Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jim Starlin, [Jonathan Hickman, Mike Deodato, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, Steve Englehart, Bill Mantlo, Roy Thomas, et al.,] Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Anthony Russo, and Joe Russo, 2018

There is a maxim in the movie world stating that you should always start a scene as late as possible.  It is a precept frequently violated in the sorts of terrible movies that would show up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Say you have a scene in which three men are out camping and one of them gets eaten by a space owl.  The movie then rattles off the following beats:

Obviously, you don’t need parts one through seven.  You can cut straight from Joe getting eaten by the space owl to his widow crying.  No one is going to ask, “Wait, how are they suddenly at Joe’s house? Did they pack up the camping gear? Where did they park? How did they get those mugs they’re holding?”  We don’t even need to hear the survivors’ side of the conversation, since they’re just describing events we’ve already seen.  But this sort of thing can be taken too far.  Thor: Ragnarok started with Rag­narok a few minutes away from being over, which kept Surtur from registering as a major threat, which in turn undermined what could have been an awesome ending.  And Avengers: In­finity War does much the same thing, to the point that during the opening sequence I started to wonder whether I had started on the wrong chapter somehow.  But no⁠—as the movie starts, the Infinity War is already well underway, and everyone already seems to know who Thanos is, and once again, it is a problem.

I mean, I guess it probably wasn’t much of a problem for most of the people who bought $2 billion worth of tickets to this thing.  This is a beat-’em-up / blow-’em-up, and fans of that sort of thing don’t always require a lot of narrative justification for the punch­ing and zapping.  When I was in high school playing the Champi­ons superhero role-playing game, our Game Master started off most sessions by saying, “Your team is sitting around its head­quarters when the phone rings. You pick it up and the villain says, ‘Fuck you! Let’s fight!’ So you go out to a nearby field to fight him.”  Avengers: Infinity War doesn’t really go to much fur­ther lengths than this to supply reasons for all the fight scenes.  And actually, those Champions sessions led to better fights than what we see in Infinity War, because we players did what the best superhero comics do and this movie does not: took a team of characters with a varied assortment of powers and tried to figure out the optimal way to deploy those powers, often in innovative ways, to take down the baddie.  In the movie, aside from Mantis you pretty much just have brawlers and blasters, and within each class the characters’ power sets are basically interchangeable.  Iron Man’s zaps, Doctor Strange’s zaps, the Scarlet Witch’s zaps, and the Vision’s zaps may have different special effects associ­ated with them, but they all do basically the same thing⁠—go zap and knock their opponents half a mile away (which generally leaves those opponents none the worse for wear).  Yawn.  For that matter, the movie Iron Man can apparently do anything these days⁠—he’ll transform his arm into a tachyon cannon, deli­ver a blast, and chalk it up to “nanotech”.  Doctor Strange has always been able to do anything, except instead of “nanotech” the magic word is, well, “magic”.  As noted in past articles, this is indeed in keeping with Stan Lee’s practice⁠—he cheerfully churned out scripts in which every character could do basically anything, including Iron Man transforming his arm⁠—but it’s dull, like playing a version of chess in which the pieces can teleport to any square.  I gotta say, the movie that springs to mind that makes the best use of superpowers isn’t even a superhero movie at all: it’s fuckin’ Tangled.  The way Rapunzel uses the incidental special effect associated with her magic hair to escape a death­trap⁠—that’s genius.  Infinity War is not genius.  This is yet anoth­er Avengers movie in which the team spends a big chunk of the running time fighting a horde of varmints: aliens in the first one, robots in the second one, and now demodogs.  Hordes are not interesting antagonists.  It’s like the screenwriters were assigned to adapt Jim Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet into a movie and accidentally adapted the video game Gauntlet instead.

The thing is, I can’t say that this movie is a bad adaptation of The Infinity Gauntlet.  I’ve read The Infinity Gauntlet.  It’s bad already!  Jim Starlin’s corner of the Marvel Universe has never really been of any interest to me, and finding out at the end of the first Avengers movie that Thanos was going to be the Big Bad of the series was a disappointment.  The comics version of Than­os is boring and silly.  His big thing is that he is in love with the personification of death, which in the Marvel Universe is not a heroin-chic goth girl like over at Vertigo but rather a robed skel­eton with breasts.  Giving Thanos a better motivation for collect­ing the Infinity Stones and snapping half of the living creatures in the universe out of existence is already an improvement over the original Infinity Gauntlet.  I would go so far as to say that the changes had the potential to be very promising, not just dramati­cally but thematically, had the filmmakers not botched the roll­out due to their fixation on starting in medias res.  The idea here, we eventually learn, is that civilization on the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of Titan, Thanos’s home world, collapsed due to overcompetition for scarce resources.  MCU Thanos wants to employ the Infinity Gauntlet to prevent this from happening on other worlds.  Now, this is actually not a good plan; even setting aside the ethics of mass murder and the trauma of the survivors, the population of the Earth has doubled just in my lifetime, so Thanos would not be setting the doomsday clock back very far.  But he is addressing a problem that is very relevant to those of us out here in the real world.  Unless we take bold steps in the direction of a more sustainable society, there is a strong likeli­hood that we will witness the collapse of our own civilization, either slowly due to environmental degradation or quickly due to a resource war going nuclear.  If the filmmakers had managed to land this point⁠—if we lived through the end of MCU Titan along with Thanos, felt the devastation of a world’s worth of lives vio­lently snuffed out, and could feel for ourselves why Thanos might truly see his plan as a mission of mercy, a grim decision to sub­ject the universe to some loss now to prevent more loss later⁠—then they might have served up a classic antagonist rather than a mild improvement over the purple monster who wants to get his freak on with a buxom bag of bones.  Instead, they throw in Titan’s fate as a few seconds of backfill midway through, far too late to register in the same way.

