Avengers: Infinity War is set to continue Marvel Studio’s habit of breaking box office records. With an interesting villain and a “Holy crap” ending that fans will be talking about for years, few can deny the quality of this movie. Even so, the positive aspects of this movie cover up a few glaring plot holes and logical fails.
Spoilers below.
Why not other forms of population control?
In the movie, Thanos reveals that overpopulation destroyed his planet and believes it will destroy most worlds in the universe. His solution was to kill half of all people with the power of the Infinity Stones which make him a god.
These stones give Thanos the ability to instantly kill half the people in the universe by snapping his fingers. This being the case, why not snap his fingers and make it rain condoms in these worlds? Or make half the universe sterile?
Why not create more land, planets and resources?
The Infinity Stones appear to have no limits. In fact, Thanos was able to crush a planet and use its debris as a weapon before he even retrieved the last stone.
Yet he treats genocide as the only possible solution to imminent destruction when he clearly has the power to postpone that imminent destruction in time to implement a less Hitlery-ey solution (See above.)
Thanos indicates in the movie that mortals are incapable of reigning in their breeding and expansion (which is probably true), but this again discounts the many, many solutions offered by the Infinity Gauntlets and his divine powers.
It worked on Dormammu
Dr. Strange’s ability to create a 30-second Groundhog Day was destined to cause plot holes in every movie in which Strange appears. For example, he also could have used that stone several times in his own movie before the climax.
One could argue that the power of Thanos greatly exceeded that of Dormammu, but it seems odd that Strange never even tried it. Especially in the scene with Thanos stabbing stark that mirrored Strange’s confrontation with Dormammu.
We also saw that Strange looked into the future and saw only one possible way for The Avengers to “win” (Presumably through a plan that involved giving Thanos the stone,) but again, the movie never explains why such a powerful ability would not work with Thanos.
What makes Gamora so special?
In the movie, Thanos proves his love for Gamora (by throwing her off a cliff, but considering the test requirements it makes sense.) He cried before killing Gamora and the movie built up his feelings for her, even though she betrayed him and tried to kill him.
Yet he didn’t hesitate to torture Nebula, his other daughter. His reasons for torturing Nebula weren’t even to make Nebula talk, but to make Gamora talk. Instead of just torturing Gamora, he tortured Nebula and made Gamora watch.
Did Nebula’s mother cheat on Thanos? Did Thanos choose Gamora as his favorite because she’s just a scrappy dreamer who reminds him so much of himself as a kid? The movie never lets us in on the secret.
Do the worlds he already massacred get halved again?
When explaining his original plan for his home planet, Thanos demonstrated a sense of fairness (although a warped one) when he said his planet’s death lottery would have been completely random with no special consideration for the rich.
But it was established in the show that Thanos’ armies already decimated half the populations of several planets through the years. If his finger-snap genocide of half the population of the universe is truly random, these planets could find their populations reduced to one third.
Furthermore, are these genocides of each planet relative to the populations, or are all the people in the universe lumped in together with no consideration for the populations of their particular planets? If it’s the latter, and the chances of a person on each particular planet dying are measured against the population of the entire universe, then a planet with a population of only a few million could easily find itself wiped out completely if enough planets have populations of several billion or more.
Although the odds of high population planets getting off too easy are low, there are trillions of planets in the universe. Some of these 10-billion population planets would get off with the loss of only one billion simply by luck of the draw, still doomed to their supposed starvation deaths.
Unless they just moved to one of those planets Thanos wiped out completely with poor planning.
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