I think time travel is almost always a dumb crutch for bad writers. But if I'm going to get particularly nerdtarded about this it's in one specific way.
Thor: Ragnarok. Best film of these in ages.
Now they go back and just pick up another Mjolnar to use.
Why would you ever choose to do this? As you note, this is now a forever solution. There's no explaining it away with some kind of future criteria when you just used it to maintain but also rewrite history to Tony Stark's wishes. You've just created an endless cycle where every character, hero and villain, are time traveling endlessly to outstep each other by a millisecond all while the universe stays static except where the winner (of which there can't be one) chooses.
This is actually the original conundrum for Kang and Dr. Doom. Kang has essentially forgotten who he originally is from all the time travel. He speculates he could be Doom and a whole bunch of others throughout time. He has no reference point to anything concrete though.
They did that for the entire universe. They imported the sliding timeline of the comics, only after they put fucking dates on every single thing.
It's hacky garbage from a specific type of conceit. They
already have literal deus ex machina sitting there in the Infinity Gauntlet and namely the Time Gem (or fuck, the Reality Gem, really who needs the other gems when you've got this one?), but they do this and give it a stupid "scientific" gloss thinking they've successfully waived away the narrative problems by killing off Tony Stark the only one who made it work.
I don't particularly care about these movies too much but I was "offended" by this in a way that other "dumb blockbusters" like
Star Trek 2009 and
The Dark Knight Rises similarly made me hate the writers for doing unnecessary garbage they thought made their story more complex yet wrapped up everything while it actually just introduced literally every plot hole into what should have been straightforward.
But I like the individual films more than the "shared universe" of this and always did because the only "shared" part was we eventually get to see everybody fight Thanos and that was it. No theme at all. And in this case, it's actually two separate Thanoses with totally different motivations who are killed instantly by someone who comes in late without resolving anything. One who was doing everything to get the Gems for a totally stupid nonsense reason but at least was a purpose, and another one who just up and fucking time travels to the future to kill errybody. (Except Black Widow, who nobody bothers to go back and save for some reason.)
even worse, potentially the very worst
Also how about everybody coming back after FIVE YEARS of agony for their loved ones, totally fine and unaged while they lived through an apparent hell. How did
nobody question this
particular mechanic to the resolution? And every character literally accepts it because it's what fucking Tony Stark wants? He's dead, fuck him and whatever he built in a cave, with a box of scraps.
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