Mysteriously wiped out by an alien overlord that could come back at any time? Nope. I think people would lose their minds and we’d go Mad Max in short order.
Are we talking wiped out by Thanos’s armies, or by the finger snap? Because I think they’d have very different impacts.
While there is great truth in the problem of distribution of resources, it is absolutely true that there is a scarcity of resources. Thanos’s plan sucks given his power, but I’m dumbfounded that the problems of overpopulation and scarcity of resources could be questioned.
I don’t want to mis-attribute the quote, since I can’t find it, but I thiiiiink it was Jane Goodall who once said that if you could eliminate half the earth’s population like quickly pulling off a band-aid it would be best for the planet.
My god, I noticed that too, and knew it was a loon (I live there). I just assumed some sound guy stuck it in as a generic bird sound though.
Martial law everywhere. All the wrong people in power, and the wrong people locked up. It would be, well we’d have less than half when they were done.
There were good people on both sides.
Yeah, there was at least one big-ass planet in the sky. I thought it was clearly movie language for “this is NOT teh Earth!” But you’re right about that loon. It might have been a space loon. Or maybe Thanos keeps loons as pets the way some old men keep pigeons.
Yes, there is scarcity of resources in certain areas. We can split the atom, for Pete’s sake! We have a ton of extra atoms lying around, and the sun still has some juice left in it. The problem comes from harnessing and distributing that energy along with the necessary resources to sustain people. Similarly, there’s plenty of food to go around, but the problem is that there’s a priority on distributing it according to the demands of richer countries that can pay for it and jigger the distribution in their favor. The food that might sustain a Third World country goes into the tummies of cows that McDonalds turns into hamburgers so I can drive down the street and get an 89 cent cheeseburger.
Besides, I don’t care how many people are in the universe; if the universe is infinite, so are its resources. C’mon, Thanos, do the math.
-Tom
Agreed. Made me sad.
One of the more interesting elements, based on listening to the podcast (hey! I listened to a Qt3 podcast!) and gauging their opinions here on the boards is that I think I liked this movie about as much a Tom did while disagreeing with him on virtually everything about it, sometimes quite passionately :)
Yes, they might as well start from scratch because Chris Claremont and other Marvel writers royally screwed Carol Danvers’ back-story in the comics. She:
- started out as a supporting character in Captain Marvel, chief of security at Cape Canaveral [Captain Marvel 1 (May '68)]
- got her powers from “radiation” emitted by Kree warrior Mar-Vell [Captain Marvel 18 (Nov '69) & Ms Marvel 2 (Feb '77)] (yes, that’s basically a 7-year gap, but that’s what the footnote in the panel said, they did that stuff all the time)
- her solo title is cancelled in early '79 and she bounces around doing some guest shots around the MU
- gets kidnapped to another dimension, brainwashed, impregnated, and has a child in Avengers mansion that grows into adulthood in days who turns out to be Immortus who confesses his love for her and asks her to go back to his dimension with him and she does [Avengers 199-200 (1980)] (this story did not age well at all and was creepy at the time)
- had her Kree warrior powers permanently stolen by Rogue [Avengers Annual 10 (1981)]
- was de-powered for a while, hung around with the X-Men, got kidnapped and taken into space by Deathbird (a Ms Marvel villain) along with the X-Men [Uncanny X-Men 158, 162 (1982)]
- after undergoing genetic manipulation by the Brood, absorbed “star power” in space and became Binary (that’s really about as well as Claremont explained it) [Uncanny X-Men 164 (Dec '82)]
- went off-planet with the Starjammers when Rogue joined the X-Men [Uncanny X-Men 171 (Jul '83), Marvel Fanfare 24 (Jan '86)] (yes, Claremont wrote it twice)
- got de-powered in the cross-over event Operation Galactic Storm while saving the Sun [Quasar 34 (May '92)]
- joined the Avengers as Warbird instead of Ms Marvel (same costume), damages a passenger jet, confesses to being an alcoholic [Avengers v3 #4, 7 (1998)]
- returned to being Ms Marvel around the time of Civil War, gets her second solo title after a gap of around 28 years (2006)
- finally takes the name Captain Marvel (and dons her first full-body costume) in 2012
That was kind of a fun research project.
I recently learned that the Captain Marvel I know from the comics is the DC AKA Shazam!
Or the ultimate environmentalist. Snap for sustainability!
I think there is a lot of historical evidence that plagues increased the economic quality of life of the survivors. I’ve even read arguments that the black death increased the bargaining power of the lower classes and set western Europe on the path to modernity.
Humans cull animal populations all the time. Thanos is just willing to extend that to intelligent life.
Oh wow. I came in here expecting this to be the Avengers 3 spoiler thread, since that’s what’s in the title. I didn’t know we were going to be discussing photographs from the set of Avengers 4 and what that means for that movie.
I guess this is the all encompassing Avengers 3/4 spoiler thread.
Don’t the usually start from scratch with the movie characters?? I mean, in the Hulk movie they didn’t have Hulk with a Bruce Banner head, or Hulk and Banner split into two different individuals, or Hulk being really smart but dumb when he is Banner, or Hulk turning into Banner when he gets angry, or any of a hundred other things they did in the comics.
