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Avengers: Infinity War
184 Plays3 years ago
For one of the biggest Avengers movies ever, it's only fitting that Perry is joined by one of the biggest Avengers fans ever. Van Allen Plexico—superhero and science fiction novelist, fellow podcaster, and founder of AvengersAssemble.net—returns to the show to talk about Infinity War. We discuss how much of a milestone the film was, the fun of seeing these characters interact onscreen for the first time, the film's interpretation of Thanos compared to the comics, and a whole lot more!
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Exploring Superhero History with Audible
00:00:00
Speaker
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00:00:19
Speaker
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00:00:35
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Accessing Audiobooks with Free Trials
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All you have to do is go to audibletrial.com slash SuperCinemapod and with your free trial you get one free audiobook and two free Audible Originals. In fact, you get to keep those titles even if you cancel before the trial is over. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to audibletrial.com slash SuperCinemapod and start your free trial today.
00:01:29
Speaker
Hear me.
00:01:59
Speaker
and rejoice. You have had the privilege of being saved by the Great Titan. You may think this is suffering. No. It is salvation.
00:02:24
Speaker
Universal scales tipped toward balance because of your sacrifice. Smile. For even in death, you have become children of Thanos.
00:02:54
Speaker
I know what it's like to lose. I feel so desperately that you're right. Yet to fail, nonetheless. This frightening... turns the legs to jelly. I ask you to what end?
00:03:23
Speaker
Spread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same. And now it's here. Or should I say...
Van Allen-Plexko Discusses The Avengers
00:03:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Superhero Cinephiles podcast. I'm your host, Perry Constantine. And today I've got a returning guest on. Last time we talked about politics and superheroes, but this time I thought it'd be good to have him come on and talk about an actual movie this time. And that is Van Allen-Plexko. Van, how you doing?
00:04:00
Speaker
Hey Perry, great to be back with you again. I'm just doing just really good, really good. Excited to talk about The Avengers, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, glad to have you back on. We had a lot of good feedback about the politics episode, but this time we're just gonna geek out about The Avengers instead. And this is a movie, because Derek and I had covered the first two Avengers movies, and eventually, I had hoped that we'd be able to get to cover all four.
00:04:24
Speaker
but since he's no longer with us, I thought, well, who's another good person is probably the biggest Avengers fan I know. And that's definitely you. Guilty. Yeah. This also really links to you in another way because not only are you probably the biggest Avengers fan I know, you're probably also, if not the biggest, at least one of the biggest fans I know of cosmic Marvel stuff and Thanos and Captain Marvel and all the Jim Starlin type stuff.
00:04:53
Speaker
That's true, yeah. Well, you know, just folks will know, when the internet first really kind of came along in the early 90s is when I created Avengers Assemble.net and it's been there for like 27 years now. I've run the same website for 27 years, which just seems insane.
00:05:14
Speaker
You know, my older daughter has graduated college, has a real job and is not 27 years old. So that's, you know, that just shows you how long that site's been there. And now we're doing all of the Avengers where I'm actually going back with various guests and reading the entire series. So the Avengers have very definitely been in my mind this year for sure. How's that reread going?
00:05:39
Speaker
It's interesting. The first time I read them just kind of out of a sense of obligation, I knew that the early 60s stuff was going to be considerably different. I came on board the Avengers in the late 70s with Jim Shooter and George Perez, and a little more sophisticated. And so I knew that the stuff that Stan and Jack did, while brilliant and having tons of ideas, was going to be a little awkward.
00:06:05
Speaker
Going back and reading them now, and then talking about them, and having various other folks on to talk about them with, it's kind of revealed to me things that I didn't catch before. There's different layers of stuff going on. And I think the thing that really has struck so far, we've done like the first eight issues, and the thing that's really struck me so far is how important the Hulk has been. Because I always knew in my mind he was there for a couple of issues, and then he left, you know? Yeah.
00:06:34
Speaker
He left the team, but he's really their ongoing antagonist for the first two years of the comic, and I had not really processed that. It's like they have different supervillains come aboard, but they're dealing with the Hulk. It's always the thing that keeps them going issue to issue, and that's really interesting, I think. Because the movies we were talking about, the movies touch on that a little bit too with the Hulk and with Bruce being more important than you might first think.
00:07:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. I'd never really considered a whole lot of that because after Stan, after those initial issues, they kind of moved away from the Hulk probably because he was busy in his own book. And then the movies, you know, really heavily focused on him as a mainstay. Even to this day, like we just covered Shang-Chi in the last episode. And, you know, at the post credit scene, Bruce is now the core of the Avengers team now that Cap and Tony are gone.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. Yeah, I think it. I think the Hulk was really kind of the focus of the book as the as the he's not the villain, but he's not the he's not one of the heroes either. He's just kind of there probably until the shakeup in 16 where you get a totally different lineup because it's not like Cap and Hawkeye and Black Widow and Quicksilver. We're going to go fight Hulk. That's just not going to work. But as long as you had Iron Man and Thor,
00:08:01
Speaker
you know, you could scrabble with squabble with the Hulk a little bit every now and then they kind of do that. That's interesting. When you get up to the music stuff, let
Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet's Impact
00:08:09
Speaker
me know. I'd love to be on to talk about that because that's how I got into the Avengers. It was Perez and music and then continued on through John's, which was still pretty good. And then got up to Austin, which is when I dropped off.
00:08:26
Speaker
But I did pick up the, the Bendis trades recently on sale and been rereading those and they're interesting. They're not Avengers books, but they're, they're interesting in their own way. Yeah, they, they do what they're trying to do. They're just not what I wanted an Avengers comic. I hung around for two or three years with it. Then I just said, you know, this is not, this is not what I signed up for.
00:08:50
Speaker
Okay, um, but so that's a nice little preamble to talk about Avengers infinity war today, and which was very kind of loosely adapted from the infinity gauntlet saga, and
00:09:05
Speaker
And it's funny, I see people online, you know, asking about, you know, recommendations. And one of the things they talk about is, you know, oh, I want to read Infinity Gauntlet because it's, you know, because I loved Infinity War. I'm like, OK, yeah, yeah, it's a good story. But just so you know, it's very different from what the comic movie is. And if they make the mistake of saying I want to read Infinity War, the comic, then it's going to be totally different. Yeah.
00:09:31
Speaker
You know, period, that's because that's actually how I got back into comics after I didn't read comics at all through like high school or college or and I was on into graduate school. And when I saw Infinity War, I missed Infinity Gauntlet somehow. But when Infinity War came out, I just happened to see it in a store. And I said, oh, Perez is drawing a Thanos story with the Avengers in it. I've got to read that. And that's this. So this is interestingly, this is what got me all the way back into this whole business again. Yeah.
00:09:58
Speaker
And correct me if I'm wrong, but that was the early 90s when infinity gauntlet came out, right?
00:10:03
Speaker
Yeah, I know Infinity War was out in 92, so Gauntlet must have been 1991 somewhere in there. Yeah, yeah. So that's pretty cool because what my impression just from the style of artwork, Perez's artwork and all that is when I first read Infinity Gauntlet, it was long after it had been collected in trade, probably like in the early 2000s or so. And my impression was that it was originally like part of the 1970s stuff.
00:10:32
Speaker
just because that, and then when I read it and I'm like, oh, wait a minute, that's Wolverine and Cyclops from their 90s costumes. How'd that happen?
