• Wait.
  • Tony Stark built an Iron Man suit in a cave.
  • From a box of scraps.
  • And now he’s on a warp-capable spaceship chockfull of super-weapons and he’s like, “Fuck it. I give up.”
  • Ah, you’re saying, but in the original Iron Man, Tony had someone to help him.
  • Yes, I’ll answer: Dr. Yinsen, who was a brilliant scientist.
  • Big loss for the team when he died.
  • Tough to replace.
  • But you know who could take over?
  • A space lady who was mostly robot.
  • Seems like she’d know something about computing machines and transistorizing frazmogarbers.
  • Anyway, this is Avengers: The One Where They Bring Back Spider-Man And Black Panther and the film will be quite literally incomprehensible if you haven’t already consumed around 40 hours of Marvel Cinematic Universe content.
  • As is the trailer.
  • A man is sad in space, and then some pretty people are sad in a room, and then a man with a pervert van arrives.
  • This, Enthusiasts, is high-context content: a commercial for a $250 million business venture that is, in essence, an inside joke.
  • There are no super-heroics; barely anyone even moves.
  • Were you not aware of the meaning of the mopery, you might be actively repulsed by this ad, or at least confused.
  • “Where’s the punching? I thought they punched each other in these movies.”
  • But you know, Loyal Marvelite.
  • You know there will be punching.
  • In the last Avengers film, our heroes were faced with an adversary who controlled time, space, reality, spiciness, and whatnot; they responded by punching him.
  • One of the Guardians of the Galaxy pictures featured a villain who was quite literally an entire planet; an entire planet had become sentient and commenced to performing acts of skullduggery and chicanery, and also he’s the main Guardian’s dad, and when the team faced off with him at the end: you guessed it, punching.
  • Complement to the punching, we see kicking and head-butting and whacking with sticks and that thing where Black Widow sticks her vagina on a goon’s skull like a facehugger, but these are the starch and veg to the punching’s protein.
  • Captain America punched a flying aircraft carrier in one movie.
  • In his defense, the flying aircraft carrier called Captain America’s mother a whore.
  • Cap won’t tolerate that kind of guff.
  • (Bores have gone on and on about how Cap, a man raised in the 30’s, would be deliciously racist in 201, but they’re all pointless and wrong because there is no racism in the MCU. Go back and watch First Avenger. The Army was fully integrated in 1945. The Marvel Cinemantic Unicycle is one devoid of any sort of racial tension. There is even a Hispanic now.)
  • So, the good guys have to re-defeat Thanos and restore the lives of half the universe, including several individuals with sequels already in the pipeline.
  • Because Thanos killed half the universe.
  • Here’s a question left unanswered: what if there were an odd number of people in the universe?
  • Do you round up or down?
  • And if his whole goal was to free up resources in order to improve the lives of the remaining half, then why didn’t he do it in a way that wouldn’t cause civilization to collapse?
  • I am not a civilizationologist, but I think that is what would happen.
  • People would freak.
  • I know that.
  • Almost none would take the Snapture calmly.
  • Wall Street would likely suspend trading for a day or two.
  • And all the airports would be destroyed.
  • It’s a stupid plan; it’s as if comic books were for children.
  • But Hawkeye’s back.
  • So if you were wondering, “Dude, where’s Hawkeye?”
  • Wonder no longer.
  • He’s back.
  • Yay.