So I watched Infinity War the other day. No specific spoilers, but I will say that it felt very... OblivAeon-y. Multiple battle zones, quests with massive rewards, Scions, Aeon Men (kinda), taking twice as long as a normal game/movie, way more than 5 heroes, “ridiculous piles of HP,” and, of course, the inevitable destruction of the multiverse. Okay, maybe not that last one, but still. Let’s discuss other similarities you saw!
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No incapacitation abilities, definitely.
It did kind of seem like Grand Warlord Deadline. But, of course, I see lots of superheroes through a Sentinels-colored lens now. (Since I didn't read comics, the Letters Page has been walking me through a lot of the archetypes.)
I also enjoyed the trailer for RevoCorp Presents: Elastigirl.
By the way, if you do the math, it'd take a population about 35 years to rebound fully after losing half its members, assuming a reasonable 2% annual growth rate. So I guess I'm just saying Thanos' plan is dumb and doesn't accomplish his goals. Unlike OblivAeon!
That's assuming equal importance in their societal roles.
Plus, given human nature, the destruction that would likely follow such an event would be massive. And that's ignoring the deaths and damages caused by vehicles without controllers, systems without monitors, etc.
"See, this is another sign of your tragic space dementia, all paranoid and crotchety. Breaks the heart." - Mal
Unicode U+24BD gets us Ⓗ. (Thanks, Godai!)
Well, planning is not Papa Smurf’s specialty, and frankly he’s not the smartest universal conqueror either. If he were, then there’s no way that he would have ever been bested by a few measly Earth heroes. He managed to lose a fight while having infinite power at his disposal. There’s no excuse for such incompetence.
Well it wouldn't make much of a movie if he just wiped the floor with absolutely everybody the first 5 minutes in, but I can understand your thought process.
For those not familiar with most things Marvel Comics, Thanos is somewhere along the weight class of Voss normally. A fully decked out Infinity Gauntlet puts him on the power level of someone like Wager Master, I'd say.
Considering that, in the original Infinity Gauntlet storyline, Thanos takes on nearly every cosmic entity in the Marvel Universe--Chaos and Order, Galactus, The Living Tribunal, and a pile more--all simultaneously, and wins...I think he's a few steps above either Wager Master or OblivAeon at that point.
Really, the only reason the heroes win in that series is that they're able to take advantage of Thanos' personal and mental insecurities and get him to make himself vulnerable.
I'm hoping the new movie gets Marvel to sell a brand-new omnibus of the Infinity War event. It would be nice to re-read it...
If memory serves, Thanos was nowhere near as merciful in the original comics. He wanted to kill half the universe to impress Lady Death. Yes, THAT Lady Death.
Not only that, he does the finger snap thing in the first or second issue of the series. The heroes he doesn't kill with that, he takes on in sequence, in increasingly grotesque ways.
Seriously... It's a trip.
I’ll bet that Deadpool brings that up in his next movie.
I didn't realize Neil Gaiman wrote Sandman for Marvel comics ;)
Late to the party here (since I only saw Infinity War yesterday), but I definitely had a moment during the film where I was like "Half of all life, that's it? Common man, a true villian wants to destroy all life across every reality!"
(Seriously though, the movie was amazing.)
"Common man, a true villian wants to destroy all life across every reality!""
Now, that's a REAL villain portrayal.
Mistress Death... not Death from Vertigo or Lady Death from Coffin (formerly Chaos) comics.
I loved it, but man his motivation is way more immature than the writers thought it was. He's essentially throwing a cosmic-powered temper tantrum to prove that he was right in the past, when everyone else involved is dead (long dead?)
Think about how F-tastically huge the Universe is. How many planets that weren't having resource issues, how many post-scarcity cultures, did he just kill half of the people living on? How does that help those cultures? They weren't having population issues.
Let's take Earth alone: How many extra people died when airplanes started dropping out of the sky, cruise ships run aground, trains derailed in residential zones? If this was completely indescriminate, how many people on Earth are going to die of starvation becasue half of our farmers are now dead? Farming is not gardening writ large, people. It has a whole other list of difficulties. How many power vaccums in the third world were just created, that will lead to war?
He didn't kill half the population. He killed half the population immediately, and a third to two-thirds of the remainder over the next... several months or so.
Thanos honestly seems to be the embodiment of "Didn't think this through, just lashed out."
"I'm Setback and I'm helping!"
Heartbreaker & Equity Kill the Sentinels Universe
I'll be honest, watching the film my reactions were mostly along the lines of "That'll be retconned", "That'll be undone", "This is a really stupid masterplan" (for similar reasons to Blackfang108), and "Here comes the SFX budget!". It's a problem with almost every ongoing serialised work, that it keeps trying to out-do itself, a problem I also feel creeps in to AD&D (guided by the mechanics), and I think it's something that justifies the way Christopher and Adam have drawn a curtain after the once in a lifetime conclusion to the multiverse. At some point, all the escalation becomes parody, if not outright comedy.
As much as the X-Men films are derided, I can think of decent character moments in most of them (I loved how Days of Future Past after all the fireworks came down to Mystique's dilemma about killing), and the character work seems fairly weak in the MCU. With that said, I thought Ant-Man and The Wasp was the best MCU film on that level. Mixed in with the fairly screwball comedy, the antagonist had a sympathetic motivation so the arcs of the heroes and the villains complemented each other in attempting to undo things that went wrong with the science. Never quite explained how Ghost had an English accent though... (on the plus side it does give Hannah John-Kamen almost unparalleled geek credentials having been in Star Wars, The MCU and Game of Thrones!)