00:10:40
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, we had the long streak of the 80s. I mean, they pretty much dealt with Thanos permanently in Marvel 2 and 1 annual number two in the summer of 77. And this was when they brought him back was for Infinity Gauntlet. They brought him back through that long, I think it was through Silver Surfer or something, where he got the different Infinity Gems. And then once he got them all, Infinity Gauntlet started there. And it was Starlin who wrote Infinity Gauntlet as well, wasn't it?
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. They just had a decade off from Thanos. And then after the 80s were over, they decided to go back into it. Yeah, yeah. That's what I found really interesting is going back and seeing that there's like this big gap of time because I read the most of those original stories and the Avengers versus Thanos trade paperback.
00:11:27
Speaker
And then after that they got this big gap and then here's Infinity Gauntlet. And Infinity Gauntlet starts off in an interesting spot because it starts off right where Infinity War ends, the movie. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, that's right.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah, it was strange because that represented trying to kind of recapture everything. Like you said, that original Avengers story had been reprinted a million times. I mean, almost any, you name a topic from the late 70s, and if you have a trade paperback about it, it includes that two-part Avengers story. Avengers Anno number seven, Marvel two and Anno number two. It's my favorite comic story of all time. I love it, love it, love it. And it seemed like such a good finish that, like I said, it took them
00:12:20
Speaker
12 years to decide to go back and kind of bring it all back up again. And in Marvel terms, that's a pretty long time to leave something lying still, especially a villain as effective as Thanos, you know. Yeah. But I was glad that they let Starlin do it. You know, I'm glad they didn't bring in some hack to, you know, bring back Thanos. That would have been annoying. Yeah. So what was it about this original story that you really loved so much? Was it just that continuation from the stuff in the original stuff in the 80s?
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like I said, we had just gone so many years and not seen Thanos or any of that kind of thing. Warlock was kind of off. He was kind of gone for a while. He'd gone to the Soul Gym and taken Gamora and Pip with him. And it was just kind of like that entire Thanos-Warlock segment of the Marvel Universe was gone for 12 years.
00:13:12
Speaker
And I really liked it. It was like I said, it was in my favorite comic story ever. So getting, getting this, bring it back. That was good enough. And then having George involved was, was, was, you know, whipped cream on top. And then it was a really, and then it was a really good story that brought in not just the Avengers this time, but, but the X-Men and a bunch of other characters. I mean, it.
00:13:33
Speaker
it just seemed like an even bigger, I mean, you know what, it was kind of like, it's kind of like if the first Thanos story was like the Korvax saga, this was like Secret Wars, you know what I mean? It's like even more, even more of a giant thing, you know? Right, right. And you mentioned something
MCU's Shared Universe Success
00:13:53
Speaker
in there, you mentioned Adam Warlock, and I thought that was interesting because this, the Infinity Saga in the movies is completely absent Adam Warlock,
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah. And also in that interim time, isn't that when Marvell died as well? Yeah, he was in the Thanos story in Avengers Annual and Marvel 2 in 1 Annual number 2. He was a medium level character. In fact, that may have been the first time I ever encountered him and then became a huge Captain Marvell fan. I went out and started buying his book right before it got canceled. But yeah, Marvell was in it and
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was, yeah, I lost the rest of your question, but I think that was... No, just refreshing my own memory more than anything else. And then just talking about Adam Warlock, who's just completely absent from the Infinity stuff, although now he's going to be in Guardians 3. Yeah, presumably. Yeah, that was the thing. We all could see it coming that, I mean, from the minute they announced that Infinity War was coming, before it was even two movies, when they said, you know, Infinity War will be the third Avengers movie,
00:15:00
Speaker
And I was like, well, they don't have time to introduce Warlock and then have him be as important of a character as he needs to be to do what he needs to do. And I thought, I had this conversation with people. I said, you know, it's going to be Dr. Strange because he's the one closest to Warlock that we already have. And that's pretty much. And has an association with an Infinity Stone, too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He has enough connections there that he could be the stand in
00:15:30
Speaker
for Warlock, because Warlock was kind of the field general in the original story, in both of them, really. He was the catalyst for everything. And Dr. Strange was in the position to kind of play that role to at least effectively. You know, he did. Yeah. So how'd you feel as a big fan of this stuff going in? How did you feel about Infinity War when you first saw it? Oh, sure.
00:16:01
Speaker
The thing that's so remarkable about that movie that struck me is what an accomplishment it is. I was just watching it, listening to the commentary, and the Russo brothers made sort of an obvious comment, but it was interesting just to hear them say it. They were saying, if you made this movie just by itself,
00:16:22
Speaker
it wouldn't work because people would be like, well, who's the green guy? Who's the purple guy? Why is there a wizard? Why is there a guy in armor? Whatever. What made this work was everything that came before it. We knew these people so well from hours and hours and hours of interacting with them. I think that what it really showed was that it is possible in a movie
00:16:49
Speaker
to recreate what made Marvel so great for so long, which is having great characters and great stories, but having them in the same universe able to interact. That was something that obviously fans have dreamed of forever. And we could never understand why it was so hard for Hollywood to understand that they could do that. They would just give us little episodic one-offs. The closest they would get is like,
00:17:19
Speaker
really bad Thor showing up in a whole TV movie. I mean, that was the closest you got. Or like Bruce Wayne saying Metropolis in Batman Forever. And then you're like, oh, yeah, there it is.
00:17:30
Speaker
Oh, you cling to any little crumb that they would throw to you. And you're thinking, if we're going this crazy over something that small, imagine if they got it right. And I didn't think in my lifetime I would see them get it this right. So it's a tribute to Feige, to Marvel, to Disney, and especially to the Russo brothers, who when tasked with executing it,
00:17:58
Speaker
absolutely killed it. They killed it. I don't think Joss Whedon would have done it nearly as well. No, I don't think so either. It's funny when I think back because about like, you know, 15 or so years ago when I was in college, me and a buddy of mine, we'd always, you know, we talk about different comic book movies we wanted to see because this was just when like X-Men and Spider-Man were starting to come out in the theater.
00:18:21
Speaker
And we talked about the Avengers. I said, we're not the Avengers. And he's like, oh, no, impossible. Like it would never happen. There's because the rights are all over the place and there's no way they could ever do like, you know, a big team up movie. And then, you know, fast forward. And now it's and we've got, you know, 20 plus movies about the Avengers all in the same universe. And I think and I think a big part of it, it's kind of the same thing with
00:18:46
Speaker
the same attitude studios had about TV shows, because for the longest time, TV shows didn't really have continuity. It's like every single episode you came in, it was like the other episodes didn't exist. And then finally, it was probably, you know, some soap operas and stuff like that, but as far as like primetime TV, it was really like Dallas or David Lynch with Twin Peaks. They decided, well, what if we just made it continue on and have the same story and get bigger?
00:19:14
Speaker
You get into my other huge fandom now because it's Babylon 5. The soap operas, even the nighttime soap operas, the difference is they didn't have an ending. They were open-ended. Babylon 5 was the first one on American TV that said we have a complete story, but it's not a five-night miniseries like Roots or Winds of War.
