This post is nothing but atomic spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.
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A Place for Spoilery Us Screaming
I’m going to put all my screaming about this movie in the comments of this post, because it contains ATOMIC SPOILERS. If you want to read my non-spoilery short thoughts, I made a public post on Patreon about it here.
(Comment moderation has been temporarily turned off so people can talk more freely. Please no one make me regret it!)
The US space program and more specifically the first moon landing (Apollo 11) has gotten a lot of play in various films and documentaries because it’s a Really Big Deal. As much as I love basically everything adjacent to the space program (hello, Hidden Figures) I gave First Man a miss because I didn’t really feel like it was going to tell me anything new or interesting about the event.
Apollo 11 is a little different. It’s not a feature film that promises to have its female cast mostly staring anxiously at the radio. It’s a documentary, rather than a fictionalization of a well-explored historical event. There have also been quite a few space program documentaries… so what makes this one worth seeing?
I’m not going to claim that I’ve seen the breadth of all Apollo 11-related documentaries, but this one certainly feels different. It comprises almost entirely original (and beautifully-restored) footage and audio. The only additions are little things like name labels to let us know who people are, or countdown clocks, or velocimeters to give context to just what acceleration or braking mean at particular points. There are a few times we get simple line-drawing illustrations of what a maneuver the capsule is about to do looks like, since there’s no exterior footage. There’s some music, which occasionally drowns out the audio for dramatic effect in a way that works rather than being annoying. Apollo 11 viewed on the big screen is probably the closest any of us who weren’t born before the launch can get to actually experiencing it.
It’s history, relying only on its inherent drama rather than anything added. It’s a massive compliment to the director and editor that even though we already know how the mission goes before we ever set foot in the theater, it still feels tense and dramatic and like the massive undertaking that it was. The documentary isn’t just interested in what’s going on in the capsule either; we see people buying Krispy Kreme donuts and Cokes as they wait for the launch. We get low-res camera footage of technicians checking a leaking valve before launch. We spend a lot of time in the tense focus of mission control. And we see a different angle on Neil Armstrong as he goes down the lander’s ladder than most of us are used to seeing. Be prepared for some serious Space Feelings. It’s beyond worth seeing. If you’re like me, it’s borderline spiritual.
The end of the documentary is a quote taken from John F. Kennedy’s Rice Stadium speech about going to the moon. And again, it’s not everyone’s favorite soundbite from the speech. Instead, it’s:
But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.
https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm
It’s a deliberate film, and it’s a deliberate quote to end on. Apollo 11 is about the United States undertaking a task that, when described, sounds absolutely ridiculous and impossible. It’s a task we know that we achieved, on one hand for uglier reasons of Cold War fear and national pride and on the other, for the lofty stated goal of peace for all mankind. Apollo 11 comes at a time when we are faced with far larger, more frightening, more immediate, and more existential challenges, and it reminds us that we are great, and creative, and we can do damn near anything we put out minds to. From 50 years in the past, it offers us a vision of what we can do.
Then we must be bold.
Surprising no one, I fucking loved Captain Marvel. I’m tentatively saying it’s my third favorite MCU movie after Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, but I’ll need to see it a few times to be sure. It’s kind of arm wrestling with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Which it honestly has a lot in common with, in the sense that it has an incredibly strong emotional arc for the main character, and in Captain Marvel’s case, it’s not your typical someone struggling with becoming a hero and the responsibilities of their newfound power thing that happens in most first movies for a superhero character.
This is because when we first see her, Carol Danvers is already a hero. She’s already powerful. And she knows it. It’s not about her trying to slot newfound power into an identity she already has, but rather her fighting bare-fisted to establish her own identity around what everyone else wants her to be.
I’m not here to talk about the cinematography of the film or the fight scenes or the rest of it. If you’ve seen an MCU film before, you already know what you’re getting in that regard. What I want to talk about is how feminist the movie is. And I mean REALLY feminist, and not in the superficial way we’re used to seeing “feminism” and female “strength” depicted in action properties that more often than not involves a male director and a male writer deciding that the best way for a woman to be strong is to put on leather pants and commit a lot of violence, unsubtly rejecting femininity as a whole.
