Spoilers Avengers: Infinity War grade and discussion thread

I agree but I'm going to quote what was actually the first thing that popped into my head watching the movie, Mr. Spock.

"As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create."

Thanos wants the easy solution, he wants to keep betting on the thralls killing each other rather than competitive farming because it's quicker instant gratification.

 

What if Hulk wins?

The green brute gets through life mostly by smashing. Sometimes he faces a problem he can’t solve by smashing, and he needs some sciencing. In those desperate situations he turns into Bruce Banner, but when the crisis passes he’s Hulk again.

I’m not the first to consider this. Has Marvel ever gone the route of having Banner become the “emergency on-call” personality for Hulk?

 

No, not in the films, but there have been so many different takes on the Banner/Hulk relationship in the comics over the years that I'm certain that particular dynamic has been used at some point.

 

I've been searching for a panel in a comic to post here but I can only find the cover.

https://comicvine.gamespot.com/what-the--24-the-infinity-mitten/4000-138243/

Anyway, Thermos has the Infinity Mitten and he makes half of all life disappear in the universe to impress Death, unfortunately it's the lower half and it shows everyone's torsos standing up in the street because they don't have any legs. This was going through the back of my mind while watching the movie and I bet I was the only one.

 

I saw a clip with Karen Gillian today where she told us about how she didn’t film a dissolving scene for Nebula and how that gave her fate away at the end of the movie to her.

That caused me to pond-er the idea of an alternate ending?
What if they not only filmed a reversed ending where everyone who lived in the one version disappeared in the other and vice versa.
And then they actually released both versions to theaters setting up two entirely different sequels.

I think that would have been absolutely unprecedented, though probably a marketing nightmare.

 

The things that worked the best about A3:IW were all of the dissolving scenes. With the Soul Stone segment, those were the main things that the film brought to the table. Do anything to undermine those, and you mess with the experience. What you are suggesting would have ruined the emotional impact of the film, by treating the moments precisely as gimmicks.

In contrast, the actual film managed to have emotional impact, despite the fact that we all have every reason to expect that all the major character deaths are reversible.

 

Not absolutely unprecedented. Clue did it in 1985.

All except Stan.

I’d be thrilled to be wrong about that. Resurrect Stan!

 

And Clue bombed at the box office.

Indeed.

 

Is there any consensus on whether the Cloak of Levitation is sentient? Is it offensive to call it “it”? How about FRIDAY and Suit Lady Karen?

 

The Cloak is perhaps impossible to know. Could be, or could just be following magical programming like a robot.

I think the Stark ai's probably are. Vision and Ultron definitely are, and it's kind of hard to find much difference between Vision and Jarvis.

 

JARVIS and FRIDAY aren't alive. Well okay Jarvis sort of is now.

When we see JARVIS in AoU he's an advanced UI that isn't "thinking" inbetween being used, idleing like Alexa.

The cloak responds to the surrondings and peoples immediate need of it, but not much besides that. So some sort of advanced animus enchantment.

 

I'd say the cloak is probably more along the lines of an animal like a dog than a person, so it probably depends on you're definition of sentient.

But it has gone on to become a big cult classic, so it's not a total failure.

 

Vision and Ultron had free will. JARVIS & FRIDAY did/do not. They're basically intuitive AI user interfaces for Stark's various computer systems. Like Karen in Peter's suit, but on a larger scale. Intelligent, but not aware.

I tend to think of it in similar terms as the monolith from '2001 A Space Odyssey', or the protomolecule from 'The Expanse'. Powerful (sometimes terrifyingly so), complex and capable of a level of cognition and analysis that an organic being can barely comprehend...and yet fundamentally unaware; bound and defined by simple protocols. At their core, just a mechanism.

 

Come to think of it, the Cloak probably not. The life forms that disintegrate on Titan do so one at a time, but the cloak disintegrates at the same time as Strange, as if it’s just another part of his clothes.

If the Iron Spider suit has an AI, the same argument applies there.

 

That strikes me as a fairly cheap argument. Like saying Vision isn't worthy because an elevator could lift Thor's hammer.

It's abundantly clear that forms do not have to disintegrate one at a time, because if they did it would take days or weeks or even months for a large city to be fully effected. Not to mention that A4 is apparently explicitly saying the snap affected animal life, too, so the same issue would apply to almost anywhere on earth where insects live.

And that's without even going into the question of whether being 'alive' for the purposes of the snap has any real relationship at all to being in any way 'sentient'. Thanos may have easily killed half the bugs in the universe but not killed a single robot, regardless of sentience. Robots in sci-fi typically don't use up resources like biological life forms, so could logically be exempt to begin with. The cloak and the ai's would fall under the same category, except they have the misfortune of being attached to a biological lifeform who takes them with them.

As for the rest of the discussion, I really never got the impression at all that Jarvis had no free will or that he never 'existed' for himself except when Tony gave him something to do, but in order to really try to gather the evidence for that, I'd have to hold a major rewatch which I don't have time for right now. So I'll just say that, in general, Jarvis seems extremely similar to Vision in almost every way. In fact the only undisputable difference I see is that Vision falls in love and Jarvis doesn't, but that could simply be a question of opportunity. Certainly Jarvis seemed to take the initiative quite often, including in AoU when he actively opposed Ultron without any instruction from Stark, even after his programming had been 'destroyed'.

Friday and Karen appear much more superficial, and maybe they are, but maybe that's just a function of their limited screen time. Either way, the key to the discussion is obviously Jarvis. If he could be considered sentient, then all Stark AI's would either be sentient or at least have the potential to develop sentience (possibly, Jarvis 'grew' over time since he was in use for so long - like the Doctor on Voyager).

 

You know it occurs to me that this assertion was made without being tested. Maybe the elevator wouldn't go up or down at all...

Vision himself says quite explicitly he's not JARVIS.
That aside, in AoU Tony describes JARVIS as starting out as a "natural language user interface" and that "now he runs the Iron Legion and more of the business than anyone besides Pepper."
Indeed, that scene makes it abundantly clear that JARVIS isn't an AI because Bruce and Tony are marvelling at the *possibility* of AI being achievable with the aid of the Sceptre. I mean, you can't marvel at the possibility of something you've already done, no?

 

Wasn't the Mind Stone a critical component in Vision? Calling Vision or his mind an AI is an understatement.

 

It's hard to define sentience because just because something is programmed to appear sentient doesn't mean it's doing anymore than following it's program. Vision is something different, he is an artificially created life form, rather than a computer program like JARVIS. I can't explain that any further but the mind stone being involved makes everything else a different category as @CorpralCaptain said.

 

None of the suits in IW had them. FRIDAY doesn't seem to be able to be uploaded to the nano-armour and her broadcast from Earth cuts out, so she's back there still. The Iron Spider armour doesn't talk to Peter, just reacts. War Machine has the same silent programming.

 

This was the question in IW, wasn't it? If they removed the mind stone then how much of the Vision would be left?