Serialized Storytelling: TV vs. MCU
00:19:35
Speaker
It's a five-year
00:19:37
Speaker
mini series. And now everything's like that. So yeah, I credit Babylon five. I'm partial, but that's no, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize that that was the first one that had had, um, I know he had had that five year plan going in, but I didn't realize that was the first one that had done that. Cause you're right. When peaks, it was, uh, David Lynch, his whole idea was he never wanted Laura Palmer's killer to be found out because he wanted that to be the catalyst that continued the story going.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, going forward indefinitely, right? Yeah, yeah. And one of the biggest changes that that stood out to me when I watched this movie is the change in Thanos' motivation. Because in the comic books, his whole thing is he's in love with death and he wants to please death. And so that's why he decides to kill half the universe. And they kind of hinted at this in his appearance at the in the end of the first Avengers movie, because
00:20:29
Speaker
His, his, you know, his lackey the other he says you know to challenge the the Avengers is to court death and then you see that close up that brilliant close up of Thanos and he smiles. But this time, it's not about you know he's not in love with death he's not trying to appease you know some female avatar of death.
00:20:47
Speaker
He's got this other motivation to, because he believes that the universe's resources are finite and this way it makes it easier for life to flourish. You know, typical eugenics population control stuff. What did you think of that change? Yeah, you know, first I would like, I don't, I didn't, I kind of fast forward through a few places in the movie. So I don't know if the Russo's addressed it.
00:21:12
Speaker
Maybe they did, but I don't know if I've ever heard it anywhere, but I'd like to know, I would have liked to have been in the room.
00:21:19
Speaker
where they said, or whoever it was that was involved, I'm sure there were four, five, six people, including probably Feige and whoever else, where they said, all right, we need to change his motivation because this isn't going to work. I think it works beautifully in the comics because you can draw a spooky lady death, you know, and it's all about Thanos obsessing about it. Plus, that had been his motivation going all the way back at least to the 1970s, to the Avengers annual.
00:21:45
Speaker
You had to keep that in the comic, but if you're doing him from scratch, I guess you have the opportunity to make it a motivation that's a little more understandable to the average person. I mean, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense because if you kill half the people, the other half are just going to reproduce and come right back up again, and now you've got the stones. He bought himself about two generations, really, and then it's going to be right back where it is.
00:22:15
Speaker
But, um, but I mean, I thought it works better than, than what the comics did. I think probably I'm okay with it. I, you know, it could have been worse. I guess they could have, they could, I, I, to me it's, it's equally good and I, and they can, it could have been worse. So it works. What did you think
Humanizing Thanos for the Screen
00:22:35
Speaker
about it? I liked it. I thought it, it, it made a lot of sense. And I thought Brolin did a really good job of selling that motivation. I mean, he was, um,
00:22:45
Speaker
He was amazing. I thought he's just, you know, this is really a Thanos movie. And I thought he did such a great job with that. And yeah, like the death motivation, I think that's something that maybe you can, in fact, my original idea, my original theory was I thought they were gonna have Hela be a stand-in for death because they brought her in in Ragnarok.
00:23:07
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that would have been interesting. Yeah, they could have done that. They could have done that. But I think they probably would have needed a little bit more buildup to that or something. But when they didn't, when Hela dies at the end of Ragnarok, I'm like, well, that's probably not going to happen now. So so, yeah, I thought that would have been one way to do it. But otherwise, if you're going to do the whole death thing, I think you really need to have some more buildup to it than just drop it in. If you introduced in this movie, I think it would have been a little bit confusing for the average viewer.
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, it would. You made a good point too. That was one thing I also heard them talking about was that the Russo said that given that the movie starts with Thor and Loki on the Asgardian ship and you follow along with him trying to get the weapon built and everything, they said if the movie had ended with Thor going for the head or whatever they always say, this would have been a Thor movie.
00:24:02
Speaker
But instead, like you said, it's a Thanos movie because Thanos wins. And the last scene you see is Thanos smiling because he's won. And also interestingly, they said it goes from being a superhero movie to in the last 10 minutes, it becomes a horror movie. And then it becomes a tragedy.
00:24:22
Speaker
And I thought that was interesting how they said that superhero movies work best when they transcend genres or do multiple genres. And it's like three different kinds of movie within the last 20 minutes of the film. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think that's one of the things that a lot of the
00:24:43
Speaker
the critics who didn't like this movie are missing about it because they say, oh, it's an incomplete movie and there's too much stuff going on. And I'm like, well, first off, you can't look, like you said earlier, you can't look at this movie in isolation. That's not the kind of movie it is. You're judging it because of something it's not. And second, they say it's incomplete. And I'm like, well, it is complete when you look at it as Thanos as the protagonist.
00:25:10
Speaker
because he starts off with his goal. He goes through his journey. He has to make a sacrifice and then he gets his ultimate goal in the end. That's a complete story right there.
00:25:20
Speaker
That's it. Sure. Yeah. It's the same kind of thing that, that I thought was done so well with Fellowship of the Ring, right? Is that they knew they had to end that movie before anything was resolved. And so they decided to focus the entire first movie on Frodo and the Ring. And, and, and it's the same thing here is that you get a sense of closure, you know, in a way it may not be the one you want.
00:25:41
Speaker
Right, yeah. There are some people that root for Thanos, and okay, that's your choice in life, but yeah, you still get a complete story, even if it's not one you like. What did you think of Brolin's interpretation of Thanos compared to the comics? Oh, great, yeah. Again, it's one of those things where
00:26:03
Speaker
We look at what we've got and we take for granted that this is what it is and how it was always going to be. And my thing is always there are a million other ways it could have gone, right?
00:26:14
Speaker
a different actor, a different voice, different, you know, written slightly different and it could have been a disaster. And so, you know, we look at what he ended up doing with it and all the nuance. He has both the gravitas, the heaviness of a guy that can beat up Thor and Hulk. I mean, it takes a certain gravitas to pull off that I can beat up Hulk and Thor, right? In the same scene effectively. Yeah.
00:26:43
Speaker
And then and then but then on the other hand, he has to be able to like talk to Gamora when she's a little girl. You know, he's got those scenes where he actually is kind of gentle or at least he seems like he's being gentle. You know, he's got scenes where he's cruel like to them to what's her name is other daughter. Nebula. Yeah, so I mean, he has quite a range of emotions and actions that he has to be able to pull off. And they I mean,
00:27:12
Speaker
they did remarkable motion capture of him. They talk about how, the Russos talk about how they actually had like, they said they had like every molecule of his face mapped out so that the tiniest nuance would come across. And we've all seen some pretty bad facial CGI. Yeah. So, you know, think how important it was to this movie even working at all that Thanos was believable.
00:27:41
Speaker
It's so amazing. And I'm watching this movie last night. And just like even the smallest details, like you were saying, even like the peach fuzz on his arms, you can see. And it's just, and you really believe that this is actually like eight foot tall giant purple guy standing in front of you because he just, the CGI was so good. And sometimes with these CGI characters,
00:28:08
Speaker
It's hard to give that really deep nuanced performance because you can't catch every little aspect of it, but they really manage to capture every aspect. And Brolin doesn't try to half-ass it at any point because he knows he'll be motion capture anyway. Oh no. And like you mentioned, his voice and one of the lines that stood out to me is when he's
00:28:30
Speaker
that scene when he's torturing Nebula and he tells Gamora, he's like, you're strong, me. And he says, you're very generous, also me. And I'm like, Thanos calling himself, and then you think about some of his actions, you're like, okay, yeah, I can kind of see that in a way. But yeah, that's one of the things that really stands out to me because Thanos is one of those villains that could easily just come off as,
00:28:58
Speaker
a mustache-twilling, cackling supervillain, if you do him wrong. And Brolin makes him a really likable guy in this, despite everything. Well, I mean, compare him to almost every other Marvel Cinematic Universe villain. I mean, the only other ones that get anything like the development and attention that he gets would be Loki,
00:29:20
Speaker
And I mean, that may be it. If there's another one or two, I don't know, but they're pretty much, and they're the most popular. And I mean, also, it kind of shows how we're in just this glut of great entertainment. And I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining, because again, I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and we were hurting. Man, the 70s, Barry, you don't even want to know. But we were hurting bad for anything. But I'm saying,
00:29:47
Speaker
We have so much now. Thanos, Thanos to me is in a league with Darth Vader as a movie villain. But Darth Vader was this giant global phenomenon for years and Thanos kind of came, everybody's like, oh, that was really cool and then went. And it's not Thanos' fault, it's our fault because we're on to the next thing, right? In 1977, there was no next thing. So we obsessed about Darth Vader for like five years. Right.
