel that way. The day Marvel stops giving me that feeling, I’ll stop going. As best I can tell, based off Infinity War, that won’t be any time soon.

Let's Catch Up On The State Of The Marvel Cinematic Universe In Time For Avengers: Endgame

Screenshot: Disney (YouTube)

Hello friends! As you’re well aware by now, Avengers: Endgame opens in theaters this weekend, finally bringing to a—uh, well, not a close or a conclusion, but uh like some kind of large-scale branding transition for Disney and its Marvel Studios subsidiary, where they will arbitrarily plant a flag and say that a certain phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ended and the next one is beginning, but in all other respects will continue cranking out broadly samey superhero movies for as long as the public continues dumping billions of dollars onto them. Anyway I’m fuckin’ pumped.

It’s been about a year since Avengers: Infinity War, the last big entry in this very long series of movies that began with 2008's Iron Man. For those who are not hardcore Marvel fans, let’s catch up on where all of our favorite 9,717 Marvel Cinematic Universe characters are as of the ending of that movie, so that everybody will be ready to make sense of however the heck Endgame starts. (This will necessitate lots and lots of spoilers for that movie that came out a year ago.) Ready? Let’s do it!

Iron Man

Iron Man is not dead. He got all fucked up in his battle with Thanos and at one point Thanos skewered him through the guts, but then Iron Man sprayed some nanites on it, which as we all know is the cure for being impaled. I’m sure his organs are just fine in there and he does not need any antibiotics at all. He survived the Snap and appeared to be marooned on the planet Titan at the end of Infinity War.

Captain America

Captain America also is not dead. Thanos whomped him pretty good in the final fight of Infinity War, in the woods of Wakanda, but he survived the Snap. Also, he had a beard! And shaggy hair! And instead of his iconic shield and goofy but charming classic red-and-blue outfit, he had a pair of these dumb gauntlet things and was wearing a grim-’n’-gritty black outfit. At the end of the movie he said, “Oh God.”

Black Widow

Also alive, also in Wakanda. Took surprisingly little damage in a long battle against the evil tall alien lady who worked for Thanos, before Scarlet Witch came along and chucked the alien lady into the whirring blades of a giant lawnmower. Infinity War didn’t seem to have any real idea what to do with Black Widow, which frankly kind of makes sense, because the bad guys at this point are so preposterously hyper-powered that it seems kind of ludicrous for someone whose superheroic ability is “good at martial arts” to be playing any kind of crucial role in defeating them.

Thor

Thor nearly stole the show in Infinity War: His arrival in Wakanda with his cool new space-ax was the high point of the movie, and he nearly won the fight when he bashed that sucker right into the middle of Thanos’s chest and then pushed it even deeper in there. I don’t know anything about giant purple alien anatomy, but it makes sense to think that, for a creature shaped and proportioned like a (very very large) human, the torso is the best place to store most of the vital organs. In which case, having a giant space-ax bashed a foot into the center of one’s chest seems like it should be a fatal wound, to me? Like if you bash a proportionally similar ax into the middle of my chest, I’m definitely gonna drop extremely dead instantaneously.

Anyway it didn’t kill Thanos. He snapped his fingers and wiped out a theoretically randomly distributed half of all the life in the universe (while somehow sparing all of the Avengers from the first Avengers movie, including Thor, who is my personal pick to be the guy who lops Thanos’s head off in Endgame). Then he used the fucked-up remains of the Infinity Gauntlet to zap himself off to a vacation retreat.

As of the end of Infinity War, Thor was in Wakanda with his space-ax. I think it’s pretty much beyond dispute at this point that Thor is the coolest Avenger.

Hawkeye

Also alive. He wasn’t in Infinity War, unless he was in one of the 56 extra scenes Marvel habitually staples into the end credits of their movies to punish people who ever want to go home from the theater. I would just like to say here that, similar to Black Widow’s case, “very good at archery” is sort of a weird superpower in the context of a world with all the other Avengers and Thanos and such in it. There’s also no reason to think Captain America wouldn’t be able to do archery just as well as Hawkeye, and no particular reason to think the Avengers would need an archer on staff.

