Star Wars vs. Infinity War: Why One Worked, and the Other Didn't

It’s only fair to warn you: this post contains Infinity Wars spoilers. It’s also fair to warn you that some Star Wars: The Last Jedi spoilers are in here too, but I think we’re past the statute of limitations on that one.

But let’s get to the point here.

I don’t know about you, but it always intrigues me when something works in one movie / book / TV series / puppet show, and then proves ineffective in another equally meritorious media. It’s even more perplexing when the first attempt doesn’t work, but the second attempt wins praise in a different forum.

This is the situation in which I find myself when comparing Lucasfilm’s Star Wars VIII and Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War. From my eagle’s-nest perspective, the Star Wars and MCU franchises have a lot of similarities between them. Both have a long-standing legacy behind them and a dedicated fan base. Both have a multitude of entwining, complex story offshoots in print and film. Both are now part of Disney’s grand scheme of worldwide conquest through market saturation, hypnosis, and ideological programming (oh, tell me I’m wrong).

Then comes Star Wars VIII and Infinity War; at a passing glance, they look completely different. But from my layman’s perspective, they have one core element in common:

Heroes who lose.

Let’s do a comparison of certain plot chunks of these movies side-by-side, shall we?

·         Star Wars: Problem: The last of the Rebel – I mean, the Resistance fleet is about to get crushed like ants under the heel of the Empire – I mean, First Order.

·         Infinity Wars: Problem: The titan Thanos is about to wipe out half of the universe with a magical MacGuffin collector’s item, the Infinity Gauntlet.

·         Star Wars: Finn and Rose (pretty sure that’s her name), in cahoots with Poe Dameron (pretty sure that’s his last name), launch a harebrained scheme to find some advanced hacker and use him to disable the First Order’s own magical MacGuffin, the hyperspace tracking device.

·         Infinity Wars: There are many harebrained schemes I could choose here, but I’m going with this one: Ironman, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and the remnants of the Guardians of the Galaxy team up to confront Thanos on his home planet to steal the Infinity Gauntlet.

·         Star Wars: Their plan doesn’t work: while our heroes get close to succeeding, the hacker turns out to be a traitor. He turns Finn and Rose in to the First Order, and the hyperspace tracking device remains intact.

·         Infinity Wars: Their plan doesn’t work: while this detachment of the Avengers gets close to succeeding, Thanos overpowers them all and stomps off to Earth, leaving the team more or less stranded on that…other planet. Whatever it was called. It wasn’t called Titan too, was it?

I hope it’s pretty clear that, at heart, these movies have a little more in common than you thought they did about five minutes ago. So why did one (Infinity War) get all the praise, while the other (Star Wars VIII) create such fanatical love it / hate it camps? Well, after considering this issue for a long time (TEN WHOLE MINUTES), I think I have the answer:

We the People, the human race, the average moviegoer, LOVES a good harebrained scheme—whether or not it succeeds.

It’s why we go to the movies in the first place, for pity’s sake. If I wanted to see a reasonably planned out, no-risks film, I’d watch an assembly line in a canning facility. But deep down we all want to see the wheels spinning on the Crazy Plan Train—sometimes it makes us feel good about the risks that we would like to take. Pulling off an odds-against-you, there’s-no-way-this-could-work scheme is part of the human condition, dare I say it. It’s why we even begin to consider space travel, make friends, create new inventions, and dream of one day going to heaven.

Think about Star Trek, another successful space-based sci-fi storyline (Alliteration! Yeah!). It could easily be retitled “Harebrained Schemes Inc. – Space Division”, and we love it. We’ve loved it for generations. On the website Imgur, there is a chain of posts called “The United Federation of ‘hold my beer, I got this’” that talks about this Star Trek motif [PARENTAL ADVISORY: even though all its contributors were posting in a good-humored manner, cuss words and F-Bombs get dropped a lot]. Here is what one of the posts had to say about this whole harebrained-human element that is ever so prevalent:

And again…

I think it’s safe to say that Star Trek is one long celebration of mankind’s tendency to shoot a bullet with another bullet, blindfolded, while riding a horse.

Both Star Wars VIII and Infinity Wars employ the harebrained scheme to the utmost, but they differ on how they treat this plot element. This is what distinguishes them, and is the reason why, in my opinion, one flew while the other flopped.

Star Wars VIII, in an unexpected fashion, scolded its crazy co-conspirators for attempting such a risky venture that yielded next-to-no rewards. “Why didn’t you trust the leaders of the Resistance?” the story asks. “I mean, the leaders didn’t tell anyone their real plan for salvation, and the version they told their underlings was basically begging someone to try a last-ditch crazy scheme, but why would anyone take such a risk?” In the end, Finn and Rose’s little side quest makes no difference to the movie at all; take out those characters and their chunk of the film, and the plot isn’t affected—if anything, it gets more streamlined.

One could argue that the Dr. Strange + Ironman part of the story, when removed from Infinity War, also does not affect the plot; Thanos still gets his Infinity Stone and heads Earthwards for the last one. But at least Infinity Wars does not dump all over its heroes for trying to succeed. The Avengers get some time to practice teamwork, weave interesting character dynamics, and ultimately build up some real stakes for the final act’s consequences. There is no reward for the heroes’ actions, but it still feels like the resistance they mounted meant something. They even earned the respect of the villain in their creative efforts to stop him. In Star Wars VIII, Finn’s side quest doesn’t mean jack; if anything, he is even more useless in Episode VIII than he was in Episode VII.

Some have commended Star Wars VIII for its edgy move in criticizing the human tendency towards the harebrained—but to me, that comes across as someone taking off and burning a bulletproof jacket that has already saved his live sixty different times. The best stories are built around the desperate situation and the even more desperate shot at fixing it; we read and watch them over and over again to feel the characters’ thrill of unexpected victory—or crushing defeat. When steering the plot towards defeat, though, the story must give the characters and the audience something to make all their efforts worthwhile. Star Wars VIII chose not to do that.