00:30:14
Speaker
In today's world, Thanos catches your attention for a two and a half hour movie and then a three hour movie and then you're done. So it's just unfortunate in a way that something this great came along at a time that there's so much competition that it doesn't, I don't think, get the credit that Brolin deserves and that the Russos deserve and all of that. Thanos in these movies should be
00:30:39
Speaker
a top five Hollywood villain ever, in my opinion. Absolutely. Yeah. And you mentioned Loki as well. One of the things I think that is really amazing is that Tom Hiddleston had several movies to develop that version of Loki. And Brolin has to do it basically all in this one movie. And he manages to still make bring him up to Loki's level. I mean, that's that's a really good accomplishment. You know, that's a lot of credit to to not only Brolin, but also the Russos.
00:31:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they knew that they had to get it. The movie lives or dies on Thanos being effective, believable, and a villain worthy of this much screen time. And yeah, and it's a combination of all the all the animators, the actor, the director, the writer,
00:31:31
Speaker
everything together to make it that. Sure. Yeah. One of the things I think that this movie does really well is it really captures that feel of an event comic book where, and that's one of the draws of it is you're bringing all these characters together.
Character Dynamics in Infinity War
00:31:45
Speaker
Some of them, you know, you're bringing back together for the first time in the years in the case of the Avengers characters. Some of them you're bringing together for the first time in the case of the Guardians meeting up with them.
00:31:54
Speaker
Um, what were some and there are some interactions that really kind of stand out in my mind. Oh, yes. What are the some of the ones that really stood out for you? Oh, that that to me is the is my favorite. I'm gonna say it's not the necessarily the best part of the movie.
00:32:09
Speaker
that's up to anybody to decide but my personal favorite parts of this movie are exactly what you're saying good guy meeting good guy from a different movie because again that's something that we hadn't seen a lot of civil war up until this point was like mind-blowing you know enough and all the characters had met each other before too
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with this, my favorite part of any of the Marvel Universe so far, my favorite like 20 minutes on film of anything MCU is like
00:32:46
Speaker
from 10 minutes into this movie to like 30 minutes in, because from the minute Hulk crashes through Dr. Strange's roof. So you've got Bruce interacting with Strange and Wong. Then Tony and Spider-Man show up. And those five, they don't know each other. They're encountering each other. Tony is dismissive. He calls him like a
00:33:12
Speaker
Dungeons and Dragons. He makes some disparaging remark about Strange. Are you giving away coupons at a store or something? And then Strange is utterly dismissive of Tony. The two of them, that is just beautiful to me. The two of them. And then Wong is great. Spidey is great.
00:33:31
Speaker
and Banner, that chemistry that you get when they're fighting the children of Thanos in New York City, that to me is the MCU at peak at 100%. It's just
00:33:46
Speaker
everything about. I've watched it over and over and over just that part. I'm not a person that generally watches parts of movies, you know, like the old DVDs where you could skip to the scene you wanted to see. I've always thought of them as a story and I like to see from beginning to end. But I'll go back and watch those New York scenes over and over just because they're so good. Yeah, so good. I love those scenes when Tony and Strange especially, I think that's one of some of my favorite moments in this in this movie is just the two of them interacting and like
00:34:14
Speaker
Tony's like, he's like, you know, I'm, you know, did you seriously just say hitherto? And then strange, like, are you seriously leaning on the cauldron of whatever? And the cape smacks him.
00:34:24
Speaker
Oh, it's so good. It's funny because this is like, because like Strange tells him, you know, unlike everybody else in your life, I don't work for you. And this is, it is kind of right. Even Cap in some way was kind of working for Tony. So this is like the first time he's dealing with somebody who is completely unaccountable to him on every single level.
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah, and well with things, maybe the exception of Hammer, but Hammer was such a dummy that he kind of hears somebody competent, very competent, who doesn't have any betrothal to
00:35:01
Speaker
to Tony. Yeah. So that was, that was beautiful. That whole bit, all those characters. And again, it's a tribute as well to how well those characters have been set up in their own movies and in previous movies that we knew them so well, they can just walk in the room together, not say a word. And the audience is like, Oh, look out. One of the things I like too is because, you know, the whole meme leading up to this movie was, Oh, you're going to have Downey and
00:35:24
Speaker
and Cumberbatch on screen together you got to have a Sherlock reference and everybody's like oh they didn't do it but they did but they did it in a very small way that time when when Tony says doctor do you concur and that was a that was like this that was the small blink and you miss it Sherlock reference right and I love when they when they do that when they find those small ways to work something in instead of making it super obvious yeah
00:35:47
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Oh, and I mean, they went through a bunch of drafts, obviously, with this movie, too. And I get the sense, they don't really outright say it, I don't believe, but I get the sense that they did a lot of a lot of it in editing, too. They arranged things in editing and oh, that reminds me of one thing I did. I was going to forget, but you'll appreciate this. They said that when they show the completed movie to test audiences,
00:36:12
Speaker
before Black Panther came out. When the scene switches to Wakanda the first time, the audience is like, huh, huh, that's an interesting place, how interesting. When they showed it after Black Panther came out, the theater just erupts when they show Wakanda. So they're like, that really does show you what we're just talking about, that once you get to know these people and these places, and you care about them,
00:36:39
Speaker
Then when they appear in this movie, you're all that much more enthusiastic. Because if you hadn't seen Black Panther, Wakanda is just an interesting place. You don't know anything about it. But they go. But after seeing Black Panther, it's Wakanda, you know. So I mean, that really is cool how there were different reactions completely based on when they saw it.
00:37:00
Speaker
And another one of my favorite interactions in this is Peter Quill and Thor, or just the Guardians and Thor in general. Like, I love that scene when Drax is just totally fanboying over Thor. Yeah, he has no guile, right? He just has no filters. So if he thinks Thor is cool, he's going to be like, you're cool, Thor. Yeah, I know. And there's that great exchange later
00:37:25
Speaker
where Iron Man and a couple of others are like, you know Thor? And Peter Quill is like, oh, yeah, what he said. He said he's like, yeah, not so good looking, needed saving. Not so good looking, needed saving, right. I'm like, yes, so again, we know these characters so well that when Peter says that, if you didn't know him, you'd think, well, why is he being so petty? But you know him, you're like, oh, of course he's going to say that because he's jealous. Well, yeah.
00:37:53
Speaker
It really makes me wish, because I know we're going to see a little bit of them in Love and Thunder because the Guardians have been filmed along with Thor. I really wish, I'm not sure how, if Thor will be involved at all in Guardians 3, but it really makes me wish that we would get to see like a whole movie with him interacting with these guys. The Asgardians of the galaxy is kind of the whole, yeah. Seems like where they were going with that. I love that. Sure.
