The Avengers: Infinity War is a 2018 film starring... well... pretty much everyone.
It is the culmination of 18 films set in the Marvel cinematic universe that focusses on the all-powerful villain Thanos and his quest to find the Infinity stones so he can kill off half of all life in the universe.
And yes, I talked about genocide while reviewing What Happened to Monday. Two days before I saw Infinity War. But fear not! Infinity War conveys a very different message than the aforementioned, so welcome to the Popcorn Lobotomy Elite Review, of Avengers: Infinity War.
I believe the convention here on YouTube is to insert a spoiler warning, and I feel it necessary to do that because it's impossible to talk about Avengers Infinity War without addressing its ending.
So consider yourself warned... Hmm that feels somewhat inadequate... Do we need a graphic or something? Ah there, that should do it.
Now, you might think I'm talking about this movie in order to double down on my harangue about population reduction and indeed we might unavoidably touch on that topic in the course of this review, but I don't think genocide is really the most prominent theme of Avengers: Infinity War.
Indeed, the idea of genocide is merely a plot device used to motivate the villain and is barely fleshed out during the course of the larger narrative.
We are simply told that Thanos believes the extermination of half the population of the universe is necessary, and while it might have been interesting to explore what motivated him to draw this conclusion, it is ignored by the movie in favour of another theme more relevant to the comic book super-hero genre and the mass box office demographic it attracts.
And that theme, not to put too fine a point on it, is sacrifice.
There is sacrifice everywhere in this film. Thanos sacrifices his daughter Gamora, the one thing in the universe he loves, to acquire the Soul Stone. Scarlett Witch is asked to sacrifice Vision to destroy the Mind Stone. Black Panther must sacrifice the sanctity of Wakanda to assist in saving the world. And of course, Tony Stark is forced to sacrifice that which he feared to lose the most -- his young protégé Peter Parker.
Collectively, the Avengers are asked to sacrifice everything for what they believe to be the greater good, and if I read the movie correctly, this is exactly what they do. Dr Strange examines multiple outcomes and discovers a one in several million chance of defeating Thanos and preventing his mass extermination, and, while the movie does advance the representation that his plan is attempted and failed, I'm sure the coming sequel will reveal that allowing Thanos' extermination to succeed is the only way to prevent it from happening.
It may sound paradoxical, but in a movie that features time travel as a key plot point, it seems likely this is how story will resolve itself.
The interesting message of the fillum is that the failure to sacrifice is perhaps exactly what allows the evil to prevail. Captain America says to Vision, "we don't trade lives", but one is left to posit, what if he had taken an alternative stance?
What if The Avengers had instead allowed Vision to destroy the Mind Stone, and in turn of course himself, to ensure Thanos was unable to collect all 6 infinity stones? Would this have led to a different outcome? One can assume that without the final stone, Thanos' power would have been curbed and he would have been unable to execute his plan.
So why not sacrifice one being, and an artificial one at that, for the preservation of trillions of other souls?
It is common while engaging in discourse about the philosophy of morality, to pose the following philosophical dilemma to a supposed person of principle: what if you had the opportunity to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby? What should one do? One the one hand, one would presumably prevent the holocaust and saving millions of lives, but on the other, one would be murdering a baby, which is considered a mortal sin.
As the stakes rise, the moral choices become increasingly difficult. The black and white lines average people claim they would never cross become grey and blurred.
People often mourn the plight of poor people, but poor people are never presented with such difficult moral choices. Sure, they may have to choose to steal a loaf of bread to feed their family, but in those cases, it is only their life and the lives of their loved ones at stake.
What if everything you did, magnified by wealth and power, had a notable impact on ALL of humanity? Do you begin to comprehend the pressure people in the upper classes must deal with every day?
As was sagaciously observed in the tagline of the earlier Sam Raimi Spiderman movies: "with great power comes great responsibility".
So if you want to talk about sacrifice, talk to one of the elite classes, because we live sacrifice every single day of our lives. Just like the Avengers, every interaction we have with the world has significant consequences, and the thought that those impacts might be unforseen or unconsidered is the idea we fear the most.
I mean, sometimes I feel like I could wake up one morning, scratch my head, and then find that the very act of relieving a mild discomfort had inadvertently wiped out a small country!
But at the end of the day, the ultimate factor one must consider when facing significant sacrifice -- even human sacrifice -- is the value of the bargain being struck.
It is a simple mathematical formula, and nothing else is more consequential in the evaluation than the net benefit of the action being considered.
And trust me when I tell you, that despite the average person's platitudes to the contrary, when presented with the opportunity to get everything they desire in life, almost everyone will be willing sell out their morality and make any sacrifices demanded of them.
So would I go back and kill hypothetical Hitler as a baby to prevent the holocaust? Of course I would, dear boy. Such choices are mere routine to me and my kind, and we make them without doubt, guilt or remorse.
One can learn to live with the expected consequences of one's deliberate, reasoned, decisions -- but the unintended effects of failure, weakness or indecision? That's the kind of that'll haunt one all the way to the grave and beyond.