Film Review
Water Avengers and their Endgame
At this juncture in history, with population increases and fossil fuel
emissions heating the atmosphere, we are creating a global heating crisis,
with water for all life as a major challenge. The United Nation (2019)
states that “water is the primary medium through which we will feel the
effect of climate change”. As water becomes more valuable than oil, the
neoliberal capitalism solution is to treat water as a commodity for sale and
privatize city and municipal water systems. The counternarrative, as
Donna Haraway (2018), cognizant that water has emerged as a right and
a condition for survival of all species, including humans advises in
“Staying with the trouble for multispecies environmental justice”, is to build
thick kinships, human and cross-species.
It is as if the blockbuster movie, Avengers: Infinity Wars, shares a
common plot with the big fossil fuel firms heating the atmosphere; as well
as with multinational water businesses that pollute our freshwater
supplies, divert water so rivers no longer flow, and exhaust groundwater
so aquifers collapse. As global heating occurs, only the poles will be left to
grow food, and most of the rest of the planet will be uninhabitable. In the
new Avengers’ movie, the villain Thanos, a Titan, has a plan to wipe out
half of humanity across the entire universe, to save the other half, before
overpopulation exhausts all natural resources, and the greenhouse gases
overheat every part of the planet. The ‘Official Trailer’ for the sequel,
Avengers: Endgame, has Natasha (Black Widow) giving an update about
the ‘apocalypse’ to someone who has been around for some time. In the
trailer, we hear her tell someone: “Thanos did exactly what he intended to
do, he wiped out 50% of the world’s population”.
In the Infinity Wars, Thanos is on a twisted hero’s journey quest to
save 50% of humanity and the destroyed planetary ecologies by
downsizing the overpopulation. The difference between mega-
corporations and Thanos is that Thanos randomly selects whom to wipe
out via genocide. In contrast, ‘big water businesses’ steal water from the
poorest 50% of humanity in order to profit by selling freshwater at
premium prices to the super-rich 1% of the world population. In the teaser-
trailer of Endgame, Tony Stark (Iron Man) says he ran out of water four
days ago, which – as is well known – causes the body to have irreversible
dehydration damage. In our own times, the contemporaneous second