00:38:20
Speaker
Another one of my favorite moments here is also Tony interacting with the Guardians. And there's that scene when Drax is like yawning and he's trying to go over the plan. And then he just asked them, he's like, what do you do? And Mantis says, you know, kick names, take ass. And Tony just has this look on his face. And it's just like, I imagined him thinking of like, I gave up a partnership with Captain America for this.
00:38:50
Speaker
I love how they found different creative ways to mix and match the characters. Honestly, that's 70% of this movie. A lot of it is Thanos.
00:39:02
Speaker
But most of what we get in this movie with the heroes is, wouldn't it be cool to mix and match this away? And they just do it constantly. Yeah. I don't think you get that so much in the next one. The next one's a little more serious, a little more grim. And that's one thing I do like about it. In fact, when I ranked all the MCU movies recently, I had this one number one. And I think that what put it ahead of
00:39:27
Speaker
In Endgame, for me, is that while Endgame has the great ending and everything, of course, this one has more fun, because this one you have stuff happening that's entertaining before it gets grim towards the end. This one has that great scene I was just talking about with Strange and Iron Man, but it has a bunch of other ones, and you don't really have the opportunity for that in Endgame. They've got serious business to tend to. It's a lot darker in a lot of ways.
00:39:53
Speaker
It's interesting you said, because I was thinking the exact same thing when I was rewatching this, because, you know, everybody kind of thinks about it in terms of the ending. Right. So everybody thinks of Infinity War as the dark one. And then, you know, the but you look at them, you're like, actually, Infinity War is pretty light and happy throughout most of the of the movie. Yes.
00:40:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, because the main villains that we really fight in the Infinity War are the children of Thanos who are basically, they're very formidable, standard supervillains. You know what I mean? They, they, they could have shown up not having anything to do with Thanos and just been Avengers villains like the, they could have been the masters of evil or something
Villains of Infinity War: The Children of Thanos
00:40:39
Speaker
and been really good Avengers villains. And so having them as the main
00:40:45
Speaker
people that get fought in this movie up until almost the end is very effective because they, the Avengers can be, it's not easy. It's not easy at all, but they are beatable. Thanos is not beatable unless, you know, you get Thor on a perfect strike coming out of nowhere the very end, you know, and it didn't, and it still didn't even work. So Thanos, Thanos spends this entire movie demonstrating he's 99% unbeatable.
00:41:14
Speaker
Whereas the children of Thanos, you're in for a 50-50 fight with them. And that makes it more fun because we might actually win. Like you said, it's not dark. It's an even fight. And I enjoyed it. Because see, in the comics, I had no interest in them. I'm like, I like Thanos.
00:41:29
Speaker
having a giant army of aliens that are faceless and nameless and nobody cares about them and they're cannon fodder for him. He has his plans and then he has all these cannon fodder. I don't need Thanos having like lieutenants, but in this movie, it works so well because in the movie with a limited amount of story time, they were able to serve as, I mean, again, to make the Lord of the Rings comparison, I don't want to overburden that, but to make the Lord of the Rings comparison,
00:41:57
Speaker
They are like Saruman or the, or the orc that Aragorn kills at the, the high Aragorn kills at the end of fellowship. They're a big scary villain for most of the movie, but you can beat them and have some closure that you won something, right? And you can't do that with Thanos.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and because you're right, the Black Order, I think it was Hickman's Avengers run that introduced them. And they never really stood out to me at all. Like they never really impressed me that much. But I love them in this movie. So when they announced they were gonna use them in the movie, I'm just like, really those guys? Okay. But they worked really well. They used them really well in this movie. Far better than they've been using the comics, I think. I think so, yeah, I agree. Another one of my,
00:42:45
Speaker
favorite bits in here is that you're talking about the little types of things, little fun they're having when they're on Ma's ship and the strangest cape, the cloak of levitation. Yeah. Like this time, because you're always watching the interaction, you're always watching, you know, Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr. This time I made a point to watch the cape.
00:43:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's so funny like that like when what he said when Peter says it's kind of your fault and the Cape even looks like oh my god, what did you do?
00:43:19
Speaker
It has a personality. It's a character. Yeah. Yeah. I love the cape, the cape really. And, you know, I kind of left Tom Holland out, but he really is important to this movie too, because, you know, Tony puts up such a front of I'm all about me. I'm not that I'm not that concerned about it. Maybe Pepper, but otherwise I'm not concerned about anybody else so much. It's me, me, me. And yet we still love him. And yet with Spider-Man, you can see
00:43:47
Speaker
that he really treats him like a son almost or a nephew, you know, and he cares about him. And even if he puts up a front about it, I think that was valuable because it gives us more. I don't know. It gives us a little more of that kind of a take on Tony, where he's not just the smart, elicky, wise, cracking billionaire. He's also a person that cares about somebody. And you can see it tears him apart when
00:44:14
Speaker
when when Peter dies. In fact, at the end, I believe the Russo said that that Downey wanted to keep filming that scene with Holland over and over and stretching it because he felt like it needed to go longer and show more of his emotion than what they originally even had in the script. So that's why I say I think there was a I don't think there was a lot of a lot of improvisation in this movie. But I could see, but like I said, between the editing
00:44:40
Speaker
and maybe some input from the actors and stuff, I feel like it did evolve past what it originally was going to be in a good way. Yeah, I think that's Holland sells that because that'd be really easy. Some of those drawn out death scenes, you know what I'm talking about there. It's like, okay, yeah, we get it. You're going for the Oscar bait. It's like, but
00:45:04
Speaker
Like the like in Deadpool two when they make fun of that. Yeah. But here he you know Holland does such a good job of that like he just the whole like you know I don't want to go I don't want to go and then just like you know that finally like just consigning himself to it like it's just.
00:45:20
Speaker
It's heartbreaking every time I watch that scene and I really love the relationship that they've established between Tony and Peter in these movies because they had kind of done a little bit like this in the comic books when Peter joined the Avengers. Yeah, yeah, in Civil War and JMS did a lot of good work with it and in the in the Amazing Spider-Man book, but
00:45:40
Speaker
But it's a different thing because in that Peter's already an adult here. He's a teenager who was grown up because you look at the timeline. He was a little kid when the Avengers first appeared. That's a good point. Yes, that that's hard to process mentally, at least for me because.
00:45:59
Speaker
it's hard to realize how much time has passed between the first Iron Man movie and Infinity War, but it's, you know, it's what, 10 years? Yeah. From 2008 to 2018. And yeah, Peter would have been a little kid. That's right. And so, um, cause we kind of think of these characters as just timeless and endless and they just constantly the same age, but yeah, in the movies they, they grow up. That is interesting. Yeah. He,
00:46:25
Speaker
would look up to them and idolize them. That's one of the things that I really loved about the first Spider-Man movie was that it really was Marvel team up the movie and it was Spider-Man and Iron Man. And you got that relationship again, which is really cool. Yeah, people complain about the MCU Spider-Man movies and they're saying, oh, you know, I just want to regulate. I'm like, well, we did get five, you know, solo Spider-Man movies. So I think it's cool that they're doing something different and showing us him, you know, interacting in a
00:46:50
Speaker
in a way they can't in a more personal way they can't really show in the in the bigger movies.
