Usually I’m not on point with a new comic book movie. With two kids and a mortgage, I often have to wait to rent them or catch a morning show two months later for half the price. Not
Infinity War, though. This was something special. It was the culmination of 10 years of waiting, an event I was not going to miss, and a movie which my kids described as “sad”.
Overall, I think The Russo Brothers delivered a pretty balanced movie. There was great pandering and some disappointment. There was humor and sorrow. It was the whole package.
I’m not going to use this article to point out the good, like Strange and Stark’s banter. And I’m not going to point out the bad, like easy plot fixes where Ant Man shrinks and goes into Thanos’ ear and then enlarges to become Giant Man to explode his head. What I found interesting, and want to focus on, are plot points used to drive the narrative but then were left like ash in the wind.
1. Thanos Bubbles, stand-up comic.
What I found interesting about Thanos was underneath all that mega-murdering, there was a real sense of humor. Not once, not twice, but three times Thanos used The Reality Stone to pull off some comedy gold. Being a balancing kind of guy, he injected some Bugs Bunny level horseplay into emotionally tense situations. Maybe that’s also his way to equal out hanging around four evil gargoyles he calls his children.
When Star Lord was promise-bound to kill Gamora, Thanos could have simply made the gun not fire. Instead, he made it shoot bubbles. Bubbles! I can’t stress this Loony Toons move enough.
Then, as he teleported away, he tells Star Lord, “I like you,” a psychopath’s equivalent of, “You can date my daughter.” But I don’t think he said that because Quill was willing to kill the person he loved, I think Thanos likes him because he’s funny. I’m sure he watched that dance-off and was laughing his ass off at Ronan’s reaction. Also in that scene, he turns Mantis to ribbon and Drax into cubes, both of which wear off. He could have just turned them inside out, permanently. I know it was homage to the comic, but it still highlights his wacky side.
In the most heartbreaking scene, when he’s forced to sacrifice Gamora to get The Soul Stone, Gamora turns to kill herself to prevent it and Thanos turns the knife into, wait for it, bubbles! That’s some next-level hilarious cruelty. He could have just made the knife disappear, but no, he has to stick the comedy knife in nice and deep to balance out the sadness.
So where does this leave Thanos in the cosmic balance of things? You can’t stare at a sunset for the rest of your life. In order to balance all that suffering you just caused in the universe, the only thing you could do is go on tour with some comedy healing. Coming to a planet near you…
“What’s the deal with life, am I right?”
2. Everyone poops, except hopefully not Eitri.
Some people didn't care for Peter Dinklage's performance as the giant king of the dwarves, but I humbly disagree. He was one of my favorite parts, but I have a Dinklage bias. The man can do anything.
Who better to play a tragic character, whose entire population was killed and now had metal fists instead of hands? I wonder, though. He said Thanos took his hands, but did he take them and Eitri had a couple of metal spares hanging around, or did his original hands get transformed into metal, permanent fists? Anyway, he needs Thor and Co. to help him forge Stormbreaker, and even in his mourning, he gets one of the best jokes in the movie, “Well, killed means dead, so yeah.”
But once the two parts of Stormbreaker are forged, he realizes he forgot to get the handle ready beforehand and goes off running and screaming like a madman, never to be heard from again. This is where Groot steps up to the plate and sacrifices an arm for the final task. Thor gets healed by the hammer and they make haste to Wakanda.
What I imagined happening five minutes later is, Eitri comes running back in, awkwardly holding a handle between two metal fists, panting and says, “Guys! I found it! … Guys?” I hope someone goes back and helps him out at some point or Tony makes him some new hands that work, because I can’t be 100% those robes of his were always brown.
3. Falcons are meticulous groomers.
"We'd like a room please."
OK. Maybe one inconsistency is bothering me. I don’t know why this stuck with me, but when Rhodes greets Cap, Widow and Falcon, he says they look like crap. The implication is that since they’ve been on the run for two years, Cap is scruffy, Widow is bleach blond incognito, and Falcon is…well…the same suave looking Falcon. Sam makes a quip about, “You should see our hotel rooms,” implying that life on the lam has been rough, but he looks exactly the same. His hair is perfect and his goatee finely trimmed. I guess being hunted by every police agency on the planet doesn’t matter when you got a good thing going. A bird's gotta preen.
4. Red Skull gets to punk people forever.
Finally, Infinity War answered our burning question of, “What the Schmidt ever happened to Schmidt?” His “death” was ambiguous at the end of The First Avenger, and we know the tesseract is a portal maker, so we always hoped he was out there in the universe somewhere skulling around.
Unfortunately, his return was just as ambiguous as his farewell. I guess The Space Stone got tired of dragging him around like a remora fish and dumped him off on Vormir to guard its buddy, The Soul Stone. Now on guard duty, it was Red Skull’s job to tell anybody looking for it how to acquire The Soul Stone.
Thanos got the stone. So…now what does Schmidt do? He doesn’t have a day job anymore. Is he free to wonder the universe again, or does he get to go back to Earth? I prefer to think he’s stuck with the job even though there’s no stone to guard anymore. And after someone comes along, sacrifices the soul they love the most, Red Skull can turn to them and go, “You just got punked, speichellecker.”
5. (Almost) Everyone dies probably.
I know Thanos only wanted to kill half of the universe, and was all noble about it, but he should have thought through instantly getting rid of half of all life more. Because of this, almost everyone is sure to die. I’ll let the end-credit scene be my evidence.
Fury and Hill are driving. Suddenly a car crashes in front of them, the driver has ashed out of existence and caused the wreck. Then, as they’re inspecting it, a helicopter, now pilotless, comes crashing into a building near them, probably killing many people in that building. And that would be just the tip of the iceberg as far as accidents go around the universe.
Imagine you’re a scientist building a nuclear weapon. Your colleague is delicately balancing some plutonium. She disappears. What’s going to happen next? That is a simplification, but how many aircraft are in the air at one time? How many nuclear submarines are in the water? There are incalculable numbers of circumstance in the universe that could lead to mass destruction from having randomly half of all living beings disappear.
Great job, Mr. Balance. Now I have to go make my kids even sadder.