I don’t know where Hawkeye is as of the end of Infinity War. His farmhouse? Maybe. Apparently he was on vacation or something while earth was being invaded by genocidal aliens. Like he just saw on TV that earth was being invaded by aliens in giant circle-ships and they were smashing up New York City in a fight with some of his best friends and he was just like “That’s cool, I’ll sit this one out.”

And honestly, that’s reasonable! He wasn’t gonna swing the fight with his archery skills.

Hulk

Not dead. Thanos kicked Hulk’s butt in the beginning of the movie, and then he spent the rest of the movie cowering inside Bruce Banner. It’s been a rough two-movie stretch for ol’ Hulk! First he got whomped by Thor in the arena in Ragnarok, and then Thanos just straight up beat the damn shit out of him!

Anyway, in Infinity War Bruce Banner had to sorta jerry-rig Hulklike smashing powers by wearing a huge Iron Man suit to the battle in Wakanda. His most memorable moment was when Thor showed up and Bruce told the aliens they were screwed.

Scarlet Witch

Scarlet Witch got Snapped in Wakanda and is dead. Honestly the events of Infinity War went uniquely bad for the Witch. First, Thanos’s cabinet secretaries interrupted her and Vision’s romantic getaway by, uh, skewering Vision through the chest. Then, when they were all in Wakanda fighting the aliens, she got baited into leaving Vision’s side, which allowed Scary Hood Guy to thwart the work of safely removing the Mind Stone from Vision’s forehead, which meant the only way to destroy the Mind Stone was to also destroy Vision. Which of course only Scarlet Witch’s magic is powerful enough to do.

She had to explode her own boyfriend’s brain to save the day! That scene was awful. And then, when she’d finally murked the love of her dang life, Thanos just used the frickin’ Time Stone to run it back 45 seconds, bring Vision back to life, and re-kill him by yanking the stone out of his face. Then Thanos snapped his fingers and turned Scarlet Witch to dust. All in all not a super great day for your pal Scarlet Witch.

Vision

But an even worse day for Vision! He’s dead as shit, man. He died twice in the span of like one minute. He’s dead.

(On the other hand, unlike many others he was not turned to dust. I suppose in theory if the Avengers get the Mind Stone back from Thanos they could plug it back into Vision’s brain and reboot him. He’s just a computer, after all. I reboot my computer like once every six months, and it’s fine.)

Captain Marvel

I haven’t seen that movie yet. Apparently it was good! Anyway Captain Marvel wasn’t in Infinity War and I don’t think she is dead. Is she higher in the Avengers chain of command than Captain America or what. Maybe she can be promoted to Major Marvel.

Black Panther

Image: Disney

Dead... for now. Black Panther’s dusting at the hands of Thanos was the exact moment everybody knew for an absolute fact that the sequel to Infinity War would definitively undo the entire climax of Infinity War—which drained that climax of basically all its emotional power and made the decision to end a day-glo comic book movie with the genocide of half of humanity seem even more ghoulish and misbegotten. Black Panther made like eleventy bazillion dollars at the box office and is by far the most acclaimed and celebrated entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; the people in charge of making these movies would sooner depict Captain America napalming a doggy daycare than wipe out T’Challa before they’ve made at least two more Black Panther movies.

Anyway, T’Challa led the good guys in the fight in Wakanda but got Snapped at the end.

Spider-Man

Spider-Man, like Black Panther, is temporarily dead. He was on Titan with Iron Man and Doctor Strange and the Guardians of the Galaxy when the Snap happened, and he turned to dust, while begging for his life. It was upsetting. I looked over at my young kid when it was happening and I could see him struggling to keep it together. He was upset about it for the whole rest of the day and had trouble sleeping that night because he kept thinking about how scared Peter Parker was when he died. It’s stupid that these are the kinds of comic-book superhero movies American culture makes.

