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magicmastered · 5 years

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Plot Holes in Infinity War

If you don’t want to see criticism of Infinity War, I suggest that you don’t read/filter your tags/block me.

Now.

Avengers: Infinity War is one of Marvel’s biggest movies, being among the longest MCU movies and quite successful in the box office. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s a great movie. The storyline that calls itself a plot is smashed together in whatever manner makes a few specific scenes happen. That style of writing has its trademarks—plots that could almost be used as cheesecloth. I’m not kidding; there’s tons of them. Some are within the movie. Some fly in the face of the rest of the MCU.

Here’s all the plot holes that I can think of. After the first couple scenes the chronological order gets messed up a little, but here goes.

1. Starting at the beginning here. So...Loki has the Tesseract. Why didn’t he use it to make a portal to get the Asgardian refugees out (or as many as he can, anyway)? We know he can use it. Why didn’t they just start a ship-chase to buy a little time and use that time to evacuate?

2. So, Loki knows Thanos, right? He’d know Thanos’ M.O. Wouldn’t he know that Thanos would go for Thor? Why not stuff Thor in his pocket dimension beforehand? Did Thanos and the Black Order block him from doing that? That’s not what I remember seeing. Loki was standing off sort of on his own at the very beginning of the scene.

3. Where has the Hulk been? Yes, “we have a Hulk” is a cool callback and it looks good as an entrance, but wouldn’t a Hulk be good to have when Thanos and the Black Order were slaughtering the Asgardian refugees? Why was he staying back the whole time? It doesn’t make sense. If he hadn’t been staying back, Thanos and co. would’ve known about him, and the surprise-attack wouldn’t have been a surprise. Was he just sitting on his butt listening to the refugees dying until he heard the words “we have a Hulk”?

4. Once Hulk does attack, Loki dives for Thor and drops the Tesseract. What. Why not just hold onto the Tesseract, grab Thor, and portal out of there? Wouldn’t that make more sense than dropping it for someone else (Ebony Maw) to pick up?

5. Heimdall. Why does Heimdall rescue the Hulk instead of Thor, Loki, or both? He’s known Hulk for maybe a day or two. He’s known Thor and Loki for over a thousand years. What’s going on with that? Why does he save the one he just met as opposed to the ones he’s known since their infancy?

6. More about Heimdall. Since when has he been able to summon the Bifrost? This is a major point of TDW. If Heimdall had been able to summon the Bifrost without the actual structure, Thor and co. wouldn’t have had to break Loki out of prison. How can he suddenly do it now? Why hasn’t he used it before?

7. Where did Loki go during the Hulk-vs-Thanos fight? He disappears after going for Thor for several minutes. Where to? I know people have brought this up before, but I want to know.

8. Why doesn’t he stay there? He’s stuck in a ship with five people who’ve just killed half the refugees his risked his life to rescue, who’d be more than happy to kill him (at best), and they’re more or less ignoring his presence where he currently is. Why go out and deliberately draw their attention?

9. Loki attacking Thanos at all. What is Loki doing?! He knows Thanos better than any other protagonist on that ship. He just saw Thanos beat Hulk one-on-one. Why does he think this is something he should do?!

10. More on that stupid, stupid attack. Loki’s got plenty of powers and abilities. Super-strength, durability, insane reflexes, freaky intelligence, combat skills, ice manipulation, illusions, invisibility, teleportation (this is canon, check out Thor: Heroes and Villains), shapeshifting, telekinesis, off the top of my head. I probably forgot something. Loki overpowered Odin. He has all this and likely more at his disposal, and he attacks Thanos with what? A knife. One knife that barely reaches Thanos’s throat.

11. Another thing about this attack. Considering the above, he probably knew he was going to die. So why did he do it? People say that he was sacrificing himself for Thor. Except...him dying wouldn’t have stopped Thanos at all. Thanos could’ve just killed Thor after Loki’s death. Loki dying or Loki being alive wouldn’t change a thing. And besides, Thanos all but did that anyway when he blew up the ship.

12. Thanos killing Loki. The Russos said that Thanos killed Loki for ‘disobedience’. Presumably this means Loki’s ‘disobedience’ in Avengers (2012). But...death is not what Thanos (or his underling the Other, rather) threatened Loki with for failure/disobedience. The threat was, “if you fail, if the Tesseract is kept from us, there will be no realm, no barren moon or crevice where he can’t find you. You think you know pain? He will make you long for something sweet as pain.” That is...not death. Definitely not what Thanos actually did.

13. Still more on Thanos killing Loki. Let’s look at the insane stuff Loki’s survived so far: falling into an unstable wormhole (in the prequel comics, Odin claims that this should have scattered Loki across the universe), a year of torture from Thanos, getting thrashed by the Hulk (who’s nearly as strong as Thanos), taking a sword through his chest and back, and getting knocked out of the Bifrost (note that Thor seems somewhat surprised with his “you’re alive!” in Ragnarok). And now apparently getting his neck broken is going to kill him.

14. Okay, finally done with the first scene. How did Heimdall know about the Sanctum? How did he know to send Bruce/Hulk there? How did he know about Strange? Thor and Loki didn’t know that Earth had wizards in Ragnarok. How does Heimdall know? Did they tell him? When? They’ve been pretty busy.

15. Dr. Strange keeps a list of threats, but he doesn’t know about Thanos. He doesn’t even seem to know that a threat so large exists. I suppose this could be a case of Thanos simply never having been to Earth, but it still seems off. Wouldn’t Strange at least know that there’s something huge out there? Given that the Masters of the Mystic Arts know about beings around the multiverse and all.

