I understand the lack of interest. I'm quite a fan of them, and I'm near to burnout with them..but they keep managing to raise the bar.

The big problem I have is that outside of the Marvel films and the Star Wars films...what is there to get excited about?

A lot of dark, depressing nihilistic releases, dozens of literary adaptations that will all be less than the source material, a ridiculous looking remake of Jaws called "The Meg"...and yet another remake/sequel of Halloween.

They may well be like an amusement ride...but that's better than the alternative shopping trolley down a dirty alley.

Managed to seclude myself from spoilers and saw it yesterday night.

Wow.

Just saw it yesterday as well and second your 'Wow'.

Either you love the MCU or you don't, so it's not for everyone. For geeks like me, this was golden.

-SPOILERS-

- For the MCU to finally tie-in Red Skull
- For Peter Dinklage to play a giant
- For Hulk to have his ass handed to him and then to be afraid to materialize when needed
- For maintaining the character integrity of the Guardians of the Galaxy when interacting with the Avangers
- For the oh-so-slight reference to introduce Capt. Marvel

Like I said, I'm a geek and I applaud Marvel for tying 10 years of story-lines into one entertaining movie.

Hey, can one of you PM me and tell me who dies? I don't really care from a fan standpoint, it has more to do with the business in general and something I'm trying to accomplish. Thanks, AJR

ajr - PM to ya!

Quoted from CameronD Managed to seclude myself from spoilers and saw it yesterday night. Wow.

Yup.

In its own way, a masterpiece.

Somebody dies!??? Great. That will teach me to read threads before I see the movie. But reading Marvel comics is like reading the Bible. A lot of resurrections.

Seen it, loved it, now I'm going talk SPOILERS SO DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NO SEEN THE MOVIE!

.......

The writers have said get used to all the dead heroes as they are not coming back. I say that's bull or misleading as several 'dead' characters have movies coming up in the official Marvel movie release schedule. I do have a theory that may cover this though. What if Thanos used the reality gem to create a completely new universe in which half the population doesn't exist? This could be Marvel's way of creating an Ultimate's style alternate universe and give them more freedom with certain characters in the different universes.

A bit of a cop-out perhaps but possible....perhaps?

Just saw this on Netflix (because that’s about how invested I am in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), and liked how the egos clashed, with just the normal level of “I don’t know you but let’s go half-way across the Universe together to face a badguy I mentioned” you’d expect from a superhero film. That crossover element could have been handled much worse.

But...

SPOILERS

The stakes have been raised to ridiculous levels, which paints them into a corner in more ways than one.

As mentioned, the MCU can hardly return to personal scale conflicts (original Iron Man or Ant Man kind of stuff) and feel important.

Also as mentioned, no one believes all or even most of the dead characters will stay dead.

Mark and Albinopenguin offered a couple ways out of this, either of which would feel incredibly cheap. Someone could also convince Thanos to undo what he did (which would be similar to how DC fixed the world-ending problems in Flashpoint Paradox), or they could go completely off the rails and Bruce Banner wakes up from a bad dream. But there is no plausible path forward for MCU that doesn’t involve some stupid trick.

The ancient artifacts were gathered in the space of a week. So either there’s nothing to prevent this catastrophe from occurring every so often, in which case the existence of a sane Universe proves the chain of events always works itself out over and over... or the artifacts get destroyed in the next movie and their existence was just some cosmic coincidence that, despite Wong’s description, has nothing to do with the nature of the Universe. To be fair, this kind of plot hole is par for the course in epic movies of all kinds, but it’s a pet peeve of mine.

I can understand some of the boneheaded decisions made in this film... Starlord in particular putting stay-true-to-character above common sense... but Dr. Strange seemed to do precisely the wrong thing at every turn. If his Time Stone let him make a bunch of counterintuitive decisions based on foreknowledge, the ending will seem even cheaper.