Anyway, there are already teasers for the sequel to 2017's very charming Spider-Man: Homecoming, so I think it’s safe to guess that Spidey will return.

Ant-Man

GIF: YouTube

I finally watched Ant-Man and the Wasp this past weekend. It’s charming! The best MCU movies are the ones that put their monstrous budgets and infinite cultural capital toward creating something fun and silly—something liberated rather than weighed down by its origin in comic books. Give me a thousand ramshackle, goofy, Looney Tunes-y capers like this one before another grim, gray-and-navy bore about Captain America Taking Duty Very Seriously.

Anyway Ant-Man was not in Infinity War but definitely will be in Endgame. I gather that the events of Infinity War left him trapped in the Quantum Realm because all of the people who were standing by to zap him back out of it got Snapped. That’s a tough break! Other other hand, Michelle Pfeiffer hung out in there for like 30 years with no food or water and she turned out okay, so I’m sure Ant-Man can handle it. Just gotta tighten the old belt and make the best of your time in the Quantum Realm, as I have always said.

Doctor Strange

GIF: YouTube

Doctor Strange was at the big battle against Thanos on Titan, gave Thanos the Time Stone, and got Snapped, and is “dead.”

The big important clue-type shit going into Endgame involves Strange: Early in Infinity War, Strange made tediously clear that his absolute highest priority was keeping the Time Stone out of Thanos’s hands, even explicitly telling Iron Man that he’d let him or Spider-Man or anybody else die without hesitation if it allowed him to keep the Time Stone safe. Then there was a scene where he used the Time Stone to view like 14 million possible alternate futures, and in only one of them were the good guys able to win. Then, after that, contrary to what he’d said earlier in the movie, he handed the Time Stone over to Thanos to save Iron Man’s life, and explained it to Iron Man by saying that “we’re in the endgame now” and “there was no other way.”

This seems to indicate that, in that one possible future out of 14 million in which the good guys win, Thanos gets the Time Stone and Iron Man doesn’t die on Titan, and Doctor Strange knows that, and that’s why he made the deal he did. You’d think he might have made more of an effort to explain that during the long minutes he and Iron Man and Spider-Man and the Guardians of the Galaxy were just hanging out on Titan after Thanos left, but, uhhhh........ maybe in all the possible futures where he explained it to them, that somehow caused Thanos to win? I don’t know, man, I have a headache.

Let’s pause here for a second for a note on Titan.

A Note On Titan

It does not speak very well of either the biodiversity of the planet Titan or of the taxonomical rigor of its inhabitants that the term for what Thanos is, like species-wise, is “Titan.” He’s a Titan from Titan. This is like if Earth were named “Human”—Hello, I’m from planet Human—or if people were called “Earths.” (This is Tony Stark, the Mad Earth.) No wonder that place went to shit! The big purple assholes at the top of the food chain thought themselves synonymous with the planet itself! In my opinion this disqualifies Thanos from making life-and-death decisions for the whole rest of the frickin’ universe.

Loki

Loki is dead as hell. Thanos choked him out and then—if the grody sound effect is to be believed—broke his neck, after taking the Tesseract (which was the Space Stone with a box around it) from him. Then Thanos blew up the space ship with Loki’s dead-ass body inside it. It’s hard to imagine even an elite-level trickster like Loki wriggling his way out of that jam.

Idris Elba

He has a cool song out!

I have been listening to this song on repeat for like a month. Also Thanos skewered him through the chest with, like, a pike or something. He’s extremely dead.

Eddie Vedder

Eddie is the worst of the MCU characters by a thousand miles. His superpowers are that he lost his arm a long time ago and got the leftover super juice that made Captain America special jacked into his bloodstream by weirdo Nazi scientists. That’s it. Evidently the Avengers are so hard up for rotation depth that they keep a spot open on the bench for a guy who has exactly one-fourth as many overpowered robot limbs as an empty Iron Man suit running on autopilot.

