there’s no point in killing steve rogers off tbh!!!! we get it already!!!! We get how fucking selfless and good hearted and reckless and borderline suicidal he is sometimes!!!!! we’ve watched him Suffer since tfa. we’ve seen him fight and fight some more. we have seen him wonder if there is anything beyond war. we already know if given the chance he would make the ultimate sacrifice bc that’s who he is bc he’s always seen his life as disposable!!!! It’s so shitty in general if marvel decides to kill him off, but also so predictable???? like???? @marvel b brave and let steve rogers live
The Thor and Loki fandom(s) were saying all this before Infinity War, and guess what happened?
i cant bear it. to me he will live forever. shame on marvel and the russo brothers. to take tom hiddleston’s loki and just strike him down as if he were nothing. he deserved better. jmo of course.
I feel it’s going to be a very long year with all of this. They don’t want us to think any different with Loki (or the others). He died but I have to ask is he really? I hurt when I think about him not being alive but I have faith in Tom and Loki or I will go to a place I don’t want to. Which I have since the movie. His character is what I connect with so much. I can’t believe he will be gone. If he is, it’s sloppy and hurtful on Marvels part.
To what Josh said I’m going on my own and saying he may have meant the last scene that Loki was in, in IW. Tom or any of the actors can’t say they are alive or anything more about IW 4. I’m holding on to that to get me through the next year. It’s hard hearing this stuff but I almost wonder if the studio isn’t doing it on purpose. Especially with this week of Kevin saying there won’t be any of the “dusted” characters in the trailer, waiting until the end of the year on the title, and now this interview. It’s like they want us to get mad and upset. It’s actually getting very tiring for me lately.
I’m getting so exhausted by it all that I almost don’t want to be a fan anymore. I mean, like a fan of whatever’s coming next. Just leave me with Avengers Assemble and I’ll pretend Loki died in TDW. I just don’t want to deal with any of this drama or entertain the possibility that Loki’s… dead.
I honestly don’t feel anything anymore. Just tired of it all.
I am also emotionally exhausted by all of this. This was once an extremely pleasurable distraction. It now feels like something from which I will need to recover. To say that I was horrified by the way they killed this character is an understatement of immeasurable proportions. I am disgusted that any person or entity would create something so beautiful, only so they could destroy it.
Everything @mentallydatingahotcelebrity and @juliabohemian said. I’ve reached a point where I honestly don’t care about any future MCU movies. I don’t care what’s going to happen in A4. I don’t care about new characters. I’m done with MCU.
Seriously, fuck these idiots. They play to the lowest common denominator; they don’t deserve what they had with Tom Hiddleston, Kenneth Branagh, or Joss Whedon, and it’s no wonder they didn’t know what to do with it. They decided their best writers were Markus & McFeely, the fuckwits whose idea of moral complexity is either Bucky, a characterless brainwashed victim, or Thanos, a massive fail at “sympathetic” villain. They think Steve’s moral self-certainty is a strength, not an obnoxious and frankly dangerous flaw. They make character subservient to plot and plot to action setpiece, and when they try to deal with complex philosophical issues, it’s like overconfident idiot freshmen pontificating based on what they read on Wikipedia.
It doesn’t mean Brolin (and Thanos) didn’t enjoy crunching the Hulk
with a cheap-shot kick — “I love that Thanos uses a knee. That was
great.” And Brolin was cool with choking out demigod Loki (Tom
Hiddleston), a longtime Marvel favorite. All of this in the first
10 minutes of “Infinity War.”
Brolin says he did have sympathy for Hiddleston, who was “obsessed” with nailing what looks to be his last scene as Loki.
“He had been with that character for so long. And he’s so
lauded for doing it,” says Brolin. “Tom was so vulnerable at that
moment. So choking him out wasn’t the most fun thing I have ever done.”
But Brolin loves the fan furor on the internet over his lightning rod characters, especially Thanos.
“On Instagram people are posting things like, ‘I hate
you,’ ” says Brolin. “That’s fantastic. I’m, like, the one guy who
smiles when he sees that. It’s like, ‘It worked.’ ”
“What looks to be his last scene”? What happened to the flashbacks in Avengers 4? Were those filmed earlier? Or does it mean last in the fictional timeline, since clearly Marvel has no intention of using whatever time travel shenanigans happen in Avengers 4 to bring back Loki along with the dusted folks?
P.S. clearly Josh Brolin has more respect and compassion for Tom and his/Loki’s fans than the assholes responsible for producing the enormous stinking turd that was “Infinity War” (i.e., Markus & McFeely, the Russos, and Feige).
Tom is too fucking nice. He should have fought for his character the way RDJ does. I want to hear him say that the makers of the last two movies did him and his work an injustice.
He said he’s known that loki dies in infinty war since before Ragnarok!
