Avengers: Infinity War

The third Avengers movie has a lot going on. There are several plots that converge and split off to give every major character something to do, even if a few of them don't get a whole lot. I'm fine with that: we're talking about a movie with nearly every superhero character they've introduced in the MCU (with a couple exceptions,) and in the interest of telling a coherent story, some people have to become supporting characters.

This is very much the movie that the whole MCU has been building up to, though I'd also caution people watching it that this movie is also very much building up to the film formerly referred to as Infinity War Part Two.

Given how many moving parts the film has, it makes sense that the Russo brothers structured the film to be about Thanos, and you can see him as its protagonist and our heroes as his antagonist. It's actually sort of interesting to think about the meanings of those words. "Protagonist" technically means the person who causes agony. This comes from the era of the Greek tragedy, where we would see heroic characters make flawed choices and wind up dead or ruined thanks to their hubris. The antagonist is often the agent of this death or ruin, but the idea of a tragedy is that it ends poorly for our protagonist, typically brought on by their own actions.

In the kind of heroic tales that we're used to in modern culture, and particularly of the adventurous or superhero variety, there's an inversion that takes place: we tend to see the bad guy as the instigator of the conflict, and it's the heroes' job to stop their plan to return to the safety of the status quo. In this way, most modern stories are kind of tragedies of the villains. The script has been flipped to have us focus on the heroic antagonists, but this has become so normal that we just think of this as standard storytelling at this point.

So what about Infinity War?

Well, to talk about that, we've got to make a spoiler cut.


Infinity War is not a simple inversion or return to the tragic form, despite focusing on Thanos. And that's because he wins.

Yes, we see the various heroes all putting in their best efforts to stop him from acquiring all the Infinity Stones, but he does, and with a snap of his finger, half of the people in the universe begin to crumble into dust (it's profoundly upsetting to watch, even if you know that there's no way this isn't going to be undone in the next Avenger's movie.)

Thanos wants the stones so that he can kill half the universe, ensuring that there are enough resources to feed and take care of the other half. In the film's version of the character, Thanos' home world was a perfectly nice futuristic civilization that then burned itself out, despite his attempts to convince the leadership of his society of the merits of his "cull half the population, at random so that it's fair." As what appears to be the only survivor of this world, he has decided he won't let the same thing happen to the rest of the universe, and so his monstrous methodology is meant to save the universe.

And never does he doubt this. He believes that he acts with noble intentions, and he does not seem to enjoy what he is doing (smartly, they removed a line heard in the trailer that suggested he was enjoying "balancing the universe.")

While I wouldn't call it a standard "hero's journey," given that there's certainly no refusal of the call or death of a mentor, Thanos does effectively go on a quest, becoming stronger as he goes (he gains new powers with each stone he collects,) and finds ways to thwart his adversaries - you know, the good guys - making a terrible personal sacrifice, but ultimately prevailing when it seems all hope is lost and then enjoying the satisfaction of completing his quest by going into a kind of serene retirement.

But that leaves us with a horrible body count. Literally half the universe is dead at the end of the movie, and the other half is left to deal with the fallout (including, for example, vehicles piloted by said dead people crashing into things. One wonders if Thanos accounted for that and maybe killed slightly less than half.)

This also means a lot of our favorite characters disappear in horrible wisps of grey ash. And of course, in the quest to get to that point, a lot of other characters died.

Now, there's very good reason to believe that we're going to see this reversed. The movie boldly (at least for a multi-billion dollar franchise) makes no promises about restoring things, but there are strong hints that we're going to see Thanos' work undone. Status quo must be defended, of course, but I also think it'll be interesting to see what this does to Thanos - who after all went through a lot of emotional strain to get himself to this point, and now feels he has completed his life's work.

But even getting to that point left a bunch of characters dead: and if you somehow are still avoiding spoilers after those paragraphs, now's the time to look away.

The movie begins with the attack on the Asgardian refugees from the end of Thor: Ragnarok, and when even the Hulk can't beat Thanos, you know we're in trouble. They attempt to resist, but Heimdall is stabbed to death and when Loki pulls a (actually pretty transparent) false defection, Thanos kills him (apparently - you never know with that guy.) The Asgardian ship is then destroyed, and while supposedly half were left alive, I'm wondering where that half is now, because the Guardians of the Galaxy arrive at their distress signal to find wreckage and bodies floating in space, with Thor literally hitting their windshield.

