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BEFORE YOU GO ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN INFINITY WAR SPOILERS LIE AHEAD!
When most people think about sacrifice they think about it in terms of giving something up for the good of others. It is something that is prevalent in all heroes whether they are sacrificing time, money, love and/or sometimes their lives for the good of others.
Infinity War showed the most sacrifice I have seen in a movie. All of these characters were fighting an evil threatening the universe and, in most situations, did whatever was in their power to stop it usually when it was too late.
Sacrifice is extremely difficult and they did a great job of showing that heroes are human and have a hard time making these important choices. Multiple times in the movie the characters are prepared to make the sacrifice when it is too late.
Loki sacrificed the Tesseract in order to save his brother’s life, and then sacrificed himself in order to defeat Thanos, even though it was in vain since Thanos used the space stone to stop Loki from stabbing him and choked him to death directly after.
Star-Lord had a small window to kill Gamora before Thanos realized what she asked him to do and if he killed her Thanos would not have been able to find the soul stone. He was later unable to stop himself from attacking Thanos while Mantis mind drugged him, and made the negative sacrifice of their only chance to get the glove off Thanos in order to barely hurt him for killing Gamora. While I feel for Quill and the character’s choice makes complete sense regarding what happened with his mother and father, it is still a choice that led to Thanos destroying half of the universe’s population because he wasn’t strong enough to control his feelings for 10 seconds.
Scarlet Witch had an opportunity to destroy the mind stone way before Thanos had the opportunity to take it and Vision approved of this, but because of the Avengers’ morals and the love Scarlet Witch had for him, they waited too long until Thanos was able to reverse time on Vision and destroy it.
However, there were other characters, especially Thanos who knew what they had to do and weren’t afraid to do it. These characters include Spiderman, Doctor Strange, Thor and of course Thanos.
People tend to forget that Peter Parker had a way out where he could have spent his last days among friends and family, but sacrificed that in order to help Tony save the wizard and then attempt to stop Thanos. He was specifically asked not to go but went anyways and without him Doctor Strange would have probably died before learning of the one possibility to win and they would have had no chance of beating Thanos while now they will in the next Avengers film.
Strange is one of the most calculating and level head heroes in the universe. Towards the beginning of the movie he stated that if it comes between saving Stark, Peter or the stone he would choose the stone every time, and since his whole purpose is to guard this stone and he says it will never separate from him, it came as a shock to some people when he gave it up for Tony. However, when he looked into 14,000,605 possibilities for the future and saw one of them winning, it was a road of sacrifices in order to win and that one included him giving up the stone and dying since before he goes he says that it was the only way and tells Tony that they are in the endgame now. That was a huge sacrifice for Strange, but he made it without hesitation while probably knowing he would die for the fate of the universe. That is something few Avengers did. Even though he could have sacrificed the stone in the beginning, I am confident that all of his decisions will make sense in Avengers 4.
Thor was willing to sacrifice himself in order to get the Stormbreaker since he said he would die if he didn’t have it. This strength is why he was a lot of people’s favorite Infinity War character. He knows what needs to be done and does it even though everything he cared about was taken away from him not too recently and he has to go through the excruciating pain of a star basically melting his body in order to get it.
Thanos was not scared of sacrifice which is why he succeeded in this film. While everyone struggled with the hard choices of killing the one they loved for the good of the universe, he killed the only one he loved without hesitation while also sacrificing and losing men he cared about, especially Ebony Maw aka Squidward. It shows that he is hurt when he dies when he talks about loosing a lot on Titan but he still goes through with the plan because in his mind he needs to achieve that goal no matter the consequence, which is a mind set that the heroes would have won with if they all had it. He is one of the best villains of the Marvel universe because he is ruthless while also having a heart.
Overall, Infinity War shows how sacrifices are needed to be made in order to achieve a goal, and whether or not you have the strength to make that sacrifice determines the outcome. If Wanda got rid of Vision’s mind stone, Doctor Strange destroyed the time stone, and Star-Lord didn’t freak out when finding out about Gamora’s death more of us would have exited the movie happily instead of in tears. However, that did not happen because the writers did a great job in writing how our humanized characters actually would have sacrificed instead of writing a movie where everything works out. It shows us that heroes are not perfect and while they try their best they still have emotions and a conscience that keep them from making certain sacrifices and keep them from reaching their goals. I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie where the heroes didn’t win and it was oddly refreshing because it showed just how difficult it is to have the fate of the universe in your hands. We all got mad at these characters when they didn’t perform how we would have liked them too, especially Peter Quill, but if we were in that situation we probably would have acted in the same way. The way sacrifices were shown in this film was very truthful and because of this while a lot of us were angry at the movie you can’t help but feel connected to it.