And again, it’s too bad, because to the limited extent that the movie has a theme, it’s relevant to Thanos’s plan.  To wit: there is a juncture at which it looks like the Avengers can short-circuit Thanos’s attempt to assemble the Infinity Gauntlet by destroying the Mind Stone; the problem is that doing so will kill the Vision⁠—a robot who didn’t exist three years ago in MCU time, but now considered a life that cannot be sacrificed even if it means saving billions.  It’s essentially the trolley problem writ large: if you can prevent several people from being run over by a train by pushing one person in front of it yourself, do you do it?  This sort of thing is more than just a thought experiment; just a couple of months ago I watched a movie about Winston Churchill’s decision to sacrifice the four thousand troops manning the Calais garrison in order to buy time to evacuate three hundred thousand troops trapped at Dunkirk.  Apparently Captain America would lecture Churchill that “We don’t trade lives!”  Perhaps Captain Britain would have a different view.

A similar theme cropped up in the first season of Jessica Jones, as Jessica’s decision to keep the Purple Man alive in episode 5 meant that many more bodies had piled up by the end of episode 13.  And we see the same thing again in⁠—

Jessica Jones (season 2)
Brian Bendis, Stan Lee, [Stuart Little, Steve Englehart, Chris Claremont, Michael Fleisher,] and Melissa Rosenberg, 2018

It wasn’t until this season that I noticed that while most of these shows include the credit “Based on the Marvel comics by”, this one’s credit reads “Based on the character from the Marvel comics by”.  I guess that stands to reason, because while at least the first season’s antagonist was drawn from a story arc from the original Jessica Jones series, Alias, this season leaves the comics far be­hind.  It does introduce one character from the comics: the Power Broker, though the show doesn’t call him that.  He’s here because in the comics, Jessica’s origin is an homage to Silver Age heroes who got their powers by getting splashed with radioactive chem­icals and whatnot, but the MCU has replaced half the characters’ origins with “unethical experimentation on human subjects”, Jessica’s included, and that’s the Power Broker’s stock in trade.  He’s not really the big bad of the season, though⁠—that’s another product of one of those experiments, who turns out to be Jessi­ca’s mother, long dead in the comics but here saved by the Power Broker, albeit at the cost of having been turned into a super-strong rage monster.  Cue half a season of “She’s been ripping people apart with her bare hands!” “But she’s my mom!” “But one of the people she murdered was my college boyfriend!” “But she’s my mom!”  Once again, Jessica doesn’t throw the trolley switch and the result is a higher body count.  But at least the bereft can take comfort in the fact that their loved ones were just supporting characters, unimportant enough that their horrific violent deaths will be largely forgotten in a couple of episodes.

As for the main supporting characters: Jessica’s assistant and lawyer both get substantial arcs, but the arc I want to talk about involves Patsy Walker, the character selected to serve as MCU Jessica’s best friend and adoptive sister.  In the Marvel Universe, she’s Hellcat, once a mainstay of the Defenders.  I had been won­dering whether she would be powered up in the MCU.  There were a number of possible answers:

• No

• Yes, but with generic toughness rather than becoming Hellcat in particular

• Yes, but it goes wrong and she dies

• Yes, but she becomes the big bad of that season

• Yes, and she joins the Defenders

When Patsy took Nuke’s pills in the first season, it looked like we were headed for option two.  This season, she turns to the Power Broker, who takes her to… a veterinary clinic, where he procures feline distemper vaccine as a vehicle for his mad science meds.  Ha ha, I thought, Hellcat in particular is on the way!  But that’s the thing.  In the comics, a new superhero has historically been treat­ed as a cause for celebration.  Here, Patsy’s quest for a power-up is depicted as pathological.  MCU Patsy is a recovering drug ad­dict⁠—in a scene that one-ups even the adults-only MAX comic on which this series is based, we see teenage Patsy Walker, title hero­ine of a humor/fashion comic that started in 1945, on her knees in a public bathroom undoing a guy’s pants so she can blow him for coke⁠—and the temporary superpowers she gets from Nuke’s stash are portrayed as just her latest fix (much as Jessica’s assistant Malcolm turns from heroin to Tinder hook­ups).  This dark view of superpowers is in keeping with the over­all dark tone of the show⁠—it is Marvel’s noir series, after all⁠—but that tone gets oppressive after a while.  Infinity War was rightly criticized by some reviewers for its tonal incoherence, as it’s meant to be the somber low point in the series but is pretty goofy for long stretches, especially when the Guardians of the Galaxy are on screen.  But after thirteen hours of watching the Jessica Jones characters get tortured, I couldn’t help but feel that some tonal variation might have been nice.

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