Avengers: Infinity War -- Spoilers Thread (1 Viewer)

[Adam Lenhardt]

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, but to my memory, since she can't be a "mutant" due to rights issues with Fox, she got her powers due to being experimented on by Hydra with the Mind Stone, which was in Loki's staff before it was placed in Vision's head. She can move things with her mind, and there might be other things too that I'm forgetting from Age of Ultron.

She's telekinetic, she can use her mystical energy in a targeted way to inflict damage and even disintegration (how she destroyed the Mind Stone) or in a diffuse way to create barriers/force fields, she can fly, she can read people's memories, and she manipulate minds and create hallucinations.

Also, apparently, she can drop accents at will, since she has a thick Russian one in Age of Ultron which hasn't been used at all since.

I was curious about that after Infinity War, so I revisited her scenes from Civil War. The accent was very much there for Civil War but a bit fainter, so I guess they're going with the idea that it faded away after spending so much time around Americans.

The real reason of course is that it was ridiculous and the focus of much derision, and they didn't want the distraction anymore.

Basically the bleeding edge armour is a series of nanobots that Tony stores inside him, to be activated and controlled by the new arc reactor mounted once again on his chest. The nanobots can essentially turn into whatever Tony wants, from clothing to complex machines. In the final battle with Thanos, you can see the nanobots moving from his legs/lower body to replace damaged armour in the upper portions (and heal him, later). He also does a neat trick with the instantly regenerating helmet.

That's how the Bleeding Edge armor worked in the comics, but from the brief bit of exposition at the beginning it sounded like the nanobots here were all stored in the new arc reactor on his chest. Functionally I suppose it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.

 

[Sean Bryan]

One thing I wish Marvel would publish: a comprehensive timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It would help us (and, for that matter, them) keep everything straight. Multiple sources confirm that the Battle of New York from the first Avengers occurred in May 4, 2012. Based on that, and the fact that Spider-Man: Homecoming took place eight years later, the MCU is probably in the year 2020 or 2021 at this point.

Feige has actually recently said that they were working on putting together a comprehensive timeline for the MCU that he’d like to release to the public when ready.

 

[Sean Bryan]

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, but to my memory, since she can't be a "mutant" due to rights issues with Fox, she got her powers due to being experimented on by Hydra with the Mind Stone, which was in Loki's staff before it was placed in Vision's head. She can move things with her mind, and there might be other things too that I'm forgetting from Age of Ultron.

Also, apparently, she can drop accents at will, since she has a thick Russian one in Age of Ultron which hasn't been used at all since.

I don’t think there have been any clear limits established for her powers, but they seem to include telekinesis, force shields, limited flight, energy blasts, some degree of telepathy, and mental manipulation. In the comics, I believe her powers are actually the ability to control chaos magic, but I don’t know if the MCU has that in mind with her or not. She’s definitely one of their heavy hitters, but she’s also a “glass cannon” since she doesn’t have any more durability than a normal person.

Accents do tend to soften when people move from areas where the accent is the norm to areas where there is a different accent. I think the idea is that her Sovokian accent softened once she left Sokovia and started living in the US with the Avengers for a couple of years.

EDIT: What Adam said.

 

[Jake Lipson]

By setting Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel pre-Thanos, Marvel avoids all of those headaches.

Yes...but the flip side of that is that it might be harder to convince audiences to go immediately backwards to a more isolated story with Ant-Man. Since we know that Thanos is about to arrive and wipe out half the planet anyway, the stakes of him and the Wasp fighting whatever more average villain that movie deals with don't seem to matter as much when our viewing of it will be sandwiched in between the Thanos story. Captain Marvel is at least going way back to the '90s, but for Ant-Man, since it's still in relatively close proximity to recent events, that might well be an issue.

Also, I'm sure that Captain Marvel will probably say "1990s" in on-screen text, but unless Ant-Man actually says "Before Infinity War," which I doubt, they might confuse people. Except for the very first Captain America film, all the MCU films thus far have moved forward in time, so if you didn't know going in that it was before Infinity War, it would be reasonable for someone (like those who didn't know Infinity War was a Part 1) to expect that Ant-Man and the Wasp is going to be after Infinity War since it's next up. I'm not sure how they will communicate in the film that Infinity War hasn't happened yet, since they can't reference something that hasn't happened yet, but I do think they need to figure this out.

I get that they wanted to put Infinity War in the summer kickoff spot because it is obviously a bigger title than a sequel for Ant-Man, and since they already had Thor in November and Black Panther in February, there wasn't really anywhere else to put Ant-Man and the Wasp first without cutting into the business of those two films. However, I sort of wish that it had been able to come out first just for continuity's sake. At least Captain Marvel is going way back, so it's less of an issue there.

It would also help very much if something in Ant-Man and the Wasp ended up coming back around to influence Avengers 4 (like, say, the Quantum Realm, as I was theorizing up in post #77.)

 

[Jake Lipson]

I was just thinking tonight about Spider-Man and Marvel's remarkably efficient and effective universe.