This grim-faced emo doofus was the MacGuffin of Captain America: Civil War, which was the silliest and most embarrassing part of that dull and excruciatingly over-serious movie that critics nonetheless loved for reasons surpassing all comprehension. In turn, the absolute lowest and most insulting point in Infinity War was when T’Challa—the Black Panther, the frickin’ King of Wakanda—personally marched down to Eddie’s frickin’ Hagrid Hut on the edge of Wakanda to present him with a new robot prosthesis, as though the fate of the world hinged on ensuring this gloomy sad-sack Budget Cap had exactly one (1) above-average limb to bring to the ensuing fight for the preservation of the human race. Get the fuck out of my face, Eddie!

Anyway this piece of shit was the first person Thanos turned to dust at the end of Infinity War. Serves him right.

Wings Man

Illustration: Me (Me)

I don’t give a damn about Wings Man! What even is his deal? Get this goober the hell out of here.

Wings Man turned to dust at the end of Infinity War.

War Machine

My kids are big fans of the Lego Marvel Superheroes video game series. Largely this is because of the truly astounding number of playable Marvel characters you can unlock and use. There are hundreds of them! Sometimes it seems as though every wacky costumed character Marvel ever crammed into a comic book made his or her way into these video games. Captain Britain and Moon Knight and Union Jack and Super Skrull and on and on and on.

It strikes me as less than ideal that out of all these wild and wacky characters, this insanely lengthy movie series has held open a crucial lineup spot for a guy whose deal is basically “An Iron Man suit, but with a different guy in it.” Don Cheadle could have played Silver Surfer! That would have ruled. Instead he is That Guy Who Borrows An Iron Man Suit. That doesn’t rule at all.

Anyway he’s not dead. He survived the battle of Wakanda and the Snap and was standing there in his goofy primer-gray Iron Man suit at the end of the movie.

Star-Lord

GIF: YouTube

Snapped. Star-Lord was the secondary villain of Infinity War. He took too long to make good on his promise to kill Gamora when the time came; he refused to take seriously the need for a plan to deal with Thanos on Titan; and he decided he absolutely had to shit-talk Thanos and punch his face before they got the stupid Infinity Gauntlet off, which screwed everything up and led directly to Thanos getting the Time Stone, which led directly to Thanos being able to get the Mind Stone, which led directly to the Snap. It seems only fitting that he got dusted!

When they undo the Snap, they should make this asshole clean up all the wreckage. He should also have to dig Vision’s grave!

Gamora

Dead. Thanos chucked her off a cliff on the pretty sunset planet so that he could get the Soul Stone. Lots of characters will be brought back from the dead in Endgame, but it seems like Gamora’s death has to be one of the permanent ones.

Rocket

Photo: Sam Greenwood (Getty)

Rocket is not dead. He survived the battle of Wakanda and the Snap.

Groot

GIF: YouTube

Groot got Snapped in Wakanda. This wasn’t as emotionally devastating as I might have expected—it almost certainly didn’t wreck anybody’s shit the way “We are Groot” did—mostly because cranky teen Groot just isn’t nearly as lovable as either baby Groot or original recipe Groot. Alas, that is what it means to be a teen: That if you get magically disintegrated by an intergalactic supervillain, people will say “Honestly, that could have been sadder.” But also, by the time Groot got Snapped, I’d already realized I was watching something incredibly cynical and cheap that existed solely for the purpose of its own undoing in the sequel.

Drax

Snapped.

Bug Lady Whomst Make Bad Guys Go To Sleep

Snapped.

Nebula

Photo: Francois Mori (AP Photo)

Alive. Thanos’s angriest daughter survived the big battle on Titan and lived through the Snap. She and Rocket are the only Guardians left. Buddy road-trip comedy time! (Sike, all the rest of them are coming back in Endgame except maybe Gamora.)

Nick Fury

I think Snapped? I think he got Snapped in one of the mid-credits scenes in Infinity War. I will leap into a volcano before I will confirm this.

The Serious Woman Who Is Always Hanging Out With Nick Fury

Probably also Snapped. There are too many people in this movie series.