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah, no, like I say, these are Marvel team up movies to a certain degree, it's Spider-Man and, and in fact, the most recent Spider-Man, I would even say it was like a Marvel team up annual, because it was super big with lots of guest stars, you know, so no, I appreciate that about it, that they've kind of gone back to the well. God, if they do a Fantastic Four movie, I would be very down with a Marvel two in one movie where you have the thing and Spider-Man, Tom Holland, maybe, or you know,
00:47:22
Speaker
I like the idea of doing these kind of team up movies that are different than just a solo Spider-Man versus the Green Goblin every every time or something. You know, this is cool. Mix it up. Yeah. Yeah. It really when they first started talking about doing that kind of thing.
00:47:37
Speaker
It's it felt like, oh, they're just there. It felt like the comics, like, you know, every time they're worried about sales, they bring in Wolverine or Spider-Man as a guest star. But it really works in these movies because it really helps sell that idea of it being the shared universe. And they don't only come together when there's some big world ending threat. Oh, you know what? You just made me realize you absolutely just made something come together in my mind. I hadn't thought about it. I kept thinking, are they going to try to bring back
00:48:06
Speaker
You know, the current Wolverine, are they going to introduce a new younger actor that can play Wolverine? But they're going to want to use him the way they've been using Iron Man to pop up in other people's movies. And so whenever we do finally get new X-Men, new Fantastic Four to kind of come into the MCU,
00:48:26
Speaker
We're going to get, I'm predicting now, we're going to get a new young Wolverine that is going to start popping up in everybody's movies just like he did in the comics. I think it's going to have to be somebody that can use a million times. They're going to use him the way Nick Fury popped up. You know what I mean? He's going to be all over the place. They'll sign him to a 12 movie deal when they get a good Wolverine. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I'm convinced that they're not going to, if they bring back Hugh Jackman, that'll probably be like a multiverse type thing for like a one-off.
00:48:53
Speaker
but they're not going to but they're going to walk because I mean, Jackman's in his 50s and he's he did a lot of work to get into shape for those movies. Like when he did Logan, he had to like dehydrate himself. So let the guy have a break for Christ's sake. Yeah. No, you're right. You're absolutely right. They're going to have a new young one that can come in like Tom Holland is Spider-Man. Yeah. And can be through a bunch of movies and pop up everywhere. And that'll be that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't be Marvel if Wolverine didn't pop up everywhere at some point.
00:49:24
Speaker
Something else I wanted to mention about this and I completely lost my train of thought. One of the thing I really liked here is the Hulk and how he's scared the whole time. Oh, yeah. I love that. Yeah. Because we saw in the trailers, you know, that big Wakanda battle, you see Hulk charging in with everybody else. And that was such a fake out. I love that they did that.
00:49:52
Speaker
Yeah, that, and I thought particularly because what was the big memorable takeaway from the first Avengers movie was that Hulk is so powerful he just utterly just smacks Loki around like a rag doll. So you come out of that first Avengers movie thinking Hulk is just invincible. And then and Black Widow scared to death of him, you know, when she was running away from him. So Hulk comes out of the corner in that first one, like Mike Tyson in his prime, you know, and you're like, nobody wants any part of him.
00:50:21
Speaker
You come into this movie and suddenly, if Hulk is so scared he won't even come out and face Thanos, then who can? Who can face him? And there's that moment when Hulk actually tackles Thanos, and then when Thanos grabs his arms and pushes him away, and Hulk's expression is like, what's going on here? Nobody's ever done this before. And that's where Hulk's like, I'm done, I'm out.
00:50:48
Speaker
Have fun, Bruce, you know, deal with him. Especially that part at the end when he's, you know, he's in the Hulkbuster and he's, he said, you know, it's the last second, it's the last second, you got to come out and he changes briefly and he's like, just like, no, and then he goes back. He goes back, yes, exactly. Yeah, that, I mean, what better shows the formidableness
00:51:11
Speaker
of Thanos than that Hulk not only can't beat him, but is scared to try. I mean, boom, that's the shortest shorthand you need. And he's not even using any of the Infinity Stones in that fight, too. Oh, golly. Yeah, I mean, he's
00:51:28
Speaker
So we're in, I know the Marvel thing, but in MCU lore is, are we basically that Thanos is like an eternal or related to the Eternals now? Is that kind of where we're going? Or are they typing semi Eternals or what the heck? I'm not sure exactly. Cause I only recently seen Eternals. I've only seen it once. I know they had Star Fox pop up at the end there. Yeah. My, my guess is that they're probably, I think they're, I don't think maybe they have some connection to the Eternals. I'm not quite sure though.
00:51:59
Speaker
It gets very complicated in the comics. It gets very complicated. I mean, you're trying to combine the work of like 10 different writers over at that point 30, 40 years, you know. And so they said the Eternals are, they related to
00:52:16
Speaker
you know, the Celestials, but they're related to the Titans and they just, you need a flow chart, you know, figure it all out. So yeah, maybe they'll keep it a little simpler in the movies at least. I think so.
00:52:31
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's what they did with the Infinity Stone, right? They kind of linked all this stuff together and they use that as kind of like the linchpin that's connecting everything, which in a comic, you're piecing stuff together as you go along. In the movies, you got to have at least some idea of where you're going.
00:52:51
Speaker
Well, that's one question I also have is, at what point did they make the decision, Feige and whoever, did they make the decision that these MacGuffins we've had in the earlier movies were infinity stones, right? Because I don't think they knew it in Captain America. I don't think they knew that the cosmic cube would turn out to be an infinity. I don't think they did.
00:53:15
Speaker
I think by the time of Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, I think they did. I think it was somewhere between like 2010 and 2014 that they started aiming that direction, but I don't think they had that plan in mind from the beginning. I don't think that they knew that what was in Loki's staff was an Infinity Stone, and I'm not sure about the vision.
Infinity Stones: Evolution of Marvel's MacGuffins
00:53:38
Speaker
I think by the time you get to Dr. Strange, they knew, you know what I mean? There's a dividing line in there somewhere where they went, hey, let's have all these things be Infinity Stones. And I'm not sure where that dividing line is. Yeah, I'm not sure if they had the idea of the Tesla Act and Loki's staff being gems in Avengers, but I think definitely by the time they get to Dark World, I think that's when they made the decision. They're going all together. And because in Age of Ultron, they specifically call it the Mind Stone. And Thor has that vision of all the Infinity Stones.
00:54:09
Speaker
That was, and I think that honestly, that's one of the things that caused the phase two to suffer, was that in phase two, they start trying to connect everything, but they hadn't figured out how to do that and tell a good story at the same time. Those movies, other than Winter Soldier, obviously, because Iron Man 2 suffers a little bit, Thor 2 suffers a little bit, Civil War to a certain degree,
00:54:39
Speaker
it was great at the time, but you go back and try to watch Civil War, and it doesn't hold up as well as, I guess after you've seen Infinity War in Endgame, you go back and watch Civil War and you're like, that's okay, but of course, Age of Ultron really does not hold up well, I don't think, after everything you've seen since. Age of Ultron actually got better for me over time. It was actually the last episode, Derek and I did, and I think we were both kind of surprised at how well we enjoyed it, especially in the wake of watching WandaVision,
00:55:08
Speaker
Um, so I think it, it, it, it improved for me a lot. And I think also it's, I don't know what it is. It's something about that. I just, I love a lot of that, a lot of that movie. There are definitely problems of it. I think the whole stuff with Thor and the, and the finding himself thing kind of drags on a little bit. But other than that, like most of the movie I'm on board for.
00:55:30
Speaker
Well, I think it's the parts that try, like I said, that try to set up future things and bring it all together. They just, they were still being clumsy about it. I got the sense that the writers.
