When you think about Avengers: Infinity War and it’s individual scenes, I’m willing to bet you first think of one of these:
[Spider-Man Death Scene]
[Gamora Death Scene]
[Star-Lord Fight Scene]
They’re all stellary written emotional scenes in their own right, and they all manage to feel impactful. However, my favorite scene in Infinity War is a quieter moment. An interaction between two characters. It’s not an action scene, and it’s not a death scene. It’s not a big reveal or a callback. The scene I’m talking about is the one with Thor and Rocket Raccoon on the ship en route to Nidavellir where they’re going to forge Thor’s hammer.
What I think makes the Marvel movies stand out from the other movies in the superhero and action genres are their focus on characters. Sure, the movies still have the action, fights and spectacular worldbuilding and story we’ve come to almost take for granted over the ten year life span of the MCU, but their focus on building characters with beliavable motivations, real flaws and intriguing arcs is what I’d say makes these movies so special and beloved. We get scenes where characters grow which make us feel like we’re following these characters’ journies, and that’s why we tend to get emotional during the more climactic scenes. The directors of these movies are patient. They don’t just launch the characters into big fights without any character development at all like A CERTAIN OTHER STUDIO I CAN THINK OF just to be able to get a fatter paycheck and sell more toys. Marvel’s directors invest time into them and it pays off in spades.
But back to the actual topic of this video. I’m not distracted, you’re distracted. This scene in Avengers: Infinity War perfectly embodies what I was just talking about. Rocket asks Thor about his dead brother Loki after finding out about him in the previous scene they shared. This initiates a dialogue about everything he has has lost. Thor reminisces about how during the 1500 years he’s been alive, he’s experienced so much loss. The loss of his mother in Thor: The Dark World. The loss of his sister, his father, his home and his best friends in Ragnarok. And finally the deaths of Loki and Heimdall during the opening of this film. But it’s after this we get one of the most fantastic and genuinely fascinating lines in the entire movie.
”And what if you're wrong?
If I'm wrong, then...
what more could I lose?”
Even though Thor keeps losing everything he has, he keeps fighting. For revenge, yeah, but also so that he doesn’t lose anything more. He’s lost his entire family, his home, half of his people, but he doesn’t stop fighting so that he doesn’t lose his friends, or worse, the people he’s sworn to protect as king of Asgard. I know this all sounds really cheesy but like I said, this is just a testament to marvel’s amazing character writing. The fact that we’ve had this much buildup and so many hours to get acquainted wih this character makes this seemingly simple dialogue so impactful and it adds a sense of melancholy and depth to a character who is usually painted as a bit of a goofball. Of course, this all becomes much more chilling when you know what happens at the end of the film. Thor does lose. He gets his revenge but he loses all the same. This brings us to Rocket Raccoon, arguably one of the most detailed characters in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, the talking raccoon.
Rocket has been seen as emotionally distant in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. His entire arc was built on that in the second film. The last scene in Guardians 2 in fact features Rocket looking at the fireworks and he smiles because even though he’s a bad person and he feels cold or acts like an asshole sometimes, he’s still loved. Side note, Guardians 2 is so fuckin’ underrated and easily the best movie in the mcu. Jesus fuck, that scene set to Cat Stevens’ Father And Son is the best scene in cinema history I swear to god.
Anyway, while this scene focuses more on Thor we can still see the effects of previous movies’ character developments’ effects in Rocket at play here. After Rocket’s arc in the Guardians movies we see him opening up more. His immediate response to Thor’s previously mentioned lines was:
”I could lose a lot.
Me, personally,
I could lose a lot.”
He has begun to learn to accept that he has friends, that he does feel love and that other people love him. And he has realized that he has to fight to keep them, adding an impactful contrast to Thor’s current arc. And while Thor loses at the end of the film, he doesn’t lose nearly as much as Rocket does. He loses all of his friends, but he also loses the one he sees as a son. Rocket has already experienced Groot’s death. He has already felt the pain of loss, not to mention the loss of his best friend. This, again, contrasts with Thor.
While Thor has been fighting not to lose anything more, Rocket has been fighting to keep what he has, and this makes them have the most interesting dynamic of any two characters currently in this series of films in my opinion. I’m so glad that they both survived the ending of the film, because this hopefully means that Anthony and Joe Russo will get the chance to expand on this relationship in Avengers 4.
I know the Marvel movies can feel formulaic and some of them are more lacking in quality than others, but the directors and producers of all of these films care so much about the characters of these movies. These characters aren’t tools to sell toys or to craft a story that’ll rake in the most cash, but they’re made to tell an emotionally impactful story that is wholly carried by great interactions like the one I’ve talked about here today. These fucking madlads did it.