Given how Marvel's production model works with crisscrossing characters, Tom Holland has already appeared as Spider-Man in as more films than Andrew Garfield did in his entire run as the character. Next year, with Avengers 4, Holland will have made more appearances than Tobey McGuire, making him the longest-running Spider-Man (strictly in terms of number of appearances) even before his second solo film. By next July, he will have appeared as this character in five films over a four-year period, which matches the total number of Spider-Man films made before him.

It's just pretty remarkable when you think about how quickly his will have become the dominant version of this character. Marvel's current golden touch probably helps a lot with that, but considering how well at least the first trilogy was received, it's still an achievement to have successfully introduced this character again and gotten audiences to accept a third version of him and to be upset when he "died," considering how ubiquitous Spider-Man has been in our cinemas over the last 16 years.

 

[Josh Dial]

Also, I'm sure that Captain Marvel will probably say "1990s" in on-screen text, but unless Ant-Man actually says "Before Infinity War," which I doubt, they might confuse people.

They could start with the scene straight out of Infinity War Prelude 1 (of 2), which shows Clint and Scott "retiring" to spend more time with their families. Start with Cap breaking his team out of the Raft (basically Cap stepping into frame in front of Scott's cell), have him mention to Scott something about where everyone else is going (Wanda is going to meet an old friend in Scotland, T'Challa took Bucky back to Wakanda, and Cap is going with Sam and Nat to Syria), and that should place the movie in context.

 

[Sean Bryan]

Yes...but the flip side of that is that it might be harder to convince audiences to go immediately backwards to a more isolated story with Ant-Man. Since we know that Thanos is about to arrive and wipe out half the planet anyway, the stakes of him and the Wasp fighting whatever more average villain that movie deals with don't seem to matter as much when our viewing of it will be sandwiched in between the Thanos story. Captain Marvel is at least going way back to the '90s, but for Ant-Man, since it's still in relatively close proximity to recent events, that might well be an issue.

Also, I'm sure that Captain Marvel will probably say "1990s" in on-screen text, but unless Ant-Man actually says "Before Infinity War," which I doubt, they might confuse people. Except for the very first Captain America film, all the MCU films thus far have moved forward in time, so if you didn't know going in that it was before Infinity War, it would be reasonable for someone (like those who didn't know Infinity War was a Part 1) to expect that Ant-Man and the Wasp is going to be after Infinity War since it's next up. I'm not sure how they will communicate in the film that Infinity War hasn't happened yet, since they can't reference something that hasn't happened yet, but I do think they need to figure this out.

I get that they wanted to put Infinity War in the summer kickoff spot because it is obviously a bigger title than a sequel for Ant-Man, and since they already had Thor in November and Black Panther in February, there wasn't really anywhere else to put Ant-Man and the Wasp first without cutting into the business of those two films. However, I sort of wish that it had been able to come out first just for continuity's sake. At least Captain Marvel is going way back, so it's less of an issue there.

It would also help very much if something in Ant-Man and the Wasp ended up coming back around to influence Avengers 4 (like, say, the Quantum Realm, as I was theorizing up in post #77.)

I’d bet that Ant-Man and The Wasp will open with a scene involving him getting broken out of the Raft by Cap and choosing to go back home. At least I’d like to see that. Would be a great opportunity for a cameo from Chris Evans as well.

But even if it doesn’t explicitly depict those events, they will probably set up that whole situation at the start of the movie and make that clear.

When asked about how the two movies in between IW and A4 lead into the last one Joe Russo said:

"They all lead in in their own way. From a plot standpoint, if there’s any corollary, Ant-Man and the Wasp probably has some elements that stitch in."

Anthony Russo then jumped in and said:

"But we can’t talk about that."

 

[Sam Favate]

Did Zoe Saldana give away the title to A4 last year and say she'll be in it?

According to this tweet, she did. #InfinityGauntlet

https://twitter.com/lizo_mzimba/status/856592998146199553

 

[Sean Bryan]

The events of this movie, I think, will highlight the divide between the TV and film divisions even further.

I think it is very unlikely that any of the Marvel shows airing between now and next Spring will take place in a world where half the population has died/disappeared. It would be interesting to see that, because we’d get to spend an extended period of time in a “post-balancing world”, which would be quite the dramatic mess for everyone. But since this is going to have to be undone (more or less) then the events of such shows would also probably be invalidated. My biggest question is when they undo this, will things be left as if they happened and people “came back”, or will it be made so that it never happened in the first place. Dramatically, it works much better if it still happened. So I hope they go that route, but it still seems like a challenge to incorporate that having happened into the stories of the shows.

For the Netflix shows, those coming out over the next year will just have to be set before Infinity War, like the next two movies. But Agents of SHIELD is trickier. If they get a sixth season they are going to have an entire season air in between two world changing movies, the second of which will likely undo to some degree the events of the first. It does provide an interesting creative opportunity for the show if they were to tell a story in the aftermath of Infinity War, but the TV division would have to know how the Russos will leave things at the end of A4 to properly incorporate that into the end of their season and I’m betting they don’t want that kind of info floating around the now more separate TV division. So maybe they’ll just have to sidestep the whole thing somehow.

 

[Sean Bryan]

Did Zoe Saldana give away the title to A4 last year and say she'll be in it?

