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, God of Mischief, at the San Diego Comic Con in 2013.
Featurette about that one time, at the SDCC, when Tom Hiddleston dressed up as Loki for a short appearance on stage and messed up with our lives forever.
Correction: the Loki that stabbed Coulson wasn’t an illusion. There were 2 illusions: the one that appeared to be escaping the cell when Thor approached, and the one that was threatening Thor with dropping the cage when Coulson showed up with the big gun. It was the real Loki that then came up behind Coulson to stab him with the scepter and then gestured at it as if to say “Sorry I couldn’t have gotten here in person sooner; I needed to retrieve my scepter.”
But the basic point stands. Joss Whedon is smart enough to write Loki; Markus & McFeely are morons.
So Marvel is saying Using Loki’s death as revenge motivation for Thor. Wasn’t the story going that Loki had been tortured and tormented by Thanos into attacking New York, and the fact that this was done to his brother couldn’t have been enough motivation for Thor? No, they had to just brutally kill him off and get him out of the picture because they’re at a loss as to what to do with him. Those brilliant minds at Marvel.
That awkward moment when your character has more class than your entire franchise and you need to dispose of him to make everything else look good.
But first they needed to make an entire movie devoted to stripping him of all the class, dignity, and pathos he had previously possessed.
They shouldn’t have pissed off Joss Whedon. He knew how to make all the central characters, including Loki, interesting in their own ways without any of them completely eclipsing any other. Markus & McFeely and the Russos are too clumsy to do that balancing act. Tony ended up being more compelling and sympathetic than Cap in what was officially a Cap movie, but the creators seem not to be aware of that.
Alot of time was spent building up the threat, building up the character, showing how strong and dangerous he was. But, at the end of the day, I think the thing that makes it work is Tom. He breathes alot of life into Loki. – Joss Whedon
As said before:
Tom was the one who made Loki actually Loki.
Even Feigie had to admit that “what Tom has done with Loki is beyond our wildest expectations”.
And you know what? Joss Whedon – unlike Taika Waititi, Markus & McFeely, and the Russos – knew how to use Loki’s character depth and Tom’s acting ability.
Unless they’re black, I guess. In which case it’s perfectly acceptable to put hundreds of them at risk of death for (1) Sad Robot
what the hell would Steve have done if Wakanda had done the intelligent, rational and understandable thing and said “no”? would the narrative have pissed on Wakanda for daring to say no to its precious never wrong Steve Rogers?
my gut says “yes”
THIS BOTHERED ME SO MUCH
I still need to post about the “we don’t trade lives” thing and deontology vs. consequentialism in the MCU but that would take a long time and I have other things I should do first… and there’s only so much brain energy I want to spend on the shit show that was Infinity War.
Long story short: Markus & McFeely are, as I have said, dimwitted hacks.
So, many people have wondered why Doctor Strange didn’t cut Thanos’ gauntlet hand off with a Sling-Ring portal…
…But remember -In Thor Ragnarok, Strange says he needs a hair sample to transport Thor through his portals.
And I doubt that would work for Thanos, someone stronger than Thor, and who would probably require more clauses for portal stuff (especially with the Space Stone already in his gauntlet).
BUT- There IS another portal we also saw in Thor Ragnarok that CAN slice things really easily-!
So… with that in mind, here’s how the first 10 minutes of Infinity War would have played out!
The End!
The post made some mistakes about Dr. Strange’s portal in TR. Strange needed Thor’s hair to find Odin, not to transport Thor. So the thing about hair is not correct. He could totally use a portal to slice Thanos’ arm. Scratch that, they could use any weapon to do that. The thing is they wanted Thanos to win by any means neccessary, even making heroes look stupid.
Apart from that, yes, this could work. Just transporting Thanos to a black hole or the surface of a star, would do the job.
No no no no no. I liked The Last Jedi. The ending felt authentic. Luke’s death felt natural and purposeful. The story was about characters suffering real, disappointing, but surmountable setbacks – much like The Empire Strikes Back.
Nothing about Infinity War felt authentic, natural, or purposeful. What’s more, we all know that the ending will be reversed through some sort of time travel. So what was the purpose of all that? It was, as one of my followers aptly put it, a “Shoot the Shaggy Dog” story. The only deaths likely to be permanent were the stupid, pointless ones in the first 5 minutes that were supposed to give Thor “motivation” that, apparently, he wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Loki is the Philosopher King 