Shuri

Did Shuri get Snapped? I honestly have no idea. She was in Wakanda trying to take the Mind Stone out of Vision’s forehead without killing him, then Hood Guy snuck in and attacked and Vision tackled him out of the window and that was the last I saw of Shuri.

Ideally I would have to hope that she didn’t get Snapped—ideally the matter of whether one of the MCU’s very most enjoyable characters died or not would have some weight—but it doesn’t matter, because all of that shit’s gonna just get undone later this week.

Okoye

Not dead. She survived the battle of Wakanda and was looking Black Panther dead in the face when he turned to dust. That’ll put a dent in your day, buddy.

M’Baku

Not dead. M’Baku fought in the battle of Wakanda and was kicking mega-ass and doing the insanely cool battle chant thing when Thanos did the Snap, and then had to stand there like a real fuckin’ schmuck while half of all his countrymen turned to dust around him.

Lupita Nyong’o

Photo: Joel C Ryan (AP Photo)

Lupita Nyong’o never appeared in Infinity War! That seems dumb to me. Maybe her Black Panther character, Nakia, was on vacation at Hawkeye’s house while aliens were attacking the nation she defends with her life. Lupita Nyong’o is not dead; as for Nakia, who knows?

The Wasp

GIF: YouTube

Snapped.

Valkyrie

Valkyrie wasn’t in Infinity War. I guess that means she died when Thanos attacked the big ship with all the Asgardians on it in between the end of Ragnarok and the beginning of Infinity War. The alternative possibility is that she survived that attack and Thor just left her floating in outer space when he joined up with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Not cool, Thor.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Photo: Amy Sussman (Getty)

The news has been pretty rough for Gwyneth Paltrow lately. Iron Man is marooned on Titan, Goop had to pay a bunch of money to customers who bought its bullshit about vagina eggs, and then she sued for crashing into somebody while skiing and then just skiing away like a real asshole.

Bilbo Baggins

I don’t recall seeing Bilbo in Infinity War. Maybe he was using the ring to be invisible. I do not know whether the power of the One Ring would protect him from the Snap. Frankly the lore is very unclear on this subject.

Tony Stark’s Uptight Limo Driver

This blog is over.

A Non-Fanboy's Spoiler-Laden And Mostly Cranky Review Of Avengers: Endgame

GIF: YouTube

Avengers: Endgame is not a movie. Here is where some poor Ringer writer with Bill Simmons looming over their shoulder like Dennis Quaid in that The Intruder trailer would write “it is a Cultural Event” or “it is the End Of An Era” or “it is the high water mark of brand synergy in the IP marketplace” or some such. No. What Avengers: Endgame is is the awkward and over-serious series finale of a long-running television sitcom. It was not made to tell an interesting story of its own, or to expand meaningfully on the themes established in the earlier episodes, or even to reiterate those themes in thoughtful or fun or inventive new ways. To the extent that Avengers: Endgame even has an artistic purpose—to grant that it exists to do more than just soak up another couple billion dollars for Disney—its purpose is to get these actors onto the next phases of their respective careers, and in a way that is gratifying for people who especially give a shit about their Marvel characters.

If you are not someone who especially gives a shit about these Marvel characters, there’s a very good chance you will find this deeply annoying. If, for example, you are someone who has enjoyed the various Avengers movies well enough, for their cool action and quippy dialogue and generally unserious tone, but without investing a whole lot of emotional bandwidth in the question of whether Robert Downey Jr.’s stint as Iron Man is brought to a close with proper reverence, there’s a strong likelihood that you will spend the first two-thirds of Endgame surprisingly fidgety and bored, if not genuinely bewildered by how much this damn movie expects you to care about whether a crudely constructed immortal alien god who expresses anger by shooting lightning from his eyeballs finds emotional closure with a minor character from a movie you half-remember watching like eight years ago. Or the sloppy redemption arc of a guy whose entire moral decline is articulated in one deeply cheesy six-minute ninja fight sequence in Endgame’s endless first-third where-are-they-now phase.

