Jack of Harts

It’s been a couple weekends since the movie came out, so I figure it’s time to post what I think about this movie. It was fun. And it was tragic. And I don’t for a minute believe that any of it will stick. But that doesn’t take anything away from the good art in the movie. I was greatly entertained.

That does not mean there were no problems. John Ringo wrote a really good deconstruction of the movie from the military mindset, and he is right. The Wakandans need to seriously bone up on building a knowledge base of war fighting technologies and strategies. Just like I mockingly suggested that they might want to bone up on a Western innovation called elections and peaceful transfers of power after Black Panther came out.

In the end, the grand Wakandan army fought like a schoolyard rabble. Kindergarten, because they hadn’t figured out the basic tactics learned during grade school bullying yet. They had fully armed and operational drone controlled hoverfighters with missiles and other weapons in Black Panther. Never saw them here. Did not see any other mass gun emplacements. No artillery. No crew served weapons. They showed us cloaks that could be turned into energy shields and staffs that shot lasers like they were extras on a Star Gate SG-1.

Even if we assume they’d never figured out any kind of permanent defense installation outside the energy wall that protected them though, even just those last two technologies gave them the ability to at least fight up to the standards of an old Roman Legion. Something the West developed a couple thousand years ago. Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to see a hundred Wakandans marching into battle with their energy shields in a Roman turtle formation, shields protecting them from every direction except down, and sticking their staffs out between shields to blast every one of the mindless alien drones as they advanced? Or we could grab some of those armed hoverfighters from the earlier movie and perform some close air support ground saturation fire. AKA, lots and lots of bombs and missiles that turn everything and everyone into modern art.

Instead we see a mass charge of individual warriors into the teeth of an individually larger, stronger, and collectively more numerous alien foe. I’ve honestly seen more tactical genius out of a StarCraft Space Marine staring down a Zergling Rush with a battle rifle and a lit stogie. While he’s asking me what I want because I keep bugging him by clicking on him because I think it’s amusing when he’s pissed off at me.

A dazzling display of “Hollywood Military Tactics 101.”

Outside that, it was actually a pretty good movie with only a few headscratchers. Thanos is actually a pretty reasonable guy, and there are a number of Progressive groups who would consider him a true hero of humanity. He saw the universe as they do, a zero sum world where every being in existence uses up much needed resources and will cause the next generation to starve. The fix is, of course, to kill half the people in the universe so they stop being a drain on the universe’s finite resources. Why the answer is not “use the infinity stones created by the creation of the universe to double the universe’s natural resources” is probably because that would be a very boring end to the movie.

Instead, half the universe is dead now, and Disney is going to have get the band back together for another Avengers movie to find some way to save the universe and bring back all of the dead heroes. Because there is no way Disney is going to give all of them up now. They represent fresh faces in hundred-million dollar properties that cannot possibly be allowed to remain dead. They are cash cows and The House of Mouse will milk them like a Disney Princess charity ball. If they’d picked better deadees, I’d actually be worried that this was going to stick and the universe would really be left like this.

So, while a fun movie to watch, and enjoyable up until the very end when my face went from “yes” to “oh no”, it just lacks any real suspense. There is no “do you really think Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father” drama to this ending. There is simply an “it will not stand.” But, this is a comic book movie. So I’ll let it slide.

Over all, it was fun to watch. I’ll give it one Ironman fistbump for believability. What can I say? I’m feeling generous today. I’ll also give it a second one for just being fun to watch. So two fistbumps for the price of one. But I’m dearly hoping they hire some real military consultants next time. These movies could use them.