After having seen the movie again, I got to thinking about how awful his plan is, and... it’s not. Killing off a majority of life in the universe is a pretty impressive deterrent. It doesn’t much matter what his ideology was- the guy who can wish your entire planet into the cornfield isn’t somebody you resist. And nobody knows that he doesn’t still have the Gauntlet in working order. He’s created a state of panic across the universe. Then, there’s another thing. He said he wants to “Watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.” Maybe this is supposed to be for dramatic effect, but... how is the universe supposed to be grateful if they don’t know what killed half their population? I think that Thanos has other plans in mind, some yet-unseen Endgame that will take the post-snap universe from a state of chaos to one of balance, with him at the helm. Maybe I’m wrong- dogma can be blinding at times- but the guy who set up the perfect opportunity to gain ultimate power in the universe doesn’t seem like the type to not have a plan.
No, his plan is awful, because there's literally no point to it. It's a tantrum with an extremely light veneer of justification.
All the power that gauntlet gives him, and he kills half of all life because "I was totally right with that plan for my planet, which was in dire straits, and so I'm going to do it to every. Single. Planet, regardless of their situation." (did he specify intelligent life, I don't recall, if not, this is even MORE impressively short-sighted, because food comes from living things).
And again, the massive societal fallout of half of the population of a planet ceasing to exist is far higher than people give it credit. I mean, I know people joke about wanting half of, e.g. congress to disappear, but imagine that half of the US's government actually did, imagine the fallout. imagine how many cities quickly fall into disrepair.
It's a plan to kill half the universe and then not help the other half survive the change.
Entire PLANETS will have their populations die off because of this.
"I'm Setback and I'm helping!"
Heartbreaker & Equity Kill the Sentinels Universe
Which is why he's the bad guy and not some cosmic saviour. :B
Yes, but a villain written in crayon. What good does destroying half of every endangered species do? Or planets which aren't over-populated? Consumer-resource relationships are not a simple linear concept, the Great Leap Forward in China is a pretty good example of what happens when some clumsy idiot starts making simple plans. Also, one of the infinity stones controls time, so he could simply save his own world by changing how things were then. Even by blockbuster standards, it's incredibly dumb.
It feels like some geekdom adaptation movies get a pass because the hardcore fans are getting a nostalgia buzz out of seeing something they love brought to the big screen. Some of Peter Jackson's writing for Lord Of The RIngs was incredibly stupid too - like Gandalf deriding Rohan for retreating to their strongest fortress when hopelessly out-numbered. In the book, they initially look to face Saruman's army at a crossing which mitigates his numbers, and they retreat to Helm's Deep when it becomes clear they are mobilising too late to use that bottleneck as a strategy. Get the look and the SFX sequences right and people just seem happy not to question when logic goes out the window.
He had a bad plan? Because he's the bad guy? And he's not particularly far-sighted? I'm not sure what you're looking for here, he did a bad thing, and now hopefully the heroes will be able to do something about it in the next movie.
I dunno what, I'm not particularly looking forward to it. But good movies aren't predicated on villains having airtight schemes?
Thanos is obviously not all there, so even if he's smart and powerful enough to get all the Infinity Gems it doesn't mean he's thought a plan like this on such a grand level through. He's called "The Mad Titan" in the comics for a reason.
Also, you must realize his reasoning for killing off half of all life in the universe is WAY different than why he did it in the comics(He was in love with the personification of Death, an actual character in the Marvel Universe, and to test his devotion she charges Thanos to kill of half of all life in the universe). I will agree that it's strange to alter the character's driving motivations and not change their resulting actions to reflect it, though.
I've seen some interesting theories that despite Thanos' stated motivations, Hela could return and take the role of Lady Death. From the trailer for Endgame I think it's unlikely, though.
EDIT: Also,
Ultimately, Thanos is a zealot. He believes that his "method" is not only universally effective, but universally needed. But I don't think he overlooks the collateral damage- I think he counts on it. With the snap, he leaves a mark on the universe that (he thinks) will last forever. But precisely because the effects of his actions linger, the (awful, absurd, shortsighted) justifications of those actions linger as well. I think he knows this, and he realizes that some (equally misguided) future ruler will inevitably be the "next Thanos." By causing such immense destruction, he's insured that his (twisted) ideals will last forever. And in a universe where rock collecting can make you a god, it's not unreasonable that another individual in another time could "continure his work."
Yes, his plan is ridiculous. His justifications are awful. And he's insane. But he's found a pretty good way to make sure that his awful, ridiculous, insane ideals are carried out.
I'm looking for an interesting villain, not something that is dull and cartoony. It's even more surprising when you see people defending his plan or saying he sounds reasonable - it's just so superficial that you can see through it with only a few seconds of thought. What Stan Lee did in superhero terms was to make the heroes characters with real personalities and motivations, which makes it ironic for me that the MCU as a whole coasts by on just creating SFX sequences, with a roster of fairly interchangable personas. Ever seen the Honest Movie Trailer that highlights the similarities between the group dynamics of the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy? It's why I feel like the X-Men is the strongest narrative property in terms of the films (and I suspect the comics, though I don't read anything from Marvel or DC at the moment). The dynamic between Professor X and Magneto (and their differing plans for saving their kind) has some scope for nuance. You may not agree with Magneto but his motivations are understandable and logical
Good stories are built around tension, and getting the audience invested. Sadly with movies, they have gotten really lazy and just get by on nostalgia for the latter. There are so few films launched in a year now with original stories or compelling villains, and it all feels like cheap sequel baiting. If it wasn't for the Planet of the Apes reboots, I don't know how far back I'd have to go to find a decently written franchise movie.
I guess everyone's tastes differ, for me Malthusian economics is a more interesting villain motivation than what you typically see in a comic book movie.
I terms of other franchises, I don't really think the last few years have been too bad. The Mission Impossible, Mad Max, Rocky, and Blade Runner franchises have all had great installments.