According to this tweet, she did. #InfinityGauntlet

https://twitter.com/lizo_mzimba/status/856592998146199553

That isn’t opening for me right now, but I do remember when she called it “Infinity Gauntlet”. It think the general thought was that she may have misspoke after having read the comics with that name.

EDIT: Okay, it opened and I got to see it.

Most all the actors in this never even got full scripts, they just were given their parts, and there were stories about fake scripts being circulated out there as well. Seems unlikely that they would reveal the title to her. But you never know, she may have heard something.

As for her being in it, I really hope so. But being in it doesn’t guarantee that she’ll be brought back to life. I want more of her in Guaridians, so I hope so.

And what they did with Rooker forever makes me not take anything for granted just because someone is seen on a set or mentions being in something.

 

[Josh Dial]

But Agents of SHIELD is trickier. If they get a sixth season they are going to have an entire season air in between two world changing movies, the second of which will likely undo to some degree the events of the first.

They could do some sort of high-concept season (sort of like a particular season of "How I met Your Mother," and like "24" in general) where the entire season takes place over the span of a day or so.

They could also do another alternate reality season like The Framework or 2091.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I just view it as SHIELD no longer being connected to the MCU - for all intents and purposes, it hasn't been since they had the Baron Von Strucker connection before Age Of Ultron. So I wouldn't really expect the show to comment on the movie one way or the other.

They've had too many "world is ending" type arcs since then where the obvious solution would have been to call in an Avenger. It strains credibility, for instance, that AI and robots could have been such a major part of the last season and that no one would say, "Remember Ultron? This isn't a good idea. Let's get Stark."

The show is now a completely different entity from what was originally suggested by its creators and how it originally portrayed its world. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's dropped into its own continuity.

 

[Sam Favate]

It's too bad there isn't a better connection between the films and TV. Both ABC and Netflix missed a big opportunity by not having commercials for Shield or the Netflix shows before the Avengers.

 

[Bryan^H]

I think my friend summed it up the best that (his words) "cosmic dust deaths" don't mean much, because he is certain they will be back(me too). But the other deaths of Gamora, Loki etc. are cause for concern. I can't even contemplate GOTG vol.3 without Gamora, so I feel she has to come back.

 

[JimmyO]

Of course Gamora will be back. That isn't even a question. GotG is a popular franchise, and relatively new in the MCU compared to the Avengers. Killing off one of the most popular characters in that franchise is pretty much marketing suicide.

You can kill of ANY of the Avengers themselves and argue they've had their run. I include Loki in that as well.

Who knows, maybe the next Guardians movie will be about trying to get her back? Search for Spock style.

 

[TravisR]

But the other deaths of Gamora, Loki etc. are cause for concern.

I think Loki is permanently dead. I could easily be forgetting someone but it seems like between the most recent Thor movie and this picture, they made a deliberate choice to get rid of all of the Asgard characters other than Thor.

 

[Josh Dial]

I think Loki is permanently dead. I could easily be forgetting someone but it seems like between the most recent Thor movie and this picture, they made a deliberate choice to get rid of all of the Asgard characters other than Thor.

I agree that Loki is almost certainly permanently dead (though if either of my theories posted back in post #34 are close to correct, the character will be back in "past events"). That said, all of the characters (not the actors) are almost certainly going to be reborn in the rebirth that necessarily follows Ragnarok--this rebirth will likely form part of the soft "reboot" for Thor in the next phase of movies. Maybe we'll get Jane Foster as Thor?

 

[Jake Lipson]

I think Loki is permanently dead.

Since even Thanos called this out specifically, I think so.

 

[Sam Favate]

Hiddleston said during the production of Thor Ragnarok that it would be his "last time out of the gate."

http://collider.com/tom-hiddleston-loki-thor-ragnarok/

BTW, random thought here, but how $#%*&@# genius was it to make Peter Dinklage the giant?

Biggest opening weekend ever, domestic and worldwide. That's always impressive.

 

[Joe Wong]

Just came back from my 2nd viewing...and it's cemented its place as #1 in the MCU for me.

The pacing and flow of action in the first Avengers and Winter Soldier (my #3 and #2, respectively) is more effortless, whereas IW has a patch mid-movie (from Thanos' throne room scene to the start of the Battle of Wakanda) which is more exposition-heavy and hence somewhat inconsistent, pace- and action-wise, with its 1st hour.

But the danger that Thanos (and the Black Order to a lesser extent) poses to the Avengers keeps the stakes amazingly high, and the heartwrenching tug-of-war Vision and Wanda go through towards the end, together with Peter falling in Tony's arms, Raccoon watching Groot dissolve, Iron Patriot searching for Sam, Bucky fading before Cap, Ikoye seeing her king disappear...makes this much more emotional than the previous MCU films.

And there's no catharsis (or hint of hope) until the pager call goes out in the post credit scene and reveals Captain Marvel. Even Age of Ultron, which left the Avengers in a dark place after the fight in Africa, had a turning point when SW and Quicksilver changed teams and Vision came to life. You knew then the Avengers had enough on their side.

But not IW. The devastation is complete.