Thanks to the good folks at the Rialto Theater this past week I finally got to watch Avengers: Infinity War. In no particular order, here's a few of my initial responses.
Thanos has gotten ridiculously powerful. I mean, even before he has the completed Infinity Gauntlet, the movie opens with Thanos beating the Hulk (you know, "the strongest one there is") into near unconsciousness. This is, of course, after he and his minions have already subdued Thor and Loki. (I'm guess that's picking up from Thor Ragnarok, which I still have yet to see).
Now, I have to admit that the original Infinity Gauntlet series was my introduction to Thanos, but I quickly picked up from references and comic lore that he'd long been a nemesis for characters like the original Captain Mar-Vell, Silver Surfer, etc. Thanks to Chris over at Comic Tropes, I learned there was even a time when ole' Thanos tootled around in a helicopter, had a hard time battling Hellcat, and was successfully bound by grass.
So...from that to beating the Hulk in a straight up punching match?!
I can't decide whether I like Thanos' altered motivations. The movie makes pretty explicit that Thanos is seeking the Infinity Gauntlet and to kill half the universe ultimately because he's a true-believer in Malthusian views of population control. In the movie, Thanos essentially argues that in order to ensure life continues he has to kill half the universe's population to ensure there are sufficient resources left over for life to actually have a future.
This is quite a change from the motivations that drove Thanos in the initial Infinity Gauntlet story line, wherein he killed half the universe NOT to preserve life, but simply because he was enraptured with love for the feminine personification of Death.
When I first read IG as a kid I was left pondering, "if Thanos loves Death so much, why did he only kill half the universe instead of the whole thing?" Recently, a co-worker and long-time Silver Surfer fan informed me that Lady Death had previously requested this percentage of universal genocide from her suitor prior to the events of IG. So, I guess the original story was more internally consistent than I realized at the time.
I suspect the primary reason for cinematic deviation was story-telling pragmatism. (Strict adherence to IG canon simply doesn't work without the introduction of Lady Death as a major new character.) However, an ancillary benefit, is that this results in the movie taking a surprisingly conservative position on a major political/cultural debate.
Calls for reducing "carbon footprints" by steps such as elective abortion and/or euthanasia in order to "fight global climate change" seem to explicitly embrace (Movie) Thanos' reasoning. As a Christian Libertarian, it's surprising that an industry I think of as pretty uniformly left-of-center would produce a movie in which the epitome of evil parrots the central logic of many modern Leftists.
They should've explicitly titled this Avengers: Infinity War (vol. 1). I studiously avoided reading reviews or watching previews beforehand, because I didn't want spoilers. However, I do wish I'd realized the story wasn't going to be wrapped up in this movie. I don't exactly fault the decision. A fight for the survival of reality itself is a pretty big story. It deserves to be done well. I just would've appreciated a "head's up."
I really hope they don't plan to wrap this up in Captain Marvel. If they're gonna make this a two-parter, then the conclusion deserves to have a parallel name and stand on its own: Avengers Infinity War 2. I have this fear that they're going to stretch it out over multiple movies and that Captain Marvel might be only the first.
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