This is not to say that Carol Danvers is particularly girly as a character. In fact, she’s depicted as being quite a tomboy. But the point in Captain Marvel is that her being a tomboy who grew up with dirt in her hair isn’t what makes her powerful. It’s just part of who she is, and there’s no judgment on it either way, from the character or through the lens of the film. Her ability to commit violence and the raw power she has access to, while useful, is also very much not the point.
But what I really want to dig into means SPOILERS. So continue at your own risk. Or go see the movie and come back, I’ll still be here.
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I have a lot of feelings about Dumplin’
I saw Dumplin’ on Netflix last weekend thanks to Sarah Gailey, and I’m glad since I might never have gotten around to it otherwise.
If you don’t know about Dumplin’, it’s about a fat girl named Willowdean (Danielle MacDonald) who is the daughter of a former beauty queen (Rosie, played by Jennifer Aniston) who is still deeply embedded in the pageant circuit and culture. As you can imagine, mother and daughter have some conflicting interests. Willowdean was much closer to her Aunt Lucy (Hilliary Begley), a beautiful and vivacious fat woman who instilled in her an absolute love of Dolly Parton… and who had recently died. In an act of grief and defiance, Willowdean decides to enter this year’s beauty pageant, along with her best friend Ellen (Odeya Rush), and two girls who also definitely don’t fit the pageant scene: defiantly queer Hannah (Bex Taylor-Klaus), and Millie (Maddie Baillio) who is extremely earnest about everything and also a fat girl.
So basically I’m going to spoil everything about this movie, so just go and watch it because it’s really fucking good.
Any movie that involves fat characters, especially fat female characters, is one I approach with caution. I’ve been burned way too many times by narratives that hinge on a girl “becoming” beautiful by losing weight. Or by the fat girl being the thin girl’s accessory. Or by the fat girl being the butt of the jokes instead of the one who makes them. Add that the whole thing centers around a beauty pageant and I would have been wary about picking it up on my own.
But the thing about Dumplin’ is that it’s one of those movies that constantly defies the expectations that have been drilled into us as an audience. For example, I spent the whole movie expecting Willowdean’s love interest Bo (Luke Benward), who is a traditional white teen guy hottie, to turn on her and be using her to score points, or because he expects her to be easy, or any of the horrible stuff that normally happens to fat girl characters. And it never happens. Bo’s earnest, and good, and… well, getting in to my own feelings as a fat person, there’s an amazing scene where Willowdean asks him why the hell he would want to be with her considering how she looks. Which is one of those moments where the movie got just too fucking real. I’ve had that conversation before. I’ve felt the disbelief that even when someone says they like you for your whole self, you think that can’t possibly be true. Willowdean’s someone that’s grown up in the same fat-hating culture as the rest of us (and it’s on display in the movie in horrible, familiar ways), with the added fun of having an image-conscious, incredibly thin mother.
(A mother who eagerly blames Aunt Lucy’s death on the fact that she was fat in an argument I felt like a punch in the gut.)
The movie does that with a lot of choices, taking the unexpected route that steps around cheap inter-character drama rather than following the familiar tropes. It’s also a massive meditation on friendship, and the strength of bonds between girls. We see Willowdean and her friend Ellen grow up together, solid friends into their teens. Ellen decides to participate in the pageant earnestly, and not as a way to try to destroy it. She and Willowdean get in a pretty nasty argument about things, where Willowdean basically calls out Ellen for being thing and says that people who look like Ellen (beautiful in a conventional sense) don’t have a place in the revolution.
The easy and expected route would be for them to be at odds for the rest of the movie. Instead, Willowdean apologizes and says she misses Ellen. And Ellen accepts the apology but says she’s still too mad to talk immediately… and Willowdean respects it. Then later, they’re back to being arm and arm, facing the world together. Like holy fucking shit, give me some more friendship like that. Give me teen girls having each other’s backs, because it’s them against the world. Give me teen girls that know they have different experiences of the world and use that difference to be even closer. I’m tearing up just thinking about it, because it was beautiful.
The sort of open heart that the film has about teen girls/young women being complex people with deep inner lives really does extend outside of Ellen and Willowdean. Millie is an actual precious cinnamon roll in human form, yet she is also without a doubt the most absolutely determined and implacable character on screen. Hannah’s a fucking adorable baby queer trapped in a small town, who goes from doing everything with full, angry irony to finding her own balance of earnest participation and still absolutely being herself. Watching Hannah and Millie become friends in the background is a fucking amazing story on its own. (And I would also totally ship it.)