Yeah, OK. Did he know he would die gruesomely in the first 5 minutes while doing something incredibly stupid and out of character?
I really, really wish Joss Whedon had still been writing it. He would have given Loki a meaningful role to play in bringing down Thanos – after all, he was the one who planted the connection between them, and he knew what a treasure he had in Hiddleston. He made Loki the sole villain in “The Avengers” after he saw some of the work he had done in “Thor.” He would have given Loki a good death, worthy of the intelligence and complexity of his character.
IT JUST BOILS DOWN TO WHAT TYPE OF VILLAIN MOST PEOPLE WILL CONSIDER ‘BEST’ AND A COOL, WITTY, RELATABLE AND UNDERSTANDABLE VILLAIN WHO HAPPENS TO ALSO BE ATTRACTIVE WILL WIN THOSE NUMBERS EVERY TIME it’s just human nature!
Also, Thanos ended up being incredibly lame and Markus & McFeely’s attempts to make him “sympathetic” went over like a lead balloon.
Yep, Tom 1.0 definitely knows how to keep secrets.
Tom 2.0 is a sweetheart, though.
Look, as a fucking grown up, I’m ready to face it if it’s true. As a fan girl, I’m still hanging onto to the fact that if he hid Loki’s death from us for two years, he could he hiding further information about his return.
^^^ THIS
Yeah, I fucking wish. But between the gratuitous graphic gruesomeness of his death, that highly unusual bit of fourth-wall-breaking (“No resurrections this time”), and the way they allowed Loki’s character to be neutered in both Ragnarok and Infinity War, the powers that be at Marvel Studios have made it quite clear how they feel about Loki and his fans.
OR, How I Can’t Stop Thinking About Loki’s Grotesque End in Infinity War and Why It Doesn’t Sit Right In the Cinematic Universe
I get the WHY. But not the HOW.
Constantly thinking about this is what inspired me actually the other day to writeup this post (re: Zara in Jurassic World) because that was the last time a movie death made me feel queasy and I have seen SO MANY MOVIES in the last three years.
It’s not like characters in both JP and the MCU aren’t disposed of all the time but generally films follow a rule of the punishment fitting the crime.This BirthMoviesDeath article elaborates on this concept and the Jurassic deaths really well and aligns with how I’m going to be talking about Loki here. This isn’t a rule based in life obviously or even in all movies, but it is established in popcorn blockbusters which these indisputably are. In Zara’s case, there was exactly zero respect for the fact that she was just a flighty nanny when the movie ran her through an absolute horror show. And it stood out like a sore thumb.
In Loki’s case, it’s obvious that this film’s “reasoning” for his dying was to fuel Thor who didn’t really need it and to show off their Bigger Stronger Newer Villain. Fine. I anticipated all of that. It’s somewhat lazy, but it is an effective shorthand for those story points.
The disturbing thing here though is Loki hasn’t been a proper villain in years. In fact, in 2017 he moved to full on hero status in the last act of Ragnarok— and even when he was at Peak Villain, he was not a torturer. TELL THAT TO AGENT COULSON OR THE ONE-EYED DOCTOR IN GERMANY, LAUREN! I WILL GET TO BOTH, HUSH. So that’s what makes his death so disproportionately upsetting. It is, for lack of a better term, overkill.
His largest scale villainy was the invasion in the first Avengers where his personal kills were instant blasts of energy, and presumably the fallout of destroyed buildings. The former isn’t in the torture range, the latter’s impact is cinematically blunted by the Marvel universe rarely showing the injuries in large scale invasions or going to great lengths to have their heroes evacuate the affected areas and that distinction matters here.
So let’s go through how it DID go down and how it could have gone without leaving the audience needlessly wincing five minutes in and weeks after.
Sorry in advance by the way, because in the end of my analysis and my suggestions for how this might have been better handled, Loki’s neck is still broken.
To date myself, I said Loki got “Jenny-Calendar’ed”. And they could have easily done this as quickly (you still get to use that gross sound effect, Russo team!) but INSTEAD we have: (And if you don’t feel like reliving this, go ahead and skip over the bullet points)
Loki is picked up by the throat and begins kicking like a helpless animal
We watch as Loki’s eyes bulge and he struggles to speak
He does get out a final line though his face is practically blue
Thanos cracks his neck with his thumb and a sickening sound effect
The camera does not cut away, we see Loki’s face and frame go slack
Thanos does not drop Loki, but instead walks the ragdoll-like body in frame, to drop him in front of his brother.
Loki brandishes the eye snatching device and brings it down upon the terrified doctor but the film cuts away from the victim and focuses on Loki’s grin as the onlookers scatter. The most we see of this act is an obscured shot of the German man’s body twitching (also, if I recall correctly, the blu-ray captions say “squelching sounds.” Ick).
