Avengers: MacGuffin War

Avengers: Infinity War.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Avengers: Infinity War is an entertaining, impeccably paced, and visually stunning epic.

I hated it.

Not at first. I was, in fact, very excited to see this movie. Spent the previous day catching up on Ragnarok and Black Panther, tied a double Windsor in my special Avengers necktie, and shelled out the extra couple of bucks for IMAX. But sadly, I was disappointed. I’ll get into why shortly, but first, the obligatory overview:

We’ve known since he popped up in 2012’s The Avengers: Thanos is coming. Now it’s 2018 and Thanos is here. And he’s collecting something else that has been popping up in Marvel movies: infinity stones. Collect all six and you become super-powerful. Like end the universe with a snap of your fingers powerful.

Fortunately for the universe, Thanos does not want to end it entirely. He just wants to kill half the people. “It's a simple calculus,” he explains. “This universe has finite resources. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.” After the culling, Thanos doesn’t even want to rule those remaining. He just wants to “rest, and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.”

And so the Avengers assemble to stop him. With the help of a few other people. Well, actually they disassemble, going in several different directions. Captain America, Bruce Banner, and a legion of lesser knowns go to Wakanda, home of Black Panther. Their mission: protect Vision, who has one of the stones embedded in his forehead. Thor, meanwhile, teams up with Rocket Raccoon and Groot of Guardians of the Galaxy on a quest to get a battle axe to replace his hammer, which you may recall his sister destroyed in Thor: Ragnarok. Parts of the mission are suicide, but, Thor reminds us, “So is facing Thanos without that axe.” As for the rest of the Guardians crew, they chase down another of the MacGuffin stones to try to keep it out of Thanos’s gauntlet. Which is a little stupid because they’re bound to run into him and Gamora knows the location of yet another one. Finally, Iron Man, Spidey, and Doctor Strange fly off into space to take the fight to Thanos. Which is very stupid, because Strange has one of the stones on him.

I was concerned that with four distinct plotlines and God knows how many characters, things would get confusing, and favorite characters would get short shrift. But the movie did a great job of keeping everything straight and giving the various heroes sufficient screen time. (Well, almost everyone. I would have like to see more of Cap.) I think one reason it worked was, despite the numerous threads, it's really a very simple plot. Thanos wants to get six things. The Avengers want to stop him. Far more straightforward than Zemo's overcomplicated plan in Civil War.

My favorite scene is one in which Thanos must make a choice. Standing at the edge of a cliff amid a bleak landscape and swelling, dramatic music, he is told that in order to collect the next stone, he must give up something he loves. Love vs. Power. And he’s in tears. It’s a truly Wagnerian moment (and those who know me understand that I mean that as a compliment).

The following scene features a joke about Starbucks coming to Wakanda. Nice pacing, interspersing the humor amid the drama that way, to give the viewer a bit of a respite before the next blow. Indeed, the humor we’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios was well in evidence. Spidey, having seen too many movies from the Alien franchise, can’t stop talking about extraterrestrials planting their eggs in people’s chests. Stark, on learning that Doctor Strange is a wizard, asks what he does besides make balloon animals. Peter Quill is jealous that Thor is so much more manly than he is. Drax doesn’t help, what with him waxing rhapsodic about Thor’s good looks and muscles. Mantis still gets expressions wrong (“Kick names. Take ass.”). And when Thor finally shows up at the final battle—with his new axe—Banner exultingly taunts the enemy, “You guys are so screwed now!”

Great characters. Drama. Humor. So why did I hate it?

There are two reasons.

The first is the political overtones. I can’t help thinking the writers have a secret sympathy for Thanos’s plan. American writers are, unfortunately, disproportionately Leftist. Raised on Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, many no doubt fantasize about having the power to wave their fingers, commit the unspeakable evil of making half of humanity disappear, and, since they won't be among the dead themselves of course, bask in the gratitude of the universe. Thanos is an eco-extremist’s wet dream. Tellingly, Infinity War isn’t the only major work in recent years based on this premise; Dan Brown’s Inferno might be literally more down to earth, but the plot is basically the same. And this view isn't confined to writers. I'm seeing many comments in Infinity War online discussions along the lines of "Thanos is right."

The underlying argument, that population growth inevitably outstrips resources, has been refuted time and again by events since Thomas Malthus first made it in 1798. It turns out humans have an uncanny knack for using technology to expand their resources. And yet, no one in the movie seems able to disprove Thanos. The best attempt, such as it is, comes from Gamora. When Thanos explains his reasoning to her, she replies with a lame “You don’t know that!”

If there’s any doubt that the writers are sympathetic to Thanos’s plan, it is removed by the second reason I hated the movie, and here I must warn the reader: THERE. WILL. BE. SPOILERS.

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SERIOUS SPOILERS.

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I'M NOT KIDDING.

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HERE IT IS...

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THANOS WINS.

He gets all six stones. He kills half the humanoids in the universe. Trillions of people just dissolve into a sort of floating black dust. The core team (Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor) survive, but Spider-man, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange, the Winter Soldier, and all the Guardians except Rocket are gone. Thanos settles down to watch the sun rise, and the screen fades to black.

What a downer.

Superhero movies fill an important psychological need. They are escape from a world where evil often wins. It’s comforting to have this group of powerful individuals to guarantee that the forces of niceness prevail—at least on the screen. It’s unsettling to see them so impotent that the outcome would have been exactly the same if they had stayed home and washed their tights.

