This post contains extensive spoilers for the ending of Avengers: Infinity War. If you do not wish to be spoiled, read no further.
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I don't trust you.
You're reading this, but you haven't seen Avengers: Infinity War yet, and you don't want to be spoiled. Even though this whole post is about discussing the ending.
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No, look, I'm onto you, bunky. You're either a risk-taker, a daredevil, who likes to live on the edge and right now you're getting your sick thrills off of riding the spoiler-lightning, or you just want to complain about how you got spoiled by some jerk on the NPR website.
This is your last warning. Turn back now.
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OK. The rest of you.
Oh god! They're all dead! So much death! Ashes to ashes! Etc.!
Thanos (a jacked, purple Josh Brolin and the CGI chin that launched a thousand anatomical jokes) collects all of the Infinity Stones and accomplishes his mission: With a snap of his fingers, he reduces the population of the universe by one half.
We watch as, one by one, several of our favorite heroes turn to ash and blow away in the wind. Oh no, so much death!
ATTENTION WE INTERRUPT THIS POST TO COIN THE TERM OF ART BY WHICH THIS FILM'S ENDING MUST AND SHOULD BE EXCLUSIVELY KNOWN FOREVERMORE, THROUGHOUT THE KNOWN AND UNKNOWN UNIVERSE, IN PERPETUITY:
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(wait for it)
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(it's so good you guys you have no idea)
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(are you ready)
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(I don't think you're ready)
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(here it comes)
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THE SNAPTURE
I know, you need a moment to catch your breath. I did, too. It's so good, that term. It gives off wiggly yellow rays of goodness. It cures halitosis. It walks the elderly across streets. It's so, so good.
The fact that they do not give out Pulitzers for coining terms just feels like a galling oversight now, doesn't it?
Anyway, back to the movie.
Here are ...
Six Reasons Why THE SNAPTURE(tm) Isn't Anything To Freak Out About:
1. I say this all the time: This is the superhero genre, in which death is not, as Hamlet called it, "that undiscover'd country/from whose bourn no traveler returns."
No: It's Tijuana, and there's a shuttle on the hour. They'll be back.
2. There is, in the world of the movie, a little thing called a Time Stone, an artifact of primordial power whose whole gig is playing with the flow of time.
3. That Time Stone was voluntarily surrendered by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who'd seen millions of potential outcomes. Cumberbatch didn't play that decision as an act of desperation — earlier in the film, Strange mentioned he'd protect the Stone over the lives of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Clearly, he's playing a long game, and set something in mystical motion that would survive his own Snapturing.
4. Outside the world of the movie, there's such a thing as a multi-picture contract. If you seriously think Marvel would let T'Challa go out like that, you're a T'Chump.
5. "We don't trade a life for a life." That line turns up several times in the film, without a real payoff. That's because — pure speculation now — it will get paid off, in Avengers 4, next summer.
If I were a betting man, I'd say that the lives that will be surrendered to reverse the Snapture will be those of the two Founding Fathers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Both actors will have fulfilled their contracts, and as Marvel shifts to Phase Four, it will leave them, and their universe-shattering salaries, behind.
6. In that post-credits scene in which Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) get Snaptured, Fury's last act is paging Brie Larson's Captain Marvel. That film, which will come out next March, is set in the 1990s. More time-shenanigans!
So: As we settle in for a long, post-Snapture year of waiting to see how the Snaptured heroes and hangers-on go about getting un-Snaptured, take some comfort in the fact that Thanos just snapped his fingers once.
Imagine if he were a fan of beat poetry. Now, that would be carnage.
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