Dumb Things In Avengers: Infinity War That Everyone Just Ignored

All right, at this point, you've probably seen Avengers: Infinity War. How're you holding up, champ? You don't feel so good? Dry those eyes, tiger. We're gonna get through this.

Avengers: Infinity War did something truly remarkable when it was released: It managed to live up to a decade of hype. Flying in the face of cynical expectations, the movie told an engaging story while giving dozens of beloved characters enough screen time that nobody felt wasted. It kept your attention despite being almost long enough to live up to the "Infinity" part of its name. It never got boring. It was, objectively speaking, rock and roll.

But if we learned anything from that Stretch Armstrong doll we trashed in the third grade, it's that just because you love something doesn't mean you can't poke holes in it. Here are the (very few) parts of Avengers: Infinity War that left us going "huh?"

Vision has become a sort of maroon personification of everything the Marvel movies are doing right. He's a character that spent decades in the comics seeming pretty lame and uninteresting, but man, from the second he hit the big screen, he was cooler and more exciting than three quarters of the A-listers over at the DCEU.

Vision is, based on what we can gather from the films, probably the most advanced machine on the planet, capable of everything from controlling his body at a molecular level to getting all Hugh Grant-ishly flustered and stuttery when he's talking to Wanda about running away together. Really, is there anything he can't do? Funny you should ask.

In the moments leading up to his first fight with Proxima Midnight, Vision has only just heard about the latest attack on New York. How does he find out about it? He walks past a TV. The butt-kickingest robot on Earth still has to get his news via basic cable on the street. It might not be glamorous work, but could one of the Avengers update the driver for Vision's Wi-Fi card, or download a news app into his brain?

Somehow, you just knew Wakanda was going to play a big part in Infinity War. Maybe it was because the isolationist nation spoke to a generation of moviegoers, maybe it was because its unique visual profile makes it a playground for any filmmaker. Maybe it's because Black Panther made more money than the secret auction where they sold Walt Disney's frozen head. Whatever the reason, Wakanda seems like a real paradise. Unless you're Bucky Barnes.

For some reason, the utopian nation of Wakanda decided that their first political refugee's welcome wagon should include withholding the readily available technology necessary to give him a working prosthetic arm. We're not saying the most advanced technotropolis in the world should've immediately handed (ha) an unbreakable super-metal arm to the guy, but it's pretty sick that they couldn't be bothered to set him up with so much as a pirate hook on a stick for a year or two.

The point is, maybe don't get all uppity about how much better your country is than everybody else's if your health care is crap.

Thanos, for all his purple might, isn't going to go down in history as the universe's most efficient planner. From what we've been able to tell, he's spent the last several years sitting in his big boy chair and waiting for the end credits to roll so he can mug for the camera. The last power move we saw him make was when he announced "Fine, I'll do it myself" after Age of Ultron, and with a resigned sense of purpose, waited and waited to get anything moving.

But that's not all. Once he started enacting his master plan, it became pretty abundantly clear that Thanos was playing things fast and loose. Overall, his strategy seemed to be:

Step 1: Get the Infinity Stones.

Step 2: THEN they'll be sorry!

Step 3: (fill in later)

There are some Titan-sized holes in Thanos' plan. The biggest one seems to be that he left Peter Dinklage's Eitri alive. The one guy capable of making a Thanos-killing weapon is the one guy Thanos didn't kill. That's surprisingly sporting for a dude bent on committing the largest genocide in history.

All-powerful technology, as a rule, only exists in sci-fi so it can be one-upped a couple movies later. A New Hope had a Death Star? Jedi has a bigger one. The world had never seen a greater threat than The Mummy, except along came a Scorpion King. If Tolkien were still alive today, we'd probably be reading about the bigger, badder version of The One Ring, which could have been called The Two Ring and had the power to turn into a tank or make people even more invisible. The point is, you can't expect something fictional that's described as unique and irreplaceable to stay that way for long.