I don’t have a problem with unhappy endings per se. Many great works of literature have unhappy endings. But there’s usually a twist. Romeo and Juliet “with their death bury their parents’ strife.” The Three Musketeers fail at stopping Milady de Winter from assassinating the Duke of Buckingham, but they make her pay for her crimes. Cyrano de Bergerac is killed by an unseen enemy, but with “mon panache” intact. Sydney Carton, in A Tale of Two Cities, goes to the guillotine, but finds redemption there, “a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, dies (presumably), in a hopeless battle, in a hopeless war, but he goes down fighting, determined to take as many of the enemy with him as he can.

But Infinity War has no silver lining, no justice done, no moral victory, no redemptive struggle, no glorious last stand. The bad guy just wins. Everybody dissolves, far too quickly, painlessly, and numerously for the viewers to feel anything other than shock that it was really going to end that way, followed by disappointment. When I saw it, the audience sat through the closing credits in icy silence. And of course you can’t leave. It’s a Marvel movie. You have to wait for the end credit scene, which is Nick Fury, his body dissolving, managing to send off a text.

That text tells us the story’s not over. Something is up. They’re going to Days of Future Past everyone back to life. In fact, they have to. A powerful environmentalist message is all very well and good, but dammit, there are profitable upcoming releases of Spider-man and Guardians on the calendar. It’s that Ovaltine moment that Kerey wrote about in his post yesterday. Ha ha, moviegoers! You only got half a movie. If you want to see the Part II, you have to wait a year and pay us another thirteen bucks to see some bulls--t that undoes Part I.

It’s a scurvy trick, and yet I’ll pay it. Because I really, really, want to see justice prevail, Thanos destroyed, the dead restored, and the effects of this miserable movie erased from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

The Annual Comic Book Massive Crossover Event

By Kerey McKenna.
Part II of a Series.

Avengers: Infinity War opened to a new box office record this weekend, taking in $250 million domestically and narrowly edging out the previous record holder, Star Wars: The Force Awakes. As Box Office Mojo put it, “Audiences assembled.”

There’s no doubt about it: MASSIVE CROSSOVER EVENTS rake in the cash.

It wasn’t always the case.

In Part I of this series, I explored the concept of the “shared universe” that underlies the crossover event. In this part I’ll give some history of these events themselves, and show how we got to this record-breaking weekend.

What TV and movie producers have been experimenting with since the late 60’s, comic book creators have been doing routinely since the 1940’s, when the Human Torch fought the Submariner.

What's better than a title bout between two characters? A team composed of a bunch of their most popular characters, like the All-Star Game in baseball.

Comic book fans quickly became accustomed to characters from different stories sharing the same fictional universe in a way that was seemingly rare in other mediums. Publishers had characters interact for walk-on cameos, team ups, or fist fights. Unlike in TV and movies, crossovers are logistically very easy for comic book publishers because adding new characters is just ink on paper. As long as a publishing house has the rights to two or more characters, they just have the artist of book A draw in characters from book B. And because a character’s creator wasn’t owed royalties for much of comic publishing history, popular characters could be used throughout a publisher’s line of books to help launch new titles and tell “epic stories.”

By the 1980’s larger crossover events became more and more frequent. By the early aughts it was expected that every year the Big Two publishers DC and Marvel would each feature at least one annual event to get as many characters together as possible. These events would take over many or even the majority of their books for one or several months like Secret Wars, Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Infinity Gauntlet, and The House of M, just to name a few.

But translating this concept to the mediums of film and TV has its difficulties because it introduces all the challenges of working with the flesh and blood actors, production staff, and physical logistics of two or more productions. Even a quick walk-on cameo by a character from a different story must be squared away with that actor’s contract, pay requirements, and schedule. Telling a story across the multiple time slots of different series requires the collaboration of all the production teams.

Despite these obstacles, producers wished to build upon brand names, repeat successful formulas, boost the ratings of their series, and hopefully somewhere in there tell great stories. There had been attempts to make comic book crossover projects in the 1980’s: a Supergirl movie spun off from the Christopher Reeve Superman films, a Mighty Thor pilot spinoff from the popular Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV series, but nothing ever stuck. It seemed movie and TV audiences would only put up with these garish comic book characters in fits and bursts, not long enough to sustain the “shared universes” comic book fans had come to know. It wasn’t until Marvel Studios painstakingly set up its 2012 Avengers crossover with four years’ of Easter eggs spread across its Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America franchises, that the crossover event hit blockbuster status on the big screen.

Since then, other companies have been trying to ride Marvel’s coattails (now Disney/Marvel) or copy its formula with varying degrees of success.

Sony has a sort of joint custody agreement with Disney/Marvel for the use of Spider-man and is basically leasing space in the Marvel universe after it failed to launch a fully self-sustaining Spider-man franchise of its own.

20th Century Fox, the other inheritor to Marvel IP characters, had been pushing its licensing agreement as far as possible to maintain films (The X-Men series and Deadpool) and TV projects (Gifted, Legion, and New Mutants) in the shared universe based on mutants. At the time of this writing, with Marvel’s parent company Disney purchasing 20th Century Fox, it's unclear if these stories or future projects will also be folded into the established Disney/Marvel Universe.

Their “Distinguished Competition,” DC Comics (the comic publishing subsidiary over at Warner Brothers) is undergoing drastic course correction after is superhero projects as planned out by Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan failed to soar (with the notable exception of Wonder Woman). Although things aren’t all bad for DC/Warner Brothers on the Crossover front. By building a shared universe for some of their TV series (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow, currently all airing on their network, The CW), crossovers between two or all of the shows have gone over pretty well with their fans, becoming regular events as they have been in the comics.

But back in the world of comics where all these colorful characters sprang from, things might not be going so well. I’ll address the phenomenon of “Event Fatigue” in Part III of this series.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.