And even the rest of the girls in the pageant aren’t reduced to caricature even if we don’t know their stories. It’s another moment where the film could have taken the expected route, making a bunch of teenage pageant participants into raging, catty bitches, and sidesteps that. They’re welcoming, and they believe in what they’re doing. Hell, there’s a scene where Willowdean shows her talent (a magic trick) in front of everyone and I wanted to die of transmitted embarrassment because she does so badly… which is the point because at that point, she’s not taking things seriously and hasn’t practiced. But the scene is actually a thousand times more uncomfortable not because the girls in the audience are being nasty, but because they convey that they really want her to do better, and that’s so much worse.
The movie does critique pageant culture for the way it excludes fat girls and is often used to make them feel worse about themselves. The scene where Willowdean signs up for the pageant, where the women in charge make it very clear that she does not belong here with tone and expression, is exactly what you’d expect. Yet the critique comes from a place of love rather than misogyny, which is where a lot of criticism of pageants loses its way. It’s possible to criticize fat-shaming and promotion of eating disorders without denigrating the idea that some people might find embracing that branch of femininity, with its sparkling dresses, empowering.
Ultimately, Dumplin’ embraces the beauty pageant as a place that allows Millie particularly to realize her potential by singing her heart out and looking goddamn fabulous in a dress. It touches on how important events like that can be in fairly small towns–so big in a girl’s life that even twenty-some years later, it’s the biggest accomplishment that Rosie’s ever had and it’s made her dedicate herself to shepherding other girls that way. And it presents its own vision of the world as it should be, with Millie placing in the pageant to thunderous applause because she goddamn well deserves it.
Which curiously, circles back around to Aunt Lucy, whose presence never leaves the film. Rosie has hit the stage of grief where she wants to get rid of Lucy’s old possessions; Willowdean isn’t quite there yet, which is another point of friction. And she wants to find a broach of Lucy’s that looks like a bee, something she always wore. Willowdean joins the pageant on a half-formed whim when she finds some paperwork among the boxes that shows Aunt Lucy was going to do the pageant the same year Rosie did… and mysteriously dropped out. The natural assumption in that moment is that Lucy didn’t make it into the pageant because of her weight… and so Willowdean decides to do it herself, to complete her lost aunt’s dream and to also get a kind of revenge, since Willowdean believes the pageant is bullshit and wants to prove it.
What we eventually come to find is that Lucy dropped out of the pageant not because she was forced out, but because the family couldn’t afford even one suitable dress, and so she dropped out and made one for Rosie herself–the one Rosie still wears every year. And in the end, Willowdean finds her own meaning in the pageant by embracing it to the point that she gets herself disqualified by doing an unapproved and incredible magic performance. Which sure seems like something that would have made Lucy proud, while still being very Willowdean. And Rosie finds she can no longer fit into her teen pageant dress… but she goes on stage (in a borrowed dress) wearing Lucy’s broach. Both of them are letting go, and changing, and still keeping the person they loved in their life in a positive way.
All this, and you get Dolly Parton drag queens too. And a ton of great Dolly Parton songs. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier. I just have a lot of feelings, okay?
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[Movie] Mary Poppins Returns
Look, Mary Poppins Returns is a Mary Poppins movie, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you just read the fucking title of it. There’s a sequence where Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) and Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda) dance with a bunch of animated characters. There’s silly, surreal sequences involving bathtubs and balloons. There’s a lot of singing. There’s a whole big number where a bunch of working class London dudes dance and do some BMX stunts, except this time around they’re “leeries” instead of chimney sweeps. It’s approximately thirty years into the future of the first Mary Poppins, so Michael Banks has his own kids and Jane Banks gets to wear trousers.
Plot-wise, and the plot isn’t terribly complicated because it’s there to hold all the musical numbers together, it’s about Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) trying to save his family house after his wife has died and he’s been bad about keeping up the bills while caring for their three children. It’s during the Great Slump (aka the Great Depression in the UK) so he doesn’t exactly have a lot of job options; he works part-time as a teller for an evil banker played by Colin Firth, who is the same guy who wants to repossess Michael’s house. Mary Poppins shows up to reignite the joy in the family and incidentally help them not lose their home.
