It’s time for a spoilerific Avengers: Infinity War chat on today’s Kotaku Splitscreen.
First, Kirk and I talk about D&D, CEO salaries, and games as a service. Then we bring on io9's Evan Narcisse to talk about the latest Marvel movie’s thrills, how it’s basically part one of a TV season finale, and what we all made of THAT ending. Even if it’s all reversed by this time next year, it should still make for fascinating storytelling.
Listen here:
Get the MP3 here or read a SPOILERY excerpt below.
Kirk: Can we briefly go over the ending? That sequence at the end itself, just as an act of craft, I thought was really incredible. I didn’t see it coming and of course was surprised, but man, just the visual effect—the way it looked, the way that people faded away. I saw it in a super-packed theater on opening night, and my theater was lit from the beginning. People were so into it, which was a really good way to see this movie. And people lost their shit at the ending, especially when T’Challa went. I’ve never heard a theater react this way...
I feel like that moment, the way they faked you out, you saw all these randoms on the battlefield going, and then you saw [T’Challa] go over, and then suddenly he goes—I thought that was so well done, that even though I immediately thought, there’s no way this is going to hold, it still worked so well in the moment that I was very glad I got to be there for it.
Evan: The look on Okoye’s face was just killer. Cause she was sworn to protect him. That’s her gig.
Kirk: That was part of what made it work so well, was seeing the reaction. I thought it was going to be her.
Evan: I want to go back to the stakes, and how this seemingly clichéd plot beat can actually matter. We don’t know what’s going to happen in Ant-Man [And The Wasp] or Captain Marvel. With Ant-Man, if this happens in a world after the Snapture—and I can’t take credit for that, that’s Glen Weldon at NPR—if this happens in a world where half the people are gone, people are mad scared...
Kirk: The Guilty Remnant is on the rise...
Evan: We can see the effect that this has. And if the next Avengers movie picks up like, where the hell are these people? What happened? Our superheroes lost. We can’t trust them to defend us anymore. If they play around in that space at all, I think that’d be a way of making it have stakes.
It’s funny cause when the first few happen, you’re like, “Oh shit.” And then you go to Titan and almost everybody there goes... You’re like, “it’s gonna keep going,” and that shit marches on, to the point where, at the end in the post-credits scene when Nick Fury disappears, you’re like, “Wow.”
Kirk: And it still somehow felt shocking when Nick went! People were still yelling “nooo!” Even though we’d seen everyone go by then, it was still shocking, which I think is testament just to how well done that whole sequence was, on a pure craft level.
Jason: And the whole effect of fading to dust looked really cool.
Kirk: Rather than them blinking out or dropping dead or whatever.
Jason: Clearly this all leads into The Leftovers, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they connect the two, especially how Carrie Coon’s character evolves.
Evan: I just want to see how they’re gonna address it on Arrested Development.
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