00:55:40
Speaker
in phase two, they resented being told you have to include this, you have to include that. By the time you get to phase three, it was kind of like understood and everybody kind of had gotten the hang of it and they had it down. But in phase two, they were still clumsy in a lot of areas. I think a big part of it was what was going on behind the scenes because phase two was still when Ike Perlmutter was calling the shots.
00:56:04
Speaker
Yeah, because that was when you had like, you know, problems with the cast and like, you know, the not being paid enough. And like, even Chris Evans was saying, like, I don't know if I want to keep doing this. And and then after when Feige, you know, made the real public blow and he said, he's like, look, I'm going to quit. And then Disney's like, oh, shit. OK, OK. Marvel Studios is now its own company. You don't have to deal with Ike anymore at that point. Once they got and they got rid of like the Marvel Creative Committee and all that that had like, you know, Bendis and Cassata and all those guys on it, which
00:56:33
Speaker
You know, I don't have the problem that a lot of comic fans do, but they're not movie guys and they shouldn't really be dictating what the movie should be doing. Once they spun Marvel Studios off into its own thing and they kind of, and Feige had found a way to tell this overarching story while also giving the directors the freedom they wanted. That's really what we got in phase three. I think that's when things really started to come together. Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
00:57:03
Speaker
Another thing is really stands out in this movie is, and this really sold the Avengers theme for me, is the scene when you've got Wanda and Vision being attacked by Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive in the train station.
The Emotional Power of Music in Avengers
00:57:19
Speaker
And there's just that
00:57:21
Speaker
It's like one of the big like, oh shit moments when she throws the staff and you see Cap and Shadow and he catches it and then the Avengers theme just like slow buildup. Watching that scene every time I get pumped up watching that scene, especially because it's not even all the Avengers, it's just three of them.
00:57:38
Speaker
Yeah. They called them the Secret Avengers. The Russo brothers said, we knew that we were going to use the Avengers theme music maybe twice. Didn't want to overdo it. We were going to use that theme maybe twice. And they said we had to figure out the most strategic places to use it. And that was one of them. And they said we wanted to delay bringing Captain America back in as long as we could. They said the original edit
00:58:08
Speaker
He was still not there for a while. They dragged it out as long as they could. But then they said, oh, let's bring it up a little bit. So so he actually is not in the movie even as much or comes in later in the original cut. But yeah, I think I remember reading that the original plan was he was going to appear during the Battle of Wakanda and it was going to be an entrance kind of like what Thor had. Yeah, that makes sense. But then they decided to move it up sooner, which I think it worked better this way. I did. Yeah.
00:58:38
Speaker
But that moment really kind of sold me on, okay, the Avengers theme, it's now like, you know, up there with like, you know, Superman and Batman. It's that theme. And when I had said this, when the Infinity War trailer came out, some people were like, oh no, it's not the same, it's not the same. I'm like, trust me, for the generation of fans coming up now, it's going to be the same thing. Well, this is funny.
00:59:04
Speaker
For years, when I dreamed of an Avengers movie before 2012, and it seemed like a pipe dream, there was no way, I always would think, I wonder what the theme music would sound like. And I would always think of like, what would John Williams come up with that would be a theme tune that we can hum that's the Avengers. And I always wondered that. And I thought, what kind of theme? And when the 2012 came out, we heard Silvestri's theme.
00:59:31
Speaker
I'm like, okay, it's, it's pretty good. It's okay. It was just kind of, you know, and, and, um, it's okay. And then when they used it in infinity war and in game, they felt like they went back, maybe Sylvester, I guess, or whoever did it, went back and took the core.
00:59:53
Speaker
little hook of that tune, slowed it down, gave it more gravitas, and it really does give you chills now. It was just a neat little orchestral tune in the first movie. But when you see like the crumbled A in the commercials, you know, and it goes, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. You're like, oh, there we go. They figured out what works about it. And they did, yeah. That's great. I have to go back and compare them back to back.
01:00:21
Speaker
You very well could be right. I never noticed that change with them. I just thought it was because, yeah, now that I think about it, it didn't really impress me that much in the first Avengers movie. And I just thought it was just having been exposed to it slowly over time that it that it kind of grew on me. No, they change it. They change it from movie to movie. It gets slower, more serious and more like to it as opposed to the first time it's kind of like that.
01:00:46
Speaker
by the end game is like, dum, dum, dum, dum. You know, it's just got a lot more oomph to it by the end, yeah. Interesting. And that's another thing I liked about this is Vision and Wanda, because when they appeared in Age of Ultron, and you know, we get that little look between them at the end there, and I'm just like, oh, that's all we're going to get.
01:01:07
Speaker
And now we've had an entire TV series of them. Silly us. Yeah, I thought the same thing. I thought there's no way that they're going there with the movie version. And yeah, we got an entire TV show. Who could have ever imagined that we would get WandaVision? I mean, when I heard they were calling it WandaVision, I was like, oh, that's pretty clever, because even the comics never thought of calling it that.
01:01:30
Speaker
And they even incorporated that into what it was about, because it was about television. Yeah. The television show about television. It was just brilliant, yeah. Also, they pointed out something, too, that I never realized is that she didn't have a codename until that series. Yeah, well, it was driving me crazy, because she's one of my top 10 characters. I love Wanda. But I kept thinking, they keep calling her Wanda. Are they ever going to call her the Scarlet Witch? It's been driving me crazy that they never would call her the Scarlet Witch. And so it turns out, I don't think that was the plan to do it the way they did.
01:02:00
Speaker
But when they kind of build up to it in WandaVision and that actually becomes a thing, I'm like, Oh, okay. So they, I don't, I don't think they planned it that way originally. I do think a lot of the MCU overall is happenstance, but that's true of a lot of good, you know, I mean, you know, the entire first Star Wars movie was just lucky happenstance. I think it worked out, but I mean, yeah, that would, that made me really happy.
01:02:25
Speaker
that they found a way to make her name, her codename be relevant, rather than just, oh, we just never gave her a name, you know, or she never gave herself a name or whatever, so. Yeah. Another thing is that kind of disappoints me about this movie, and I know this is a small thing, but I really liked Thor with the eye patch he had at the beginning of this and at the end of Ragnarok.
01:02:46
Speaker
Give it, you have it just very quickly and he gets a cybernetic eye. I'm like, I kind of like the eye patch. I kind of preferred that. Yeah. Well, it made him, it showed that connection to Odin. Yeah. Whenever you're in charge of Asgard, you immediately have to lose an eye, apparently. That's kind of the rule. So it made, it kind of, it was like putting a crown on. He's the new, you know, head, but.
01:03:08
Speaker
The thing about Thor that disappointed me at first, but I've kind of come around on it, was that I like when Thor looked like Thor. And over the movies, they increasingly moved him away from looking like Thor. I mean, Ragnarok, just to cut his hair off, he had the eye patch, he didn't have the hammer anymore, all that. That's one of the reasons I didn't like Ragnarok as much as some people did. I like it, but not as much as because
01:03:32
Speaker
It doesn't feel like a Thor movie to me. It feels like an, it feels like an annex of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie with the Hulk and this guy that used to be Thor. And I was disappointed by that. And then when Avengers, when Infinity War came out, I'm like, okay, he's still not really Thor.
