Re: Avengers: Infinity War
I love Ragnarok. Only a couple moments felt tonally "off" for me. My biggest problems with Age of Ultron and Iron Man 3 is that both of those should have been two movies apiece. There was too much being crammed into the runtime that needed to be told. They needed more room to develop organically, the way the MCU in general is. That, IMO, is why those felt so jarring.
And, ironically, I feel Rogue One would have been better if they
hadn't killed everyone off. The rationale was lazy. "We never see them in the Original Trilogy, so they must all have died in the mission." *pff* Cassian and K-2SO and Chirrut, okay. Theirs were thematically-appropriate deaths, and worked for their character arcs. The rest felt like "body-count" deaths. Let the pilot live. We never see him again because he's doing things where Our Heroes aren't. Maybe he was piloting one of the transports in the Hoth evacuation. As for Baze and Jyn? She already had little use for the Rebellion, and would have even less after learning that Cassian's boss had put a hit out on her dad. Baze had no affiliation to them, and with Chirrut gone, his only remaining tie was to his "little sister", Jyn. They go off on their own to continue having adventures on the fringe, and not part of the Galactic Civil War.
From watching the trailer a, ah... few times, now... I never trust the sequence in which trailers show us things. We see Thanos drop the Time Stone into the gauntlet's socket, next to the Power Stone. No others in evidence. He had to have hit Xandar first, which I'm hoping we see. Thanos getting the Infinity Stones is a perfect ticking-clock countdown for the film. At least a
little screen time should be given to each of the six. So Xandar first. Then the Asgardian refugees. Then Earth -- he only has those two Stones for the shots of him fighting Iron Man. This makes me wonder when he will get the Reality Stone that we last saw in the keeping of the Collector.
At first, I felt he showed up over New York first. The more I watch, the more I think he shows up in Wakanda first. There's more of a lull in the action for Bruce and Nat to reconnect, and for Bruce to be working on the new Hulkbuster suit than I think would actually happen if everyone ran from new York to Wakanda in pursuit of Thanos. This also makes sense as IW will follow Black Panther's release. My speculation, from what we were left with at the end of Civil War and what we see here, is that Vision is in Wakanda to be with Wanda, and Thanos shows up there to get the Mind Stone. Then heads to New York to get the Time Stone that Strange now apparently has with him there in the New York Sanctum, rather than in Kamar-Taj, where he left it at the end of Doctor Strange, and where it presumably still was in Ragnarok, as he wasn't wearing it.
My wonderings and speculation... I wonder if this won't be the "Infinity Gauntlet" story from the comics, so much as part of Thanos' quest for the Stones. If he trounces Our Heroes as I feel he must, he'll leave earth with four of the six. The Reality Stone is still out there somewhere. And we have no idea about the Soul Stone. @
Dessa related a friend's speculation that it's in Wakanda and what allows the king to commune with the Panther Spirit. Plausible. I could see it. On the other hand, that would mean
three Infinity Stones had been on Earth for centuries-to-millennia. That starts to feel unlikely. The next Avengers movie was going to be IW2, but that's changed as things have evolved. We are now getting the next Ant-Man (and the Wasp) movie later in 2018, followed by Captain Marvel's origin movie set in the '90s, Avengers 4, the probably-Venom Spider-Man film, and GotG3, before we no longer have definite projects announced.
Those could change yet again, yes. But going with that sequence as it is now, I'm curious how the evolving macro-story that saw them make Avengers 4
not "Infinity War, Part 2" is going to affect those other films. James Gunn has said that the pod at the end of GotG2
is Adam Warlock, but that he won't be in Infinity War or Avengers 4. Given his association with the Soul Stone in the comics over the years, I don't know how they're going to play that. I don't know if GotG3 will be the next stage of Thanos' quest, where he gets the Reality Stone from the Collector and Adam Warlock comes into play, and the big, cosmic clash of everybody against a nigh-omnipotent Thanos takes place -- rather than in Avengers 4. Which would mean some other massive threat Our Heroes have to deal with in that film, set between Thanos hitting Earth and the actual "Infinity Gauntlet" story (which involved the Celestials, the Living Tribunal, Nebula, and so forth -- all cosmic entities more in GotG-land than the more Earth-centric stuff). I just don't know. My sense of how they're handling the MCU is that they'll take a moment following IW to let whoever's left catch their breath and up the ante a bit more before giving us the other bookend. I like to think they've learned from the over-compressed stories they've done. Age of Ultron especially.
We'll see.
--Jonah
I'll shut up now. 
