Immoral, Mindless Garbage

Rating: 1/10 (29 September 2018)

I rarely write movie reviews, but I had to speak up about this one. The Avengers franchise seems to represent the moral decline that has been happening in America and around the world for the last couple of decades. The story is almost meaningless. The "super-villain" Thanos, if he's telling the truth about his beliefs, probably suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. The morally weak heroes, mostly white and mostly male, seem more like criminals or villains themselves than actual heroes. The only adult in the room, Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross, is treated by the so-called heroes as if he's either bad or doesn't know what he's doing. He is sidelined by the vigilante "heroes" whose only skills involve hitting, kicking, punching, smashing, destroying, and other types of violence. Doctor Strange for some insane reason just hands the Time Stone to Thanos on a silver platter, when he could have withheld it. He also magically looks at the future and sees millions of possible permutations of this scenario, but only one in which "we" win, but never tells the audience what those permutations are, as if Strange somehow knows much better than we do, and doesn't trust us with that information. The relationship between Peter Parker (Spiderman/Spiderboy) and Tony Stark (Iron Man) seems codependent and Stockholm-Syndromy. The conflict in the story; that a single person, with a group of magic stones from the dawn of the universe, and a magic gauntlet, could somehow wipe out half of the population of the universe with a single snap of the fingers; is utterly implausible and thus is false conflict. When a story only has false conflict, then it basically has no conflict.
One of my greatest concerns is that many young people hold these Marvel superheroes up as personal role models. Many parents these days are overwhelmed with the pressures and hardships of modern life, and it's very hard to counter these bad role models which appear in modern pop culture. My youngest son, who is now eighteen years old, seemed to love this movie, and it was difficult for me to explain to him just how bad it really was. He's inexperienced and naive, and it's hard for him to understand that these self-described "heroes" were anything but. Throughout the film, I wished that these "heroes" would just step aside and let law enforcement do their job. The cliff-hanger at the end was obviously just a scheme to get us to pay to see another installment or two of this garbage. Fortunately, we just rented it on Amazon, so we weren't out too much money, but I think we'll skip the next couple of movies, thank you very much.