Patreon Letter - 27th April, 2018

Hi there! 

It's Jackson, I am back, I have returned from underneath the pile of school work under which I was trapped for the last month or year depending on your interpretation of trapped. I'm not completely done, I moved across the country this month (not my choice, don't ask) so I've got an extension to finish up the final bits, but it's not that much. I'm back. Which means Amory Score is going to get back on track, it means we'll be doing weekly updates again, it means I'll be reaching out to people who have hit their six month goals, it means I'll be redesigning the site slightly. 

But most importantly, it means I can read Star Trek books again. I am truly blessed.

And also write patreon letters I suppose. Which is what we're doing here. Em has held the fort incredibly while I've been away, and for that I thank them! I don't have much to write about because I've been finishing school and then I've been trapped in the God of War hole thanks to our good friend Amr's fund to get some more takes other than Dads reviewing the game and calling it the Game of the Generation. Which, now that I've played some, I can say for sure that no description could be more accurate in text and more untrue in spirit. But we'll have to wait for that. Which leaves us with one simple topic left to write about: I saw that there Infinity War.

So first, a small warning:

I'm Going To Spoil Infinity War

Alright, now that that's out the way.

I went and saw Avengers: Infinity War at the very first midnight screening I had ever been to. The cinema was so packed that the horde of assembled nerds could not physically fit inside the lobby at the same time. The level of excitement in the crowd was palpable. There were a great many people in full cosplay, and an even higher number of people wearing T-Shirts with quotes from the movies in bold text. I did not see a single ironic Batman shirt. What I'm trying to say is: this was not a crowd of fuckin' Smarks (aside from me, i guess), this was the real deal, the true marvel fans, the earnest ones who legitimately believe in the dream and the promise that Disney has been selling them for a decade now, and they packed the cinema wall to wall.

The biggest laugh, in the entire move, came when the credit treatment faded away and the screen went to black in preparation for the mid-credits scene... and then the credits kept scrolling. Take from that what you will.

Infinity War is awful. It was never going to be good, on account of having approximately fifteen thousand characters, a good 75% of which are the exact same type of sarcastic dude, and somehow forcing them into a plot that has to support at least five massive action setpieces. And I was never going to like it, on account of me not enjoying marvel movies at the best of times, and this being from the team that brought you Civil War, a movie that was only enjoyable for the five minutes when Paul Rudd shows up and reminds you that nobody else on set knows what comedy is. Paul Rudd isn't in this one.

So it's not surprising that I think Infinity War sucks. It's not for me, and that's fine. What was surprising is how I watched it and felt like it wasn't for anyone else either. The film feels like a spit in the face of Marvel fans, a middle finger to that very audience that cared so much. It's a nasty, mean spirited movie full of contempt for the audience that it exists to provide fanservice to. I'd say that I don't understand how it exists, but I've read event comics, and I guess they have all the same problems. But it's still so bizarre to see play out in real time. Let's do a quick beat by beat.

The very first thing that happens in this movie is that every single character from Thor Ragnarok dies offscreen. Valkyrie? Dead as fuck. Thanos got her good. Korg? His revolution ends today, he has gone to join Doug. Idris Elba's Heimdall? Oh shit he's brea--ah no, Thanos stabbed him in the chest. And that's an onscreen death, so it actually counts. That leaves just Thor and Lok-- okay Loki's neck has just been snapped. After watching all the people he has saved get massacred at Thanos' hands. Thor spends the movie obsessed with revenge, building Stormbreaker, and even getting rid of his cool eyepatch for good measure. His main character trait is that he is a god and as such his revenge is his divine right. Every single thing he says and does flies in the face of his character development in Ragnarok, and that's before you even get to the fact that everybody else from that movie gets fed to Thanos in the first ten minutes.

I'm only going on about this so much because Ragnarok is one of the only Marvel movies that basically everyone agrees is actually good. Not 'alright,' not 'decent for a marvel movie,' but legitimately good and funny and warm. People are still posting gifs from it on my feed. People are quoting the director's commentary to each other! Who does that!

The point is, the opening volley from the movie that exists to be this huge celebration of ten years of films is to shit all over the only movie that everyone loves in order to show you that the villain means business. And yeah, it's comic books, everybody could be resurrected next week, nothing actually matters, but it's still such a strange and mean-spirited choice.