The emphasis on Doing Right By These Tentpole Characters is so overwhelming that for long stretches of the movie it obliterates the conflict that has ostensibly motivated their actions in the plot. When Rocket and Thor find themselves off on a quest that is of absolute importance to the team’s long-shot hope of saving literally half of all living things in the universe, Thor’s angst over his career and lifestyle choices not only diverts his half of their effort, but is given the vast majority of screen time. We get plenty of Thor’s heavy-handed and cliché-laden reconciliation with a cameo performer, while Rocket literally scampers around desperately in a few throwaway cut scenes, actually fighting to save trillions of lives. The only way to interpret this, as a viewer who cares much more about the plot of the movie than about whether Thor will like Take The Mantle Of King Of New Asgard after the movie is over, is as proof that the plot is just a noisy excuse for the filmmakers to establish as much of what comes after it as possible.

That’s just one example. Here’s another: Tony Stark and Captain America go on a similar quest, with the same stakes—succeed or accept the absolute finality of Thanos’s Snap. It’s seemingly a risky gig, too, involving taking a potentially one-way trip to a secured facility to steal top secret shit guarded by armed badge-wearing types. At one point the duo’s attire and demeanor draw suspicion, and some of those armed badge-wearing types are mobilized. Cool! Surely this will raise the stakes—surely now we will get a sense of just how huge and daring and likely doomed this quest is for our long-suffering heroes! And we get the shot of Captain America coming one way through a narrow corridor while some of those armed types head toward him. Uh oh! How will our heroes escape this one?? I’ll tell you how: Captain America ducks into an unlocked office, whereupon those of us who are a little distracted by the quest to bring back to life actual trillions of beings are disappointed to learn that the whole potential conflict with the armed guards of a top secret facility was just a way for the story to force Captain America into that exact office at that exact moment, in order to confront some of his personal baggage. The MacGuffins he and Stark are after aren’t even there to move the plot; they’re there to give Captain America a boner.

And even the eventual undoing of the Snap itself—listen, motherfucker, if you thought they weren’t going to reverse the Snap, I’m afraid you’re just too stupid to watch movies, let alone read about them—is positioned by the story arc as ultimately about prolonging the resolution of the question of which of two central Avengers characters will survive the movie. This is a narrative trap of Marvel’s own making: under no circumstances were the Avengers not going to reverse the Snap; under no circumstances were they going to lose to Thanos. The only thing left to learn is under what specific circumstances they’d reverse the Snap and win. There’s a ghoulish God-view angle to this, though, because inevitably some part of what we are watching is not the development of a plot, but the sensitive extrication of actors and a studio from a project. As much as you may tell yourself that you’re watching to learn what will happen to these characters—or even just to enjoy the thrill of watching them do the only thing they can do, which is win—it’s impossible to ignore the knowledge that some number of these characters must have their stories closed, as a practical matter.

At one point in Endgame Thanos describes himself as “inevitable,” and it’s a little queasy, because as much as he is the author of his own genocidal designs, he is also an axe in the hands of the filmmakers, who simply have no choice but to kill some of these fuckers. By about the 120-minute mark of Endgame, if not far earlier, if not whole actual months ago, you have fully transitioned from wondering which Avengers will be killed by Thanos to wondering which will be killed by Disney. If you are not the sort of person who has invested disproportionate personal emotional significance in the fate of Gun Lady or Arrow Fella (for example) there’s a good chance this grim game of musical chairs will resolve itself in your brain into an uncomfortable and removed analysis of shit like genre conventions, if not brand fatigue and the dreaded IP. So when Gun Lady and Arrow Fella are faced with a terrible do-or-die choice, and the scene quickly evolves into an explicit test of which one can survive, you never quite escape the feeling that the cruelty that has forced them to this moment is less cosmic and more corporate, an artificial Sophie’s Choice being foisted upon the filmmakers, by the filmmakers, with the emotional weight sort of presumptuously passed along to you, the viewer.