It’s like the original Mary Poppins, but a bit more pacey. Lin-Manuel MIranda gets to do a tiny bit of rap, even though he had nothing to do with the lyrics, which we can all breathe a sigh of relief about. I mean, it’s just really nice? And suitable for small children? And very colorful. The costume design was really great, especially what they did during the animated sequence.
Really, it’s all cute wrapping paper for the fact that Mary Poppins is a terrifying eldritch being that descends to earth once a generation, spreads a particular kind of madness around, and then leaves once she is on the receiving end of enough laughter from people whose reality she’s utterly broken. Okay, look:
- She descends to earth from the heavens in a terrifying shadow, one foot cocked up as if about to tap impatiently because it’s been so long since she’s had some delicious mortal souls.
- She spends all of her time taking the kids on strange adventures that, when the children try to describe them later, she tells them that of course these things didn’t happen.
- She bends reality around herself. Mirrors don’t respond properly, etc.
- There’s an entire song she sings (while in the trippy cartoon realm) about not judging a book by its cover. Sure, it’s a warning about Douchebag McBankerface, but more importantly, she’s delivering a winking warning about herself. Don’t judge her by her charming exterior when it’s actually just a flesh bag that contains an unending sea of glittery, chthonic madness.
- At the end of this film, Angela Lansbury gives her a fucking bright red balloon like she’s fucking Pennywise the Clown because JESSICA FLETCHER KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKING UP
But come on, it’s not like any of this is a surprise if you saw the first movie. It’s very consistent. The one thing that isn’t consistent, that’s still bothering the heck out of me, is an almost throw-away line at the end of the film. I guess count it as a SPOILER if you’re really concerned.
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Christmas 2018 Airplane Movies, part 1
I love international flights because they give me a reason to sit in one place for long enough to watch multiple movies. On the way over to the UK, I only watched two new ones because I made the attempt to sleep. With as much sleep as I got (about an hour and a half), I should have just watched more movies.
Ocean’s 8
I kept meaning to see Ocean’s 8 in the theater and just never got around to it. I think that was before I had regular access to a car, so that’s my excuse. Am I sorry I only saw it on the tiny screen of an airplane? Ehhhh… it’s a fun movie, that’s for sure. I mean, if you like the other Ocean’s movies, you’ll no doubt enjoy this one. If for no other reason than to watch Cate Blanchett strut around in a variety of beautifully tailored trousers. It’s got a heist, it’s got a ton of talented women in it. It’s light fluff that I enjoyed in the moment but really can’t remember much about now… other than Cate Blanchett. And I did love there was at least a nod to the importance and strength of friendships between women, even if I never quite felt like the group gelled as well as I would have liked. I’ll be happy to watch it again the next time I see it’s around on Netflix.
Searching
Saw the preview for it in front of an Alamo Drafthouse movie, and I was interested. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see Searching before now. John Cho plays a dad whose daughter has gone missing, and he’s frantically searching for her while realizing just how much distance has grown between the two of them since the death of his wife two years ago. The conceit of Searching actually works pretty well… the film is told entirely via interactions on a computer: text messages, chats, facetime calls, streaming videos, etc. There’s a time or two where it feels like the scope of the action is fighting the format a little, but it honestly doesn’t feel as contrived as I expected. John Cho does an amazing job, and the twist was actually not one I expected. It’s great to see a dad searching for his daughter in a way that doesn’t go all Taken and feels quite authentic. I do want to see it again when I can find it on Netflix or Hulu, because the tiny airplane seat screen made it hard to read some of the text-based stuff for the story. (Apparently this caused me to entirely miss a sort of easter eggy subplot.) Definitely recommend.
Also, I watched Crazy Rich Asians again. It’s still fucking adorable.
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[Movie] Anna and the Apocalypse
The pitch is: Shaun of the Dead meets High School Musical. In Scotland.
If you’re like, “FUCK YEAH GIVE ME THAT IN THE FACE” then you’re going to like this movie. If a zombie musical with Christmas visual jokes sounds awful to you, I’m not going to try to change your mind. This movie absolutely is what it is, and it leans hard on the musical trope of people randomly singing and doing choreographed dance routines, then continuing on with their lives as if nothing at all weird has happened.
