So, I look at things from a couple perspectives. Sometimes that's moral (I have an ethical problem with Whiplash etc), or sometimes it is philosophical (materialism in LeCarre), and it usually always involves some sort of interest in plot analysis, but the one to look at here is "If you're using something that looks 'classical' or 'ancient,' and your name if JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis or JK Rowling, I'll guess right away it has some depth, but otherwise you have to answer a few questions such as (1) Does it actually have anything behind it or did you just grab big impressive sounding words? and (2) Are you using it to good effect?" That's the main thing I'm looking at with the infinity stones.
But first I'll mention the nine realms. Nine has a numerological significance that means, as near as I have been able to pin it down, "all" ... which can be seen in such popular expressions as "giving it the whole nine yards" and "dressed to the nines." So, nine realms makes sense as a number for everything in the world, or the universe, or the multiverse, or however you want to put it (lots of interesting things with the number 9 too: Bonaventure would note that it's a trinity of trinities, and my dad the mathematician, in helping me study for the math section of the GRE, discovered that the difference between any number and its mirror [the number backwards: 54321 is the mirror of 12345], no matter how many digits are in the number, is divisible by 9 [even with a single digit number, the mirror is simply the same number, so the difference is 0, which is divisible by 9 because 9 x 0 = 0 ... funky stuff]).
So, nine is a good number for all that. I doubt it goes any deeper, as in the nine realms all tracking to different aspects or something, or at least I haven't seen it in the movies. The places where Thor goes to settle things down after Thor 1, coming into Thor Dark World, seems as much like one of the anonymous isolated cultures sets on Star Trek TNG. But that is fine even if I am right (and it could be that I am wrong and that there is this wealth of material in the comics that is done based on some super duper intense ancient cosmology etc ... which I'll probably never find out because I don't enjoy comic book narratives and worlds in their original paper-print setting, or even reading plot synopses on wikipedia, enough to justify the work involved ... I can get into them in the movies, and if there is obvious connection there that can be picked up, all good, but if I have to go looking harder in the actual comics world, my interest flags considerably). Who knows, it might also have something to do with the Enneagrams. Again, others can track that out if they want. For my purposes, it puts the MCU on the "interesting" level, but it would have had to have something like alchemy etc to get me any more interested on this level. Without that, my interest goes on characters and virtues and interesting plots.
There are only six stones, but I found some exposition of how nine and six get interchanged alot in things like "whole six yards" being evidenced in places, so that works with the nine. Of the six stones, I have thought that the mind stone was actually used really well in Age of Ultron (weaving it with the AI theme and how AI writes some human foibles and logics large). Reality was actually even used decently for what it is Thor; Dark World, a lot more than I gave credit for originally, when saying below things like "if all the others exist, then they are real, so what is there to add about reality?" The whole wish fulfillment things I read was in the comics but not in the movies is actually a substantial idea (if you're a languages person familiar with Koine Greek, you get what I mean when I say it is basically the power to change something from the optative mood into the indicative mood ... and I like any time I get to use language-studies words) and the anti-matter grenades in the movie are even a little bit of substance as an idea involved in "reality" (kind of a negative reality). The space and time stones kind of make themselves work, and the only thing other than that that I have to say on them is that Dr Strange was a let down for me. I'm not saying I stormed out of the theater yelling about wanting my money back etc. It was fine as an evening's entertainment, but I also felt a bit weary walking out because I knew I was supposed to be really into it as "up my alley" and I wasn't, and part of that was that there was this hype by some in circles in which I travel as having been written by a Christian, and so I was already going "yeah, gotta try to stay away from conversations about Dr Strange ... just sort of a downer for all involved." Anyway ... the soul stone hasn't been seen yet, but what I've heard the comics do with it doesn't sound too interesting to me, but the concept itself can have interesting possibilities beyond that, so who knows ... won't know til we see it.
The last one is the power stone, and I leave that til last with its own paragraph because that is the only one that has left me, still, even on further rewatching of Guardians of the Galaxy, as fun as it was for characters, completely flat (probably the single biggest reason the second Guardians is much more interesting: the whole family/father desire and tension is much better as a plot than the tired BFG thing ... especially when you throw Michael Rooker's Yondu performance in there). Power is just like this big word that is supposed to be this big thing of "power! baby ... power!" but just makes me think of that political cartoon I just saw with Trump and Kim Jong-un nude comparing their nuke dicks.
Other than that, I will say that I think the ensembles have gotten better as they have gone along. I think Age of Ultron and Civil War have been the best two of the ensembles, at least on this world or whatever (Guardians II was really well done, and like the Avengers ensembles, the second was more interesting as far as the villain goes, as I just said, but they are more of their own team that got pulled together in their first movie, so it's not really an ensemble the way Iron Man and Thor and Captain America and Hulk came together after individual solo stories ... I liked that, in Civil War, you could sort of feel a tension between Captain America the Avenger, to which Stark was appealing, and Captain America with his own history): The AI problem in Ultron (as human problems writ large) and the human friction of Civil War are, in my opinion, vastly better as sources of antagonism than the nefarious "they" of Hydra or an army of unstoppable snake-a-pede ships from another realm.