The Avengers franchise is only the one-millionth story to run into the problem of how to produce an inevitable outcome in a way that feels compelling and urgent. What makes it a television sitcom, though, is the inevitable outcome they’re stuck producing is external to the plot, and is the retirement of a franchise that is ending for reasons that are arbitrary to the world of the story. There is no storytelling reason whatsoever that the MCU can’t conjure up the next big scary villain and throw these same superheroes in his or her path, in the same way that there’s no particular storytelling reason why the gang from Friends couldn’t continue snarkily hating each other at a coffee shop for another 100 episodes. The MCU movies are episodic, duh, because what makes comic book superheroes superheroes is their supernatural ability to return things to their prior condition in a certain number of pages. Their adventures on the page will quite literally never end, because there will always be someone to draw a new one, and anyway once you’ve gotten readers to accept things like reincarnation and the multiverse, you have permanently foreclosed on the possibility of retiring a character. Ending their adventures will always be a decision; in the movies, those decisions likelier than not have to do with this or that actor aging out of the damn role. Now that Spiderman has made the leap to the multiverse and animation, you can forget about worrying ever again how his stories will end.

So, like, Sauron was never gonna win in Lord of the Rings, but also Samwise Gamgee was never gonna be spun up into like the grim and gritty story of an essentially immortal vigilante Hobbit gardener in order to wring out another few years of summer blockbusters. Peter Jackson never had to devote any of his movies to convincing viewers that the individual arcs inside his movies were actually, really, sincerely coming to a close, and then do the demeaning servicey shit of making LOTR fanboys and fangirls accept that very arbitrary decision without too much moaning. There’s no rule or convention or standard of kindness that says the makers of Endgame couldn’t have made an even vaguely self-contained sci-fi action movie, ended it the way all the other movies ended—with things returning more or less to normal—and then just said “we are now done telling the stories of those characters.” Frankly, that would’ve ruled! Instead they buckled under the wholly self-imposed pressure to like Do Right By Undies Man And Mech Genius In This Hour Of Their Retirement, and the result is a movie where so much of the important and permanent stuff that happens has the impossible-seeming quality of feeling both arbitrary and also inevitable. There are no surprises. Only children and the least savvy viewers will not spot the either-or choices the filmmakers have dug their way into a mile away.

With the actual plot thus encumbered, Endgame devolves fairly early on into a greatest hits reel, and the weight given to some of the character resolutions in the final third is goofy to the point of being unbearable, the kind of shit that could only deserve all its heavy-handedness if you consider Chris Evans as Captain America to be an important part of your childhood. If you’re just a person who thought the Avengers movies were fun and had cool punching and unpretentious dialogue, you may find yourself wishing they’d ended it with all the main characters going to jail. The Avengers movies have never before given me the urge to shake adult human beings and angrily remind them that these are comic book characters, until Endgame. That’s a talking raccoon. That’s a green space alien. That guy shoots lightning. That guy shrinks. Settle down.

Go To The Movies In The Morning

Photo: Larry Ellis (Getty)

Two of the better movie theater experiences I’ve had in the last few years were when I saw Hereditary in June 2018, and when I saw Avengers: Endgame in April. Hereditary was weird and terrifying and I loved it; Endgame was overlong and mostly bored me to death. What those theater-going experiences had in common is that I saw both movies bright and early in the morning, which may not be the “right” or “correct” or “only good” way to see movies, but is for sure the best.

The most obvious benefit of going to the movies in the morning is that almost no one else will be there, and so you will have an entire screening mostly if not entirely to yourself. For reasons that should be perfectly plain, this rules. You will not have to deal with rude people chatting or moving around or chewing noisily or texting. There will not be annoying silhouettes marching across the screen. There will be no line at concessions, and the bathrooms will be clean and unoccupied. You will have absolute freedom to put your feet wherever the hell you want them. Morning moviegoing isn’t the only way to get a theater to yourself, but the only other dependable ways involve seeing extremely lousy movies, or waiting several weeks to see good ones. Bullcrap.

