Red Skull seemingly vanishes forever (more on that later) and the Tesseract melts through the floor of the plane, dropping down into the Arctic Ocean, not far from where Captain America ends up in a frozen sleep for the next 70 years. While Red Skull is fighting Captain America on a plane in one of the final scenes of the movie, he grabs the Tesseract and unwittingly opens up a portal to space that consumes him. After a deathly skinny Steve Rogers gets injected with the Super-Soldier Serum and becomes the swole Captain America, the future Avenger helps prevent Red Skull-as Schmidt is better known due to that pretty red noggin of his-from leading an attack on the U.S. Johann Schmidt, a Nazi scientist and the head of a terrorist organization called HYDRA, uses the Stone as a power source to mass-produce advanced weaponry for their army in the war against the Americans. The Space Stone is introduced in one of The First Avenger’s opening scenes, as we see it being recovered from a Norwegian tomb in 1942. And it is significant that the first stone we encounter is the one that represents space it was a big sign that other beings exist in the Marvel universe outside of Earth. But before Infinity War, the Space Stone was often one of the more important elements in the MCU films. The Space Stone is capable of opening portals across the galaxy, and it greatly improves Thanos’s commuting time throughout the course of the film (among other things). Once obtained by Thanos, the Space Stone is just another tool to help him find the next stone. It even helps provide the model that Tony Stark uses to create a new element in Iron Man 2 (yes, that really happened). The first Infinity Stone we’re introduced to is also the one that appears most frequently: The Space Stone, once contained in a device called the Tesseract, plays a key role in The First Avenger, Captain Marvel, and The Avengers, while making cameos in a few other movies. But when we look back at all the movies throughout the years, we learn that these stones are also timestamps that show just how far ahead Marvel mapped out its “phases,” with details both big and small interwoven across a vast web of stories and characters. Heading into Infinity War last spring, you didn’t really need to know anything about these colorful rocks or where they came from to be able to enjoy the action blockbuster. In a vacuum, the Infinity Stones may seem to be no more than simple MacGuffins, plot points that give our heroes something to fight against as we learn the nature of their origin stories. When some of these earlier films were initially released, it wasn’t always clear that these objects contained such ultra-powerful gems, nor was it clear that there was any connection between them.
With the exception of the Soul Stone, every Infinity Stone had appeared in at least one previous movie (the Space Stone has been in at least four) before Infinity War, though they were often embedded in other devices, such as magical objects like the Tesseract, Loki’s Scepter, the Orb, and the Eye of Agamotto.
These Infinity Stones each control an essential aspect of existence: Space, Reality, Power, Soul, Mind, and Time.”
These magical gems can be traced through a number of films dating back to Captain America’s origin in 2011, The First Avenger, as villains like Red Skull, Loki, and Ronan the Accuser have all attempted to wield the Infinity Stones’ unique powers in order to further their own evil agendas.Īs Wong and Doctor Strange explain to Tony Stark and Bruce Banner toward the beginning of Infinity War: “The Big Bang sent six elemental crystals hurtling across the virgin universe. In Avengers: Infinity War, the 19th film of the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Mad Titan finally (after receiving several makeovers) obtained all six Infinity Stones, which granted him enough power to make such destruction possible. With a simple snap of the fingers, Thanos wiped out half of the planet’s population, including many of Earth’s mightiest heroes.