I bring this up only because I was struggling to find an act that Loki did on screen where what he dealt out was comparably as grotesque as to what happened to him. Only the first Avengers didn’t amplify this violence by—and you could just IMAGINE the outcry that would have happened if instead—Loki pulled out the device, he rammed it into the doctor’s face, we then STAYED on the doctor and watched his eye be excised from its socket. When Loki is done in this version, he would push the body off the table and show the isolated eyeball to nearby innocents and we would hold on a closeup on the German’s corpse.
IF this had happened, I would have said watching Loki getting choked out was fair cinematic game.
Additionally, Loki’s stabbing of Agent Coulson was literally cinematically declawed. OUTTAKES:
Catch the difference? The filmmakers removed the impaling scepter tip from going all the way through in the final product because it was unnecessarily violent for getting the point (harhar) across in this PG-13 comic book film. Here, the point was to unite the Avengers against this evil and taking out Phil galvanized them on a more personal level. In the meantime, it didn’t needlessly maim Agent Coulson. You felt sorry for him, but not nauseated. (Sidenote: Poor Thor having a front row on both of these deaths.) (Second Sidenote: Remember when Loki could teleport away from problems as illustrated in the above scene? Huh.)
Moving on. So going by the premise that Loki just had to die to similarly motivate Thor to vengeance on Thanos, how might have Infinity War have HONORABLY discharged Loki, so to speak?
My thoughts:
Loki pulls his dagger on Thanos, who then grabs his wrist as we saw.
Thanos makes plain that he means to kill him (you could even keep that same snarky line spitting “undying” back in Loki’s face)
Thanos wraps his Gauntleted hand around Loki’s throat (not lifting or choking), while the space gem glows brightly indicating Loki’s teleporting means are stunted and he is truly stuck. (Like how they explained Vision’s failed phasing later)
Loki, confidently, ANGRILY and in clear voice delivers his “You’ll never be a god”
Thanos *maybe* gets in a quick retort or *maybe* throws some snide remark in Thor’s direction.
(WIDE DISTANT SHOT) Thanos snaps Loki’s neck, loudly and quickly
Loki’s body falls swiftly down before Thor
You might disagree with my specifics or have your own ideas. I’m no screenwriter. But in my scenario, Loki is not made to suffer, the audience doesn’t have to see a graphic depiction of strangulation AND Thanos is still shown to be stronger than the perceived ‘reigning’ MCU Villain. Also, by utilizing the stones or making reference to their impacting the fight against Loki, you’re not inexplicably stripping Loki of his hitherto demonstrated wide array of tricks.
Did I seriously just say hitherto demonstrated?
Agreed, with one correction: Loki’s largest-scale villainy was the attempted destruction of Jotunheim. We don’t know how many Jotnar were actually killed, but we do see the impact of the Bifrost breaking up the ground and causing structures to collapse like a massive earthquake, and we see Jotnar screaming and running from the spreading destruction. But of course no one in the MCU mentions that again – it’s all about Loki’s attack on Earth – because they don’t really want us to care about Frost Giants; if we did, we might place more weight on the wholesale slaughter that *Thor* perpetrated at the beginning of the movie. But that wouldn’t do; they need Thor to be completely absolved of previous sins so he can assume Unproblematic Hero status. Meanwhile, nothing Loki does to save various worlds can make up for his earlier crimes.
NB: I don’t hate Thor, I don’t think he’s evil, I don’t think it’s bad that he (or Tony Stark, or Wanda Maximoff) can be considered a hero after having done terrible things. I’m also quite willing to grant that Loki’s record is worse than Thor’s. But no one even mentions Thor’s unwarranted aggression again (except that “In my youth I courted war” line – that was LAST YEAR, ffs), while the “villain” label, and apparently the inevitable fate of a villain, follows Loki forever.
Same, @saygoodbye-not-thisday. And I still think they wanted to dispose of Loki as quickly, brutally, and humiliatingly as possible as a kind of revenge: they couldn’t stand that this morally ambiguous, unconventionally masculine character is more popular and attracts more female interest than Thor, their approved male power fantasy; and they probably think the silly Hiddleston fangirls (who are too immature to go for one of the Real Men they’re selling) are bad for Marvel’s image (though of course they’ll take our money before punching us in the gut).
This is so heartbreaking, seeing his resolve fading. For all his words, his love for his brother overcomes. He can’t stand to watch Thor in pain.
Tom deserves all awards!
Tom’s performance in this scene reminds me of a story my college choir director used to tell about a German orchestra conductor he worked with. The orchestra was hired to play for a local theater’s production of Oklahoma! The first day they rehearsed the score, the conductor raised his baton and said (in a little old man German accent), “All right, my darlinks, let us see if we can turn shit into gold.”
Loki is the Philosopher King 