So, while there is a part of me that wants to be skeptical about Infinity War because it centers on the stones mainly, it looks like, as combined power, and a big baddie from another dimension, I'm waiting it out. Josh Brolin is a pretty interesting actor, and the fact that they went with him rather than Ron Perlman makes me wonder if they have some interesting spins to put on the character of Thanos. I find Perlman enjoyable in general, but he does get used for every gravelly voiced character in the world and has become kind of typecast like that. Of course, who knows, maybe they wanted Perlman but just couldn't get him. Any which way, I like "cap in black" ("cuz I'm cap in black; well, I'm cap in blaaaack ...") and Black Panther, and Stark has always been good for some tension and it looks like even Thanos could be good ... so, I'm waiting to see with a lot more openness than I thought I would have to the idea that I might get into it. My guess is that I won't be able to get any more into the aspects of it that I write about on this blog than I have already done in this post, but I might still really like it.
Oh, and one last thing: I like Brie Larson as an actress so I am interested to see what happens with the whole Captain Marvel thing, which seems to me like the Marvel version of Wonder Woman, and I absolutely loved the new Wonder Woman movie. I have heard that WW2 is not going to be WWII, but rather the Cold War ... very interesting choice ... kind of John LeCarre meets a comic book superhero, and being as I like JLC and think the Gadot Wonder Woman directed by Patty Jenkins is pretty awesome, that could rock pretty hard if done right.
Original blog posting of FB post of 12/10/2017.
This is a new kind of post I am going to start doing when I just sort of
pissed something out on Facebook and then thought, "wow, that was kind
of long; I should probably turn it into a regular post on the blog ...
but I'm too lazy." So, I'm just copying text straight to a post here
with a subject line "FB Post: Topic."
Ok, so, I got schooled some by the college girl who works at the Y concerning the infinity stones, and even though I still hold it was a dang good line, since I have to take back the "infinite number of infinity stones," I should probably take back the Sly and the Family Stone line, great as it was as a line.
Ok, so, I got schooled some by the college girl who works at the Y concerning the infinity stones, and even though I still hold it was a dang good line, since I have to take back the "infinite number of infinity stones," I should probably take back the Sly and the Family Stone line, great as it was as a line.
... BUT, I just want to put in that, without looking into it for sure, I have my doubts whether the elements of the six stones correspond well to any actual classical/ancient world mythological, philosophical, or mystical systems, rather than being just "big words" that everybody who's been kind of mentally sapped after several centuries of materialism and scientism (and there are as many scientismists inside Christianity as outside it) goes "oooohhhhh, that must be a heavy intense concept thingy." First, while there are usually different words for them, mind (nous in Greek and mens in Latin) and soul (psyche in Greek, anima in Latin, and nephesh in Hebrew) are usually too fluid in respect to each other to split out into clearly defined elements like that; power is mainly a modern boner word (the medieval Scholastic discussions of actuality and potentiality are quite different from what is normally meant these days, and I must say that I was very happy when the USCCB decided to replace the modernistic mistranslation "Lord God of power and might" to the more original and poetic "Lord God of Hosts" in the Sanctus in the Mass back in 2012), BUT most important of all of those ... reality? I mean, power is real, and minds are real, and souls are real, and time is real, and space is real ... so what is there left that the reality stone can be about? I like this description from https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8560555/marvel-infinity-stones-avengers-infinity-war-movie:
"The Aether is a red floating liquid thing that attaches to a host and... makes him or her stronger? In the comics, it's more focused on wish fulfillment. Its only appearance in the movie so far has been Thor: The Dark World as "thing Natalie Portman has and the bad guy really wants." By the end of the film, it was given to The Collector (aka "blond Benicio Del Toro") for safekeeping — although his whole house was wrecked during Guardians of the Galaxy, so who knows if it moved at that point."
Actually, I like all their snarky descriptions; particularly funny is:
"The Tesseract is a blue stone capable of teleporting anything from one point in the universe to the other. The other use is, apparently, as a means to manufacture futuristic weaponry — but who's to say those blue lasers aren't just teleporting all the victims to some random pub on a distant planet? Sounds like the plot of Marvel’s first TV comedy."
Just analyizing ... I'll still go see Infinity War and probably really like certain parts of it, even if other parts leave me sort of "meh" (hey, the other night I chose Avengers 1 over a horror flick on the elliptical, despite the 2 hr 20 min commitment on a night I got started late and wanted to get up early next morn) ... but I gotta be able to think about it and not just drool. Plus ... something about the "million threads into one" feels like a monopoly to me, and that's always a sketchy thing, at least for those of us who aren't registered republicans (socialism wants the state to own the means of production, fascism want the state to only control the means of production and not have to worry about all the hassle of maintenance etc required by actual ownership, and capitalism wants those with the most means of production consolidated to control a puppet state) ... I think we found out this past year that the "unum" in "e pluribus unum" is kind of wishful thinking (and more likely, sales and marketing on somebody's part)
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