Thanos was wrong

Yes, this is about Avengers: Infinity War.

Again, there will be spoilers, but it came out in April so I like to think we're good.

It is a reasonable follow-up to writing about the aspects of each individual mattering in Ant-Man and the Wasp. There is a huge body count in Infinity War. It's almost like a DC film, except there aren't piles of dead bodies at the end, just something like ashes floating away.

Even more to the point, you see a real impact from the loss of those lives as well.

Many people were torn up by the death of Peter Parker. He got more words in - possibly because he felt it coming, possibly because he can talk a lot, quickly - and he said them to Tony, who had previously shown guilt about getting Peter into dangerous situations, and who had started the movie talking to Pepper about having a child.

(Also, somehow in the impossible to detect pattern of the destruction, everyone else on the planet's surface had gone, except for Nebula, a cyborg stranger to Tony, leaving him terribly alone.)

The fadings happening in Wakanda stuck with me more: Rhodey looking for Sam and just missing him, Bucky and Cap's eyes meeting just before, and T'Challe reaching out to help Okoye. I was sure he was going to see her go, which would have been one kind of tragedy, but then the one who faded was him.

Beyond that, you could see how the randomness was leading to immediate complications. Back in New York, a plane was going down, and if the former occupants of the crashed car weren't going to feel the impact, that doesn't mean that similar accidents would not have casualties.


(And yes, I assume it will all be undone, even rolled back to save the Asgardians from the beginning. Dr. Strange saw the one plan that worked, and he still handed his stone over to Thanos. Obviously it will all be fine. No arguments.)

From that immediate awful aftermath, I can see the chaos extending far beyond that. 

Part of that is that in some of my readings about authoritarian regimes, I have seen that once you expel the foreigners, the economy goes stagnant and there isn't enough food. That can also happen when you nationalize markets. When you target people who are more educated and have more money, that is not a guaranteed combination, but it tends to get rid of at least a few doctors and people with good skills to have (some dead, some escaping). That causes problems. It causes suffering.

Thanos could defend his plan of ending suffering by reducing the universal population in half all he wants, but it caused immediate suffering with a promise of more suffering in store.

It doesn't make sense to get all worked up over a movie adapted from comic books, especially when I believe the next installment will resolve everything. However, much like there being a large contingent of people declaring that Killmonger was right in response to Black Panther (my thoughts on that), there has also been a contingent declaring that Thanos had a point.

And sure, that's mainly a subreddit where you shouldn't expect too much from the inhabitants, but yes, there are a lot of people who with infinite power would still see more point in eliminating people than increasing resources or improving the distribution thereof.

People reference Malthus a lot in relation to this. He was not twisted in that manner (he could be faulted for an understandable lack of vision), but Malthus' writings have been used in some really twisted arguments about why sometimes you want to let people suffer and die. Really, he just wanted people to wait longer to have kids, which has several advantages.

Infinity War was a pretty good movie in general. Given the size of the cast it was impressive in what it managed to balance, and the fun it managed to have despite some serious and painful situations.

It also gives us something worth thinking about. That isn't so much whether or not individuals have worth; the film comes down pretty clearly on the side of that. It is worth thinking about how hard some people fight to avoid accepting that.


Remember, the problem with #alllivesmatter isn't that it's not true; it's that it misses the point of specific lives being counted as less. Truly believing in the value of each life requires examining the structures that endanger lives, which are sometimes very specific. It's a deflect when the opposite is needed.

The damage of lost lives is never merely collateral.