With all that said, we've wasted a lot of time caring about the Bifrost.

When it was first introduced, the Bifrost Bridge was the only way of getting from Asgard to Earth. Then it exploded at the end of Thor, so we found out in Avengers that Odin could summon the bridge, but only if he tried super, duper hard and used dark magic. Now, we get to see Heimdall doing that, and it's a gut-wrenching process. Why, he has to go so far as to ... ask politely? Yeah, apparently Heimdall just has to say "please" and some sort of dark magic lets him control technology that previously took a big bronze room full of spinny things to harness.

And if Thor's new hammer, Stormbreaker, is actually summoning the Bifrost, why didn't the Asgardians put in an order for a couple magic axes a long time ago? It seems like that'd come in handy.

No two ways about it: Infinity War was an incredible culmination of a decade of storytelling. It just seemed overly eager to ignore a whole lot of those stories.

We might lose some of the younger readers here, but way back in November 2017, there was this movie that came out called Thor: Ragnarok. It starred a plucky Chris Hemsworth as the Norse God of Thunder, going on a mission not just to save Asgard, but to learn a little something about himself, too. After losing Mjolnir, his first magic hammerlove, Thor realized his enchanted accoutrements were never where his power came from. He didn't need a magic hammer. The magic was in him all along.

Now, with Infinity War coming directly after the events of Ragnarok, Thor suddenly needs a magic hammer. He needs it so much, in fact, that he spends 90 percent of his screen time trying to get a new magic hammer. Of course, maybe Marvel lost track of the whole "believe in yourself, that's the real lightning" storyline since it had been 17 or 18 weeks since Ragnarok had left theaters when Infinity War came out.

And who knows? Maybe Thor just needed Stormbreaker for the specific task of killing Thanos. It just seems like it detracts from the "the real power was inside you" moral of the last movie if the new one pins on the tag "... unless you need to kill a purple dude, then the real power's in a new axe."

If there's one thing Infinity War makes absolutely clear, it's that the Children of Thanos ain't shlubs. We see them lay the smackdown on almost all our favorite heroes, wrecking a good chunk of Scotland in a fight with Vision and keeping a significantly souped-up Iron Man on his toes. For a decent chunk of the movie, the only thing we see that seems to slow these guys down is when Wong sling rings Cull Obsidian into the mountains and then closes the portal around his arm, chopping his hand off like he's almost anyone in Star Wars.

So here's a question: Why aren't we using that sling ring more often?

It seems like Wong and Strange could fix just about any problem by teleporting it away. Why stop at the mountains? Send Obsidian into a volcano. Or the Sun. Or drop him in the middle of Nebraska and wait for him to give up. Better yet, open a portal, move it so that it's lined up with the vertical axis of his body, and teleport half of him 3 feet away hot dog style. Or, if you're worried about the ramifications of heroes flat out murdering people, the least you could do is teleport Thanos' Oven Mitt of Destruction away, forearm and all. Spider-Man probably would've had an easier time getting it off his hand that way.

As storytelling maneuvers go, time travel has got to be one of the hardest landings to stick. The rules seems to shift based on the needs of the story. For more on this subject, ask your weird cousin about why Back to the Future Part II is a travesty at your next family outing.

Understandably, that makes the Time Stone kind of a pain from an audience perspective. Sure, we know it controls time, and that's rad. It also makes for a great piece of flair for when Strange goes peacocking at local clubs. But boy howdy is it tough to nail down exactly what it does.

In Doctor Strange, the Time Stone warps time just ... everywhere. Strange turns back time all over the city when he uses it, making this appear to be more of a time hammer than a time scalpel. Flash forward to Infinity War, and Thanos uses it to turn back time, but only for Vision and the Mind Stone. He's had the thing for 15 minutes and he already figured out how to use it as a very specific undo button. Someone should really keep an eye on him; this guy's dangerous!