Much later in the movie, Gamora has been captured by Thanos, who uses her knowledge to find the Soul Stone, the one we hadn't seen before this movie. When he comes to the world that holds it, he is greeted by none other than Red Skull (did not expect to see THAT guy again,) who has become something of a disembodied spirit forced to guard the stone. He explains that the Soul Stone can only be attained by sacrificing someone the seeker loves, and here's the horrible thing about Thanos: Gamora is convinced that this is the perfect way to keep it out of his hands, as he doesn't love anything. But she's wrong, and he tearfully tosses her off a cliff in sacrifice to the stone. Gamora lies dead, and Thanos takes the stone.

The Mind Stone, of course, is currently in the forehead of Vision, and it gives him life and sentience. He and Wanda have fallen in love, and they realize that if Thanos if going after the stones, they need to protect him. But Vision points out as well that one way to keep him from getting it would be to destroy the stone, something that Wanda might be able to do with her powers, which were granted by the Mind Stone to begin with.

And so, a great deal of her plot in the film is agonizing over the fact that she might be forced to kill the man she loves.

Thus, in the final confrontation, when Thanos has all the other stones near the end of the movie, Wanda does the thing she dreaded, destroying the mind stone and causing Vision to erupt in an explosive blast.

But then it's far worse. Because Thanos has the time stone, given to him by Dr. Strange in exchange for Tony Stark's life (a bargain that seems really terrible, though we should remember that Dr. Strange makes some pretty clever bargains...) So Thanos reverses time, restoring the mind stone and the yanking it out of Vision's forehead, killing him yet again.

With all the powers granted to him, Thor arrives at the last minute and buries his new dwarf-forged axe (forged by the same forge that created Mjollnir and the Infinity Gauntlet) in Thanos' chest. But that's not good enough: he should have aimed for the head. With a snap of his finger, Thanos is gone, and then the horror begins.

We watch, in rather quick succession, as Bucky, Sam, T'challa, Wanda, Mantis, Drax, Groot, Peter Quill, Peter Parker, and I've honestly lost track of who else, all dissolve into grey ashes. Thanos disappears, apparently fine, and retires to a remote cabin somewhere just as he said he would once his task was complete. One of the later ones to go is Dr. Strange, though as he is about to dissolve, he tells asks if Tony Stark realizes that this was the only way.

In the post-credits scene, we see chaos erupt in New York as Nick Fury and Maria Hill talk about just having heard about things arriving over Wakanda when people start vanishing. Maria dissolves before Nick's eyes, and Nick begins to right as he pulls out an old pager, sending off his signal just as he crumbles to dust. The pager apparently calls Captain Marvel, but that's just our little tease.

So this is about as bleak as the MCU has ever gotten. Scratch that, it's definitely as bleak as the MCU has ever gotten. But there is reason to assume that things are going to be fixed.

First, the practical/cynical/meta version: we know there's going to be a Black Panther 2, a Guardians of the Galaxy 3,  and a Spider-Man Homecoming sequel and somehow I don't think those would work with their main characters mostly dead (of all of them, only Rocket Raccoon is still around.)

The other is Dr. Strange: at one point (and man have I not gone into detail about who is where when,) Strange uses the Time Stone to look into over 14 million possible futures, and only sees one in which they beat Thanos. The fact that he gives Thanos the time stone to save Tony wouldn't make sense at all unless he knew that the only way to win were to first lose. This is some real Muad'dib stuff, with all the horrors involved. But we've already seen Strange pull off a ploy in which he got killed possibly thousands of times, so once is probably nothing for him.

Captain Marvel is also one of the most powerful superheroes in the Marvel canon, so we can probably expect her to play a big role in solving this problem.

What's interesting is that the next two MCU movies both take place before Infinity War, meaning that neither has to deal with the fallout of this one. I think we can expect to see the next Avengers movie reverse these events and probably see Thanos defeated, but we've got a year to wait.

We have two in between: first is Ant Man and the Wasp, which I believe takes place months before Infinity War, and next is Captain Marvel, which will introduce Carol Danvers and presumably give us a sense of what role she might play in fixing this catastrophe. Her movie is set in the 90s, well before even the first Iron Man.

But I've got to say, Infinity War definitely left us with some unsettling imagery, and even if it's practically guaranteed that this will all be nullified, it's not a very pleasant thing to watch people die in such a dehumanizing way.

The big question is for those who died before Thanos snapped his fingers: what of Heimdall, Loki, Gamora, and Vision? How much is getting reset?

The other question is where things go after Thanos? It certainly wouldn't be too difficult to find other mega-bads to base the movies around, but I think we're also heading toward a big reset of the MCU - not a reboot, but probably new focus on different characters.

I was actually quite shocked that I didn't see Captain America or Iron Man die in this one, but I could certainly see them going out in the next one.

The movie does leave me itching for more, and I guess that's a good sign. There was a lot of stuff that happened in this that I didn't remotely touch on, and while the movie was probably overstuffed, it kind of had to be.