01:03:50
Speaker
And then, but once I saw where they were going with him over time, we get like fat Thor and everything. I'm like, okay, I get it. The joke now is we're just going to keep messing with Thor. He's never going to look like he did in the first movie again. And I just got to deal with it. And so I'm like, all right, I'm just going to embrace the joke, embrace the stick. And this is the Thor we have now. And what really saved it for me was when I was at my lowest about, man, I just don't have my Thor anymore.
01:04:19
Speaker
at my lowest is when he hooked up with the Guardians the first time and we got a whole new dynamic with him and Star-Lord and Drax and all. And I'm like, okay, if I had to trade away my Thor to get the Asgardians of the galaxy bit, that's a fair trade. I'll take it, you know, I'll take it to get this gold that they're doing here. Yeah, I've never been a big Thor fan in the comics. So for me, I've really,
01:04:48
Speaker
gotten to like him more as kind of, they let Chris Hemsworth just have a little bit more fun with the character. So as a Thor fan, you know, I definitely feel for you because you know, they've, because I know what they've done as a Superman fan, I know what they did to Superman. So I definitely understand that. But yeah, overall, I do like what they've done with Thor.
01:05:12
Speaker
And one of the things that also kind of made me a little bit bittersweet about this movie is this is the first, this is really like the last time we really see Chadwick Boseman play Black Panther because he only has basically one line in Infinity in Endgame. So this is basically like the last time we really see him interacting as T'Challa.
01:05:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's sad. I love seeing him when he comes out talking to them all. But it was great at the time. Now it just makes me sad to see it. So I'm kind of like, oh, there's a Challa. Oh, there's Chadwick. I feel bad. I mean, I had the same thing that killed him. And so I have just an enormous amount of empathy for
01:05:54
Speaker
for that actor and for what he went through and I'm just glad we got what we got from him. Yeah, yeah, that's and it was nice to see him interact really kind of interact with the Avengers on a more personable basis because he was very antagonistic for good reason in Civil War. So like the scene when you know, Bruce bows that he's like, we don't do that here. Well, that's that I mean, that's the thing about Black Panther is you have to be careful because
01:06:23
Speaker
he can be very aloof and off-putting and with good reason. And if you're not careful, that can make him unlikable. So you kind of have to make him true to the character, but also still likable. And so the audience has to understand why he is how he is. And I thought they did that very successfully. You could have made him a big jerk. People would be like, oh, I don't like this guy. But no, they were very successful, I think.
01:06:52
Speaker
Yeah. He's very like him. Yeah. Any other final bits about this movie you want to mention?
01:07:00
Speaker
I don't think it gets enough credit not only for being just a great superhero movie, which it is, I don't think it gets enough credit for being as innovative as it is. It does so many things that had not really been done before. So much screen time for a character that's entirely CGI mixed in with regular characters.
01:07:23
Speaker
you know it's it the same you know it came out the same year as ready player one where you have cgi characters through half the movie but i mean they're not really mixed in with live action he knows has to exist in the same frame with with people and um that's interesting and also that it it was innovative in the sense that the bad guy wins if you didn't know there was another movie
01:07:48
Speaker
You'd be like, I guess that's it. You know, there were, you know, there were reports back when it came out that the audiences were like, what, what? That's it? What? You know, you killed Black Panther? What? What? You know, so, you know, comics people knew, but the general audience was like, Oh,
01:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like the death of Superman all over again where people don't understand it's not permanent, you know, so it's just innovative in a lot of its structure. It's certainly innovative in bringing together like 18 or 19 movies before it together. There's just so much about it that had never been done and that
01:08:21
Speaker
that works very, very effectively. Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely got overshadowed by Endgame because with them coming out so close together and that was definitely something that's worked against this movie and didn't make it seem because so many people were going into this as part one of two instead of thinking of it as
01:08:41
Speaker
as something on its own. And I think going back and reevaluating it and just watching it on its own, I think is a worthwhile exercise because you really can appreciate a little bit more what this movie is doing. Because back when it came out, all of us were just like, okay, we get to the end and like, all right, now we're getting pumped up about part two next year. And we didn't really allow part one to really digest, I think.
01:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair. No, yeah. And it's by itself, it is an amazing movie. And yeah, I think you're right. And I think the point that you made a while ago, you were talking about is that
01:09:18
Speaker
Most of it is a happier, brighter, more fun movie than we want to remember, than we often do remember. We think of that end. Yeah, you're right. The ending ends up overshadowing everything, the 80% before it. And the movie does a really good job of pulling that bait and switch because it makes it seem like they're going to win at the end.
01:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, like, it looks like, you know, Wanda kills vision and you think okay, that's it, it's done. And then, you know, then it's like whoop time stone, and then it's like oh shit. And then it just from that moment on it just
01:09:51
Speaker
it just cascades. And then we get Thor with the ax and we think, oh, this is it, this is it. And then boom, the snap. And it did, and like you said, comics fans, we knew the snap was coming. So I don't think we really, I think we kind of took for granted how well that cascade plays out.
Infinity War's Bold Ending
01:10:12
Speaker
Yes. No, 100%. I think that we take this movie for granted in a lot of ways and not just because it's basically part one of two and it's easy to focus on the big finish and forget all the setup, which is its own thing.
01:10:27
Speaker
Also, one other thing I want to mention is I really love what they did with Tony's armor in this, like the nanotechnology, like every, like just from that first scene when he's walking up and he takes the sunglasses off and he's armoring up like that. And everything about this armor in this movie, I love the design of the armor in Endgame because they went back to the classic armor, but I love what they did with the armor and how just like interactive it is.
01:10:53
Speaker
Yeah, as an Iron Man fan, I was thrilled. I mean, I felt like we had to be getting near the end of Tony's story if for no other reason that there was nothing left to do with the armor. By the time these two movies are over, I don't know where else you would go with Iron Man's armor. They had pretty much made it magical at that point. It was a fantasy thing at that point, you know. It was beyond science fiction to fantasy at that point. And so, yeah, I felt like, you know, if I had, you know, well, that's in game, but if I had to lose Tony,
01:11:22
Speaker
unless you went out with a hell of a story, a hell of a finish, yeah. Okay, Van, anything you'd like to promote before we close up now?
01:11:32
Speaker
Oh, just, I'm author of like 19 novels and you can check those out. You can see all my stuff at www.plexico.net, P-L-E-X-I-C-O.net. And I host a number of podcasts, including the White Rocket podcast, where we talk about stuff like this all the time. And I think for people that are watching, they're listening to this, the main thing would be if you go to avengersassemble.net, avengersassemble.net,
01:11:56
Speaker
We're doing a rereading of all of the Avengers and they're on YouTube so you can watch me and other people break down every issue, issue by issue, every two weeks. Great. Thanks a lot for coming back on, Van. It's great having you on. It's great to see you as always. Yeah, and we'll have to do it again sometime.
01:12:15
Speaker
And that does it for us. Superherocinephiles.com is our website. Be sure to like and review us on Apple podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. And we'll come to you next week with another movie. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you then.
01:12:31
Speaker
You have been listening to the Superhero Cinephiles podcast. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at SuperCinemapod. Join our Facebook group by searching for Superhero Cinephiles where you can interact with us and other superhero fans. If you'd like to support the show, you can become a regular supporter at Patreon,
01:12:47
Speaker
or make a one-time donation through PayPal, both of which can be found at our website, SuperheroCinephiles.com. If you buy or rent any movies through the Amazon links at our site, it helps support the show. Please be sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:13:21
Speaker
Thank you for listening. And as always, good night. Good evening. God bless.