I’m pretty confident that they can distill the essence of Captain Marvel and put her (them) into a movie.
This post is so awesome and hilarious. And thank you @ArmandoPenblade, for listening to a podcast. I know that’s not your thing, and I’m glad you listened, because given your opinions about the other comic book movies we’ve reviewed, I find this post fascinating.
Also, dark meat rules.
-xtien
Oh yeah, I was just having some fun pointing out just how convoluted her back-story was. Worse than I remembered, actually.
Still don’t know how to wrap my head around this movie. WOne the one hand, I’d say there’s a bit too much crammed into it, which means some characters ended up on the backburner. On the other hand, it’s still impressive nevertheless how they manage to juggle around so many heroes and backstories. Avengers 1 was quite the event way back because it united the heroes for the first time and was the result of 4 years of universe building, and Avengers: Infinity War kinda recaptures that in that they bring more to the table (Spidey, Doc Strange, Guardians & Black Panther) while also earning its title unlike “Age of Ultron” or “Civil War”…
The four or five scenes in which a character has to choose between saving the universe or a person they love were kinda annoying. I mean, I get it, I’m sure it’s intentionally there to hammer home the significance of Doc Strange’s behavior an the contrast to Thanos’s logic, but it had me groaning nevertheless. And yeah, Peter Quill wanted to make good on his promise, but you could argue that it might have actually worked if he had simply done it and surprised Thanos instead of hesitating first and have Gamora talk him into pulling the trigger, giving Thanos the time required to diffuse the situation. Still, I can live with that.
That said, Quill’s deed on Titan then managed to really piss me off. Yeah, he is an insecure manchild, but this was stupid beyond redemption and to me not really in line with the character he had become after two Guardians movies. I hated that moment so much.
I was surprised that Thanos got as much screentime as he did. His reasoning or feelings for Gamora don’t make him a complex character - he’s just a zealot that does what he has to do. But him not being about revenge or universe domination and also following through on his plan to ‘retire’ after achieving his goal were a plus in my book and make him one of the more tolerable MCU villains along with Killmonger or Loki.
While I think it was a sensible thing to change his motivation (from trying to impress Death), the plan seems kinda weird if you think about it. It took mankind less than 5 decades to double our world population, and same probably would be true for other civilizations as well. What Thanos does thus would seem only like a short-term ‘solution’, and with his glove being fried and him retired, everything would be back to the old status within a few decades - just a blip in the history of the universe.
On that note: Thanos was already pretty much unbeatable at the beginning when he only had one infinity stone, and that made all the action scenes that involved him a bit nonsensical. I get that the heroes fighting him despite the inevitability and futility of it all was kinda the point, but it also made it boring to watch.
Another surprising thing to me was how much the Guardians were involved in the movie. I had expected them to be an extended cameo, of which most scenes were already in the trailer - and I was wrong. I liked Thor getting paired with Rocket and Groot, and it’s nice to see that they’ve learned to harness Chris Hemworth’s comedic talent a lot more over time. I also really dug the scene where Rocket tries to console Thor as he’s grappling with what has happened to him, Loki and the other Asguardians.
I was initially impressed by how ballsy the ending appeared to be, but its effect had already been diminished by the time the credits started to roll because of the MCU machine working so prominently - with Guardians 3, Black Panther 2 and Spidey 2 already announced, it was simply difficult to buy into the respective characters passing. The whole “Thanos wil return” and the post-credit scene made it just as salient. Wish they had pulled a Logan and refrained from doing any of that, but MCU gotta MCU. The fourth movie… now that might be the real deal and bummer because it’s safe to say that some of the heroes established in Phase 1 will bite the dust for good.
A3 also continues the tradtion of Marvel movies having an absolutely unremarkable soundtrack. Once you enter Wakanda, there’s a bit of specific musical flavor, but other than that there was not a single thing that registered for me.
I wish that, once A4 concludes, someone will produce a huge documentary on the making of Phase 1-3. I’d really like to get a peak under the hood with regard to when which elements got mapped out and the logistics of the production. Like, I’m wondering if the first scene of A3 perhaps was done during/after Thor 3 was being shot since they had all the actors involved (Hemsworthm, Elba, Hiddleston) at hand anyway. Of course, it’s just as likely that the latter two were hauled in for a few days of shooting to the A3 set.
Im sure that if you just found out that the woman you loved was murdered, directly from the mouth of the man who murdered her, you would act sane and rationally. That may have been one of the most real moments of the movie. Was it stupid? Of course it was but it was also very human.
Because of the shortage of labour, from skilled artisans (making carriages, blacksmiths etc.) to actual labour in the fields, resulting in a rebalancing of the power?
Yeah I’ve read stuff along those lines, basically the burghers (middle class for lack of a better word) getting more power, and money, and the power starting to shift from owning land (and vassals, translating into military power), and having a strict, feudal, hierarchy, to having money.
i mean, on a basic level, fields still need to be tilled, and if half the population was gone, then the remaining half are in a better bargaining position, as in same work, fewer people.