The (Only) Four Things I Didn’t Like About Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War now reigns as having the biggest opening weekend of all time, and good for them.  It’s a really solid movie and it really delivers on its enormous ambitions.  Sure, I wouldn’t have minded a lighter affair like last year’s Justice League, but this movie brings in a lot of characters and backstories into a much more cohesive whole than, say, The Defenders did on Netflix.  You’ve probably seen the movie by now and, if you’re like me, you probably came out of the theater thrilled but kind of annoyed.  As good as the movie was, there were a few things I that bugged me.  Here are the four things that I didn’t like about Avengers: Infinity War.

This scene actually doesn’t appear in the movie.

Thanos’ Motivation Makes No Sense

I’ve been reading a lot about how Thanos has clear motivations that make are sane if incredibly cruel.  He simply looks at the problem of overpopulation and figures he can solve it by ending half of all life in the universe.  I suppose that does fix the overpopulation problem, but it does sort of raise all sorts of other problems.  It’s sort of like trying to lose weight by sealing your mouth with concrete.  Seriously, is it really that hard, with the infinite resources of the Infinity Stones, to come up with another solution?  Maybe you could shrink everyone down really small or just provide free food to everyone?  If the danger of overpopulation is the possibility of loss of life through war or famine, it seems like mass extinction doesn’t prevent that outcomes as much as gives us that outcome immediately.  And sure, maybe some people live in poverty in an overpopulated universe, but at least they are alive.  Was life on Gamorra’s world really that bad before Thanos arrived?  They seemed happy enough.  Is being dead really better than being poor?  That’s the contradiction I can’t get around: If Thanos cares about the people in the universe, then there must be ways to save the universe through either the seemingly limitless technology or mysticism that surrounds him.  If he don’t care about the universe (and thus is okay with wiping out half of everyone), then why not just build a fortress and let universe burn?  He cares enough to help but cares so little that mass genocide is acceptable.  Wanting to save everyone through killing half of the universe just makes no sense to me.

If you care, don’t kill them. If you don’t care, why save them? Does “Thanos” mean “paradox” in your language?

The Children of Thanos Are Just Awful

Thanos is a pretty scary villain.  He’s smart, he’s driven, he’s weirdly charismatic and he’s utterly ruthless.  His minions, the Children of Thanos – however – are not nearly as interesting.  They dress like a bunch of Hellraiser extras and have one or two superpowers that let them face off with the superheroes for a round or two.  They seem to exist to give the heroes someone to punch other than Thanos and while Thanos gets to be complex and philosophical, they just sneer menacingly from the shadows.  Their powers seem a little arbitrary as well; they can survive extreme environments sometimes but not all the time.  They have the ability to keep Vision from simply phasing through to the center of the Earth but can’t stop any of his other powers.  They just exist whenever the plot needed a fight and Thanos is engaged elsewhere.  Really, the movie is pretty full with characters already before these one-note goths show up, so it’s no wonder they don’t get to have a lot of screen time to develop.  But, still, Thanos deserved a better crew.

Ugh. Do you guys all shop at the same store or something?

Why No Ultron?

This movie is jam packed with heroes, and lots of those heroes get somewhat shortchanged.  I think there’s a particular kind of math going on in that the more a character speaks in this movie the less likely they are to play a large role in the next movie (if you know what I mean, having a lot of dialogue in this movie is like wearing a red uniform in Star Trek).   Heck, I just hope Captain America gets a line or two next time, here he could be accredited as “Bearded Glowering Man.”  Other characters are probably completely absent here because they’ll be playing larger roles in the next movie (and yes I’m talking about Hawkeye and Ant-Man, but I’d like to see Lee Pace’s Ronan the Accuser too).  But we still see a lot of returning characters here and specifically we see a lot of villains returning from a lot of different movies (some aren’t even played by the same actor).  So, if characters like Loki are back, why not Ultron?  James Spader’s supervillain was a lot of fun in the second Avengers movie and he interacted with the Infinity Stones to some extent.  Surely he could reappear in some capacity here.  Why is he excluded?  Again, maybe his absence here just guarantees his presence next time, but – until we see that – what the hell?

There’s a lot of just plain bad facial hair in this movie.

Oh Great..Another Cliffhanger

Yes, we could see it coming, but c’mon!  We’ve been waiting for years for this big movie and we’ve been told a million times in a million ways that it all comes down to this!  And now we have to wait for Part 2.  I was hopeful after the talk last year that these movies wouldn’t be “Infinity War 1 & 2” that maybe we’d get two standalone stories.  But no we didn’t.  Sure this movie tells a complete story in that it has a conclusion, but that conclusion is clearly not the end of the story.  So we get to spend a year waiting for the true final Avengers movie, hopefully it will all come down to that.