16. How does Bruce know so much about Thanos and the Infinity Stones, or that Thanos sent Loki? He knows what Thanos does. He knows that Thanos is after the Stones. How? No one tells him this stuff onscreen. Was there some mysterious conversation somewhere between Ragnarok and Infinity War where everyone shared all the information that they had? Wouldn’t they have been busy organizing the refugees in the ship/finding quarters for everyone/figuring out how to get food and water for the trip? You know, stuff that’d seem more immediately relevant?

17. How does Thor know that the Aether was on Knowhere? This is never discussed onscreen. I’m seriously suspecting that info-dump conversation. But still, why were they having an info-dump conversation? Wouldn’t the things mentioned in item 15 be more immediate concerns? It’s not like they all knew that they were about to need this information.

18. Thanos’s plan and “making sense”. No plot-hole list of IW would be complete without this. Thanos believes that there is too much life in the universe for its resources to sustain. For the sake of argument alone, I’ll assume that he’s correct for the duration of this point on the list. Thanos has decided that in order to save all life in the universe, he needs the Infinity Stones to “balance” the ratio of life to resources. Okay, that’s fairly logical. He can do anything with the Infinity Stones. Here comes the weird part. He decides that the only way to “balance” the universe is to kill half of all life...including (according to the Russos) plants and animals. AKA resources. Remember, he’s devoted decades at minimum to the development of this plan. And this is the best he can come up with. He’s got unlimited power. Couldn’t he use the Space and Reality Stones to move beings around to other planets with more resources? Couldn’t he use the Reality Stone to make more resources? No, gotta kill half the life he’s ‘trying to save’ and the resources they use as well. That doesn’t change the ratio at all. It doesn’t accomplish his stated goal.

19. Gamora. How does Gamora know what the Soul Stone is? The Collector had to explain Infinity Stones to her as well as the rest of the Guardians in GOTG Vol 1. So how would she know what the Soul Stone was, let alone where it was?

20. What exactly did Thanos do to the Zen-Whoberi (I think that’s how you spell Gamora’s species)? In IW, Thanos says that the remaining population of her planet is thriving. However, in GOTG Vol 1, it’s stated onscreen that Gamora’s the last of her species. Did Thanos kill all the Zen-Whoberi or half of them? If the latter, did the other half die off because—gasp!—his plan hadn’t worked on their planet? In that case, is Thanos just even more massively deluded than I previously thought, is he lying, or is it someone else who’s thriving on Gamora’s home-world?

21. How did Steve, Sam, and Nat wind up exactly where Wanda and Vision needed them to be? They’d moved quite a bit from their initial location during the fight with Proxima and Corvus. I know, I’m nitpicking, but still.

22. How does Nat, an unpowered but skilled human, manage to overpower Corvus Glaive, a member of the Black Order who’s presumably far stronger and also highly skilled? Yeah, she took him by surprise, but it shouldn’t have been easy at the very least.

23. Steve denying Vision the choice to sacrifice himself. As others have pointed out, Steve made a very similar decision back in CA:TFA. He chose to dive a plane into the ocean, which would—he thought—kill him, to save many lives. Now, Vision’s decided that Wanda should destroy the Mind Stone in his forehead, which would kill him, to save many more lives. Why is Steve denying Vision the ability to make the choice that he made himself? (Hint: It’s so they can have a cool-looking final battle to save Vision and then have him die anyway.)

24. Speaking of destroying the Mind Stone. Isn’t destroying Infinity Stones supposed to be impossible? This was another major point in TDW. Jane only came across the Aether (Reality Stone) in that movie because there was no way to destroy it and Bor had to settle for hiding it. Malekith gets the Aether because they still couldn’t destroy it. Infinity Stones are either indestructible or they’re not. Which is it?

25. “We don’t trade lives,” says Steve, right before he decides to trade hundreds if not thousands of Wakandan lives to save the life of his friend (who’d already decided that he wanted to sacrifice himself). Um, what?

26. T’Challa agreeing to risk his countrymen is iffy. He’s agreeing to send hundreds (if not thousands) or his people to their deaths to save one person with a lengthy, experimental procedure. And again, that one person has already voiced the opinion that they should just destroy the Mind Stone while they still can, whether it kills him or not. Wouldn’t T’Challa respect that decision, especially since it’s the one that saves the most lives?

27. When the Titan crew pins Thanos, why are they just trying to take the gauntlet off his hand? Tony at least has been in/witnessed (it’s been a while since I saw IM3) a fight that involved cutting off the villain’s hand. Wouldn’t he have thought of this during the planning stage? They could’ve stuck Thanos’ wrist through one of Dr. Strange’s portals and cut it off. No gauntlet, no snap.

28. How does Thor know to come to Wakanda? I get that he knows there are Infinity Stones on Earth. But last time he was on Earth, Vision was in New York, wasn’t he? How would he know that Vision was now in Wakanda? How would he know that the battle was there? Does Rocket have an Infinity Stone-sensing device? Why didn’t this come up?

29. Why did Thor go for Thanos’ chest? Thor generally goes for the head when he’s fighting. Except, of course, for this time. Why? Wouldn’t he want to make absolutely sure that Thanos was dead? (Besides so Thanos could win?)

30. If not the head, why didn’t Thor at least go for the gauntlet hand? In TDW his and Loki’s plan to deceive Malekith involved Loki pretending to cut Thor’s hand off so he couldn’t use his weapon. Wouldn’t Thor have some vague memory of the whole ‘if you remove your enemy’s weapon hand, they won’t be able to fight’ thing?

I guess it’s pretty obvious where I spent most of my time looking.

I’ve probably forgotten some, seeing as I watched this thing, what, one and a half times last year, when it came out and shortly afterwards. Any additions?

@lucianalight @lokiloveforever @philosopherking1887 @mastreworld

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