And the experience of watching a movie in a silent theater can be vastly different from the experience of watching it in a loaded one. In the empty, silent theater, the scene in Hereditary [spoiler alert] where Gabriel Byrne’s character bursts into flames and suffers a howling death was shocking and horrifying and even a little bit sad? A week later I saw the movie again with the dreaded Albert Burneko, at night, at a full and lively Regal theater, full of giggling teens, and when old man Byrne went up like a roman candle, everyone in the theater was dying. Even I was laughing! Which is fine—I enjoyed it nearly as much as a moment of dark, absurdist comedy as I did as one of unbearable horror—but it’s eerie to think you might never know how you’d feel about a movie if your first experience of it hadn’t been influenced by a bunch of nervous teenagers, or dipshit MST3K wannabes, or Marvel fangirls and fanboys. The empty theater experience is a far less polluted viewing experience than the unspoiled one, in my correct opinion.

There are other, unexpected benefits to seeing a movie in the morning. At the Alamo theater where I saw Avengers: Endgame, the theater was serving brunch items during the showing. I wimped out and stayed clear of their tempting selections—just popcorn and booze for me, thanks—but I should’ve gone for it! Imagine tearing into blueberry waffles while, for example, Ethan Hunt does badass action stuff across the rooftops of Paris! A breakfast sandwich would’ve for sure made the 19 Endgame hours of fat Thor mewling about his career choices vastly more interesting. More importantly, it would’ve driven home the thrill of sitting in a theater and watching a blockbuster comic book movie on a big movie screen with Dolby surround sound before lunchtime.

That’s the biggest benefit of all. When the movie is over, whether it ruled (Hereditary) or blew (Avengers: Endgame), you get to walk out of the theater into the bright sunlight and suddenly remember that your day has just begun! It’s noon and you’ve brushed your teeth and showered and bathed and showered again, and gone out into the world and seen a damn movie in a movie theater. It’s a weirdly triumphant feeling. If you’d been sitting in your living room watching Avengers: Infinity War on your laptop for the 31st time, you’d feel like an asshole for how your day was shaping up. Or, anyway, you should. But when the pre-lunch movie-watching takes place in public, in a movie theater, you will feel weirdly and undeservedly productive, like a go-getter whose day is filled with plans and purpose.

There are potential pitfalls. Two of my local theaters set aside one day a week where early movies are tailored to parents with toddlers or babies, which means the sound is softened and the lights are dimmed but not extinguished. I blew it and saw Annihilation during one of those days, and it was a bummer, especially since obviously not a single parent chose to bring their small child to a showing of Annihilation, which is a violent and terrifying science fiction movie. So I was a 37-year-old man sitting alone in a theater calibrated to the sensory needs of a damn baby. This was less than ideal, but the truth is it was still a very good moviegoing experience, because there were no teens anywhere in sight. Just me, a quiet movie, some mood lighting, and a large soda.

This is an especially useful bit of advice for huge blockbuster releases. You are excited to see them, and you want to skip spoilers, because you are a goof. You could go to a midnight showing Thursday night, come out buzzed with caffeine and excitement, trek home, stay up too late, and wake up Friday morning feeling like hammered shit. Or! You could go to bed at a sensible hour Thursday night, wake up bright and early Friday morning, catch a 10 a.m. showing, and be right on schedule, having avoided spoilers and also gotten a full night’s sleep. By lunchtime you’ll be the one doing the spoiling, and after all isn’t that the point.

I realize that most of us have responsibilities, including jobs, which require most of our daylight hours. First of all this is definitely bullshit, and is a reason to throw off the yoke of capitalist oppression and take to the streets. And morning movies aren’t quite the same on the weekend—you are likely to run into many more people at the Saturday morning showing of Avengers: ReAvenging than you would on a weekday morning, which will go part of the way toward defeating the purpose. Still better than a Friday night movie! Also I urge you to search for workarounds. Maybe you’re home sick from work? Can’t you be just as sick in an empty movie theater, crushed beneath a massive tub of popcorn? Point is, whether you are experiencing this yourself, the fact is morning movies are the best. Have a good weekend.