Regular kid Anna wants to get out of her little town of Haven in Scotland; her goal is to escape to Australia and travel for a bit, though she assures her janitor dad that she’ll be back and will go to University. (He is, as you can imagine, not convinced.) Anna’s friends/compatriots have their own problems: Steph is a socially awkward lesbian who just wants to bring attention to important social issues while having no idea how to interact with normal humans; John is in love with Anna and just wants to go to art school; Chris needs to figure out how to emotionally connect with the subjects he’s filming and find their humanity; Lisa wants Chris to show up for her when she needs him and for Anna to buck up; and Nick is just a douchebag. Oh, and there’s a new headmaster taking over the school, the bushily-bearded Savage, who is a total dick when the movie starts and just gets worse.
Then the zombie apocalypse happens. In a slight reversal, most of the kids are trapped outside of the school and are coming in to rescue their loved ones, while inside the building things are getting… touchy.
It’s very much the kind of movie it is. If watching comedic gore and Yes-Belive-Us-They’re-Totally-Teenagers deal with their emotional issues sounds good to you, you’re going to have a lot of fun with this. The music’s poppy and engaging; I got earwormed pretty bad by one of the songs for about two days after seeing it. If it sounds not fun to you, I’m not going to try to change your mind.
I think what was an interesting angle in the film was the conflict between the headmaster, Savage, and Anna’s dad, Tony. It’s very much something you could read as a north vs south (UK style), educated middle class vs working class conflict, the the upper class dude (Savage) at one particularly horrific point calling Tony a “pleb” as other very bad things are happening. Though Lisa provides the moral center of the film in an absolutely memorable exchange with Savage, which occurs because Lisa is concerned about the heart condition one of the people trapped in the school has. It goes something like this (per my unreliable memory):
Savage: And what does society do when things start to fall apart?
Lisa: We help each other.
Savage: We prioritize.
I’m betting here that Savage is a Tory. Just saying.
As with many horror-comedy movies, the horror wins out a bit over the comedy in the end. Just don’t get too attached to a lot of the characters is the moral here. But some of the comedy is screamingly funny, with the big winner being Lisa’s song at the Christmas show, which is incredibly, hilariously dirty and involves dancing boys wielding large candy canes in absolutely mortifying ways. About all I wanted out of the film that I didn’t get (other than happy endings for several of the characters I liked, which is just not going to happen because… horror) was more of a character arc for doucheboy Nick. I think the movie was trying to aim at something and didn’t quite succeed, maybe because there wasn’t quite enough room in its lean, 93-minute run time.
[JUST ONE SPOILER BELOW]
As a free service to my fellow queers, however, I’m happy to inform you that the lesbian doesn’t die.
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[Movie] Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Hopefully by now, you’ve had at least one friend shriek at you on Twitter or Facebook about how fucking GOOD this movie is. If not, consider me that friend. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is fucking amazing. It’s definitely the best Spider-Man movie I’ve ever seen. It’s quite possibly the best animated movie I’ve ever seen. It’s in the running to be the best movie I’ve seen all year, and it’s without a doubt the most fun I’ve had at a movie since Thor: Ragnarok.
So that should give you some kind of idea what we’re talking about here. I generally don’t watch animated movies and don’t like them that much, I think because I don’t tend to connect to the characters well for some reason. Or maybe I just don’t find the plots compelling. Maybe the emotional stakes don’t tend to work for me. I don’t know. Combination of factors perhaps. So it’s a Big Fucking Deal when I tell you that I LOVED this movie, that it made me tear up three times because it had so much emotional truth to it, and not just because like someone’s dad got whacked and the actors were really convincing.
I’m hoping this is a movie that’s going to get all of the ticket sales it deserves because of people like me, howling about how damn good it is at all of their friends and family. Because let me tell you, I couldn’t have been less interested in the trailer, which made it look like a cute-but-forgettable direct-to-dvd release that had unaccountably gotten bucked into theaters. I could not have given less of a shit about this movie until I saw Venom… because for whatever reason, they’d nailed about five minutes of Into the Spider-Verse on after the credits and I’d stayed to watch it in case there was a credit cookie. THEN I was hooked.
