Avengers: Mickey Mouse Rising

So let's do a math problem.

Let's say you have 12 dogs, but only enough food to feed 8 of them long term. You then go ahead and kill 6 of your dogs so that the remainder of them can eat happily and enjoy a life of plenty. "Perfectly balanced" you say while wiping a bit of mustard off your chin, but unfortunately you don't bother to spay or neuter any of them and immediately throw away the shotgun you used to do the deed.

Approximately how many years would it take to realize that you're a fucking idiot?

I thought about writing a review of Infinity War when it came out, but found that the sheer weight of stupidity at play in that movie was too much for me. I'll attempt it now that I've seen two of the damn things, but I can only do so much.

Still. Let's try to go through the key points.




1) Humour as a substitute for world building.

So in this movie, the main thing is time travelling. While building their time machine, the Hulk and Ant Man talk about time paradoxes for a bit only to be interrupted by War Machine, who makes a few references to Back to the Future and a couple of other time machine movies (that are probably all property of DisneyCorp - more on that later!). They all have a good laugh at this Family Guy style self-referential humour and then... nothing.

There is no coherent explanation about the time travel. There's no attempt to make this real science fiction. It's just "Haha! We're using time machines, just like those other movies! Wink!"

Whenever the movie runs into an issue that might stress this convoluted mess of a plot, humour is deployed to keep those higher brain functions from kicking in. "Hey, I'm making portals without my time gem to bring a bunch of people from all sorts of different places in fifteen minutes and they are all super coordinated already." "Wait you mean you want MORE portals? Haha zing!"

Ugh.

2) Don't you have a time gem?

Didn't Dr. Strange bring an entire city block back to life in his movie? Why can't he bring Stark back to life? I get that they made a big deal about how they can't bring Black Widow back because of Souls or whatever the fuck that was, but Stark only got killed by radiation poisoning from using the stupid glove.

Look, this isn't an obscure point. Last movie they did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VddDZf6hRPM Why can't you do that?

Oh what's that? How could he give a dramatic death speech if you just did that? Yeah, you're right. I never thought of that.

3) Is there no end to the cheese?

I hope that I am not the only person that thought of Kate Beaton's Strong Female Characters when they did that one scene where they put together every single female character they could cram onto one screen to give them their little pseudo-feminist charge. Yeah Marvel, you guys are totally on the right side of history! Wow, I am just so impressed with how progressive you guys are. Maybe next movie you'll have two girls obliquely mention that they're in a relationship and have everyone else be totally cool with it? Babysteps!

4) We are living in a corporate dystopia

There's a scene in the movie where Iron Man drives up to the Avengers compound in a fancy car, logos in full view. If I were to cut that little scene out of the movie and put it on Youtube by itself, you would not be able to distinguish this scene from a car commercial. How many extra bucks did that make you, Disney? All the merchandising shit you get out of these films isn't enough, is it? Need to hawk some cars too on top of it?

You know, we used to say that kind of thing was crass and cheapened a film, but in this era perhaps we're all just deadened to that.

5) Disney's marketing department controls our thoughts.

Look. I'm obviously a very smart man, but I do think I am probably not the only person in the world who figured out how stupid the 'kill 50% of people' plotline was. Disney had focus groups and mock reviewers all over this shit way before release, of course. But they were ahead of it.

Up popped a massively popular subreddit called /r/ThanosDidNothingWrong, with the gimmick being that they were all going to subscribe to it and that 50% of accounts would eventually be banned from it. Haha! Well memed. A little bit of astroturfing and all of a sudden, the plot being stupid and incoherent was no longer a bug, but a feature. It was part of the goddamn fun.

(And no one had better tell me that subreddit is some natural fan thing. One of the top threads right now on that damn subreddit is about going to see the movie again to make Disney more money so it beats Avatar's box office record)

And there is the real fucking genius of Avengers. The most basic criticism of the movie is co-opted into the marketing of the movie itself, making anyone that insists on pointing out this fundamental flaw as just someone who's being a naysayer.

Man, the fucking marketing guys should be the ones writing the damn movies.

Anyway, that's all I can stomach. Mickey Mouse might make all the money in the world, but I will continue stand here against his dark machinations, howling into the wind.