The rest of the movie does not fare much better. Because there's no time for anything to happen, you either have scenes of characters flatly delivering exposition to each other through quips, or you have action scenes. Only a few scenes are given any room to breathe, and the cinematography is somehow more flat than in the films directed by Joss fuckin' Whedon. The structure for most scenes is to get all the characters in a square or a circle, and then cut between two or three wide shots of each side of the conversation, depending on who is delivering banter at any given moment. This is maybe the most expensive movie ever made, and when things aren't blowing up, it looks like a Kevin Smith movie.

A big problem with this is that the film is painfully unfunny. The bulk of the comedy comes from the Guardians of the Galaxy, mostly in the form of Drax saying something overly literal for comic effect. There's a moment where the Guardians are fighting Iron Man, unaware they're on the same side, and they point guns at each other. Quill yells, "where's Gamora!" Stark yells back, "I can do you one better: who's Gamora?" and Drax concludes: "I can do you one better: why's Gamora?" Given the sheer amount of Characters, everyone is the broadest version of themselves, but it's honestly astounding how much Drax has been flanderized over the course of three movies. Rather than the jokes coming from his character, and his literal perspective, he is now a machine to deliver The Funny, and he doesn't have a character. Even his desire to get revenge for his Family is played as a joke. The heart is gone.

That's not to say this film doesn't have any emotional core, it understands that there needs to be something to hang onto, and then makes the worst possible choice. There are two (arguably three) plot lines which amount to: "hey kill me before Thanos takes the stone from me" and their partner saying "uh no" until they do kill them, but oh no! they did it too late to actually stop Thanos. The only character with any semblance of an arc or real weight given to their emotions, motivations and actions is ultimately Thanos himself. The most dramatic scene in the movie involves him sacrificing Gamora - the only person he has ever truly loved - to get the Soul Stone. Later, they give Thanos a backstory and a motivation for why he wants to kill half the universe, and the film genuinely wants you to ask the question: what if Thanos is right?

And I get it, every superhero movie is still, on some level, trying to be The Dark Knight, trying to build a film around an antagonist that represents an ideological challenge to the heroes. The first Avengers movie did this fairly well, the second one much less well, and here Thanos is just so hilariously, overwhelmingly Evil that it all feels like wasted ink. His motivation boils down to: overpopulation will kill us all, and the only fair way to save us is to kill half the universe using random selection. Which he does!

The film ends with the "iconic" Snap happening and half the cast turning to dust. This ending is the film's only real card - it's impossible to overstate how absolutely nothing really happens for the three hours that precede it. It's a very adolescent form of plotting, a gut punch ending that has no real sense of tragedy or thematic resonance, but merely a base need of provocation, a "wouldn't it be cool if." Wouldn't it be cool if the villain won? 

Leaving aside the fact that such a provocative, world-changing ending is kinda meaningless when everyone knows it's not going to stick (in a particularly traumatic scene, Spider-Man turns to dust as he begs for his life, he begs for it not to be him, please not now. He's got another movie coming in July 2019), it doesn't even work in the moment. It's the ultimate extension of storytelling as Walking Dead Cliffhangers, of Game of Thrones twists, of thirteen year old boys thinking how fucking cool it would be if you killed the main character in the first episode. There's a reason that The Snap is the opening of the original story, because it's not an ending, it's a premise: what if half the population died? Y: The Last Man was able to ask that question with a boundless empathy, yet here it is deployed for a nihlistic sense of shock value that everybody who has read a comic saw coming and nobody who has watched a movie thinks they will follow through on.

So yeah, it's bad. And I wonder what the reaction to this movie is going to be from the wider marvel fanbase, because I've definitely seen people buy into the idea that this was truly this immense, shocking, brave way to end a movie. And I've seen others feel cheated by Infinity War, and feeling that their investment in this universe has been used as fuel for empty shock value as the things they cared about get thrown under the bus. My prediction is that this all rests on whether Part 2 can truly be the triumphant rebound from hopelessness that it wants to be, and whether the fans feel betrayed when The Big Shocking Cliffhanger gets totally undone with magic.

Anyway, we shall see! I'm still going to see it, because the main marketing strength of the MCU is sunk cost fallacy, so I guess look for my take on that in a year. It's good to be back writing the letters again and not writing university assignments. I hope you've missed me as much as I've missed you. I'll see you again soon!

-Jackson <3

PS: Hawkeye isn't in the movie lmao