So why is it good?
The plot on its face sounds cartoonishly wacky. Ordinary (but brilliant) high school student Miles Morales gets bitten by a radioactive spider while he and his uncle are putting up some graffiti art in an abandoned area in the subway. Hijinks ensue, and then by accident Miles runs into Peter Parker Spider-Man as he’s trying to stop Kingpin from using a giant McGuffin machine to connect to all the alternate universes in an attempt to get his wife and kid back. During the fight, the machine instead yanks several Spider-People from other universes into Miles’s: Spider-Gwen, a schlubby burnout version of Spider-Man, Spider-Man Noir (voiced AMAZINGLY by Nic Cage), Penny Parker (an anime girl from future NYC who pilots a spider mecha), and Spider-Ham (a Warner-Brothers-esque 2D animated pig). They all join forces to save the world.
Yeah, I know. I wasn’t convinced either.
What summarizing the plot can’t do without spoilers is explain the massive, beating heart of emotion that moves this film. All of the various Spider-People get their own mini-arc, and Miles struggles to find his place in his own life, in his powers, in his family, and in the rest of the world. A lot of superhero movies give lip service to the idea that they’re a blown-out metaphor for the way the ordinary actions of regular people are still important. This is the first one I’ve seen that actually believed it, and really questioned what heroism is in the context, up to and including self-sacrifice.
Into the Spider-Verse gives us a vision of what it means to be a blue-collar hero in the modern world in the most life-like New York City I’ve ever seen in a Spider-Man movie. Miles’s dad is a cop and his mom is a nurse (neither of them are white) and they’re both moving heaven and earth to put him in a more upper class school that the obviously doesn’t feel comfortable in. The movie addresses the trauma of survival, the need to accept pain and not being defined by it, the true power of personal connections and sense of self, and the vital necessity of empathy. I could go on forever about Miles’s relationship with his dad alone, but I don’t want to spoil it.
And as a work of art of itself, it’s fucking gorgeous. As someone who is no aficionado of animation, I won’t make claims about if something is groundbreaking or not. But this was an animated movie that felt like it really lived in the medium and made very specific artistic choices because it exists so comfortably in its own skin. It freely references comic book tropes, mixes 2D and 3D animation to great effect, and even does some absolutely gorgeous shots that look almost like traditional cell animation with a painted background. I was blown away by it. Even just little things, like the way the animation has halftone gradient effects subtly all through it.
Oh yeah, and it’s fucking HILARIOUS.
I was not prepared for this movie and what it did to my heart while I was laughing hysterically. I don’t think you can be. And I haven’t even touched on the spoilers–let’s talk about challenging expectations and examining preconceptions–because for once I’m glad I went into something unspoiled.
You should go see it.
I’ll admit, I was having a hard time getting hyped up about Infinity War as we approached it. First I thought that Black Panther had stolen all my excitement, but once the movie was past, still didn’t feel that enthused. I just kept looking at Infinity War and thinking oh god this is going to be a train wreck. Just too many characters in something movie-length.
Well, having seen it, I can now tell you that past me was wrong. The movie actually did a really good job of fitting in all the characters and giving most of them at least a moment or two. This was accomplished by splitting them up into several groups, and then interweaving the individual plots of those groups to build up to the Epic Battle(TM). That worked way better than I could have imagined; it was fun, the right people got put together for neat interactions, and I never found it confusing.
No, I’ve got completely different reasons that I’m not happy with this movie.
The plot, by the way, is that Thanos is a dick and wants the Infinity Stones so he can make half the people in the universe, determined by RNG, instantly die. Because scarce resources, something something no one ever bothers really arguing with his philosophy. The good guys think this is a bad idea, and thus there is conflict and a lot of punching.
There were things I really liked, which are the standard things you get out of any MCU film: some damn fun dialog from characters I like and good fight scenes. I did genuinely enjoy myself at places.
If you want to know what I didn’t like, well. That’s spoiler territory. Read at your own risk if you haven’t seen the film yet. And also let’s keep in mind that I’m totally allowed to have my opinion and you’re totally allowed to disagree because different people relate to pieces of art differently! *throws confetti*
ATOMIC SPOILERS INCOMING, TURN BACK NOW TO SAVE YOURSELF.