Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, language and some crude references
Score: 4 out of 5
Here we are, with a movie that was a decade in the making. In 2008, when the very first Iron Man ended with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury meeting Robert Downey, Jr.'s Tony Stark at his mansion to discuss the "Avenger Initiative", few could have predicted just how great a revolution it would bring to Hollywood. While shared universes between franchises have been tried since the 1940s with Universal's monsters, it was Marvel Studios, inheriting the comic book company's legacy of doing this in comics, that took it to the next level, producing what is, without a doubt, the most impactful film franchise since Star Wars -- a feat made all the more impressive by how virtually everybody else who's tried to copy them has stumbled flat on their face. And now, just five months after Marvel's "distinguished competition" produced the most high-profile of those faceplants, we come to this: a superhero epic to end all superhero epics, or at least it would if (potential spoiler alert) Marvel didn't end the movie by challenging themselves to somehow top it. Make no mistake, this is a capital-E Epic. The combined budget of this movie and its forthcoming sequel has been reported as being a world-shattering one billion dollars, and as shocking as that figure may look at first glance, there is not much good reason to doubt it. The cast is composed of a murderer's row of A-listers, many of whose careers were made by playing these characters in prior films. Most of the film's poster, that which isn't devoted to the title, is trying to pack as many of them in as possible. Not one cent was wasted in the production values; it's all up there on the screen. This is a film that, from start to finish, looks, sounds, and feels as towering as its villain Thanos, the sort of superhero movie that Cecil B. DeMille and Adolph Zukor, armed with modern special effects technology, might have made in the '50s to stand toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with Ben-Hur. It doesn't merely "shake up" the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it drops a tsunami bomb on it that makes you wonder just how in the hell they're gonna go forward from here.
It may not be the best movie in the MCU. But it is, without a doubt, the biggest. Again, it looks big, it sounds big, it feels big, it's probably a bit too big for its own good, and it's a movie that can only be properly experienced inside a big damn movie theater, surrounded by people who straight-up went dead silent in shock at the ending. Knowing Marvel's game plan going forward, I know that the jaw-dropping finale is probably going to be undone in the next film with a reset to a new status quo, admittedly undercutting some of the stakes. But when it comes to swaggering epic movies that fully earn their titanic runtimes to the point where I don't even care about having to go to the bathroom, this is one of the all-time greats.
This movie may have united the massive new crop of Avengers that have emerged since Age of Ultron, but none of those characters is as important to this movie as the single central figure behind it all: Thanos. A big-ass alien who wants to wipe out half the population of every planet in the universe after seeing his homeworld destroyed by overpopulation run amok, Thanos gets what can only be called a twisted, inverted version of the classic Hero's Journey, first posited by Joseph Campbell as the "monomyth" and later popularized by Star Wars and copied by virtually every other blockbuster epic since. We meet Thanos well into his journey, having already acquired two of the seven MacGuffins he needs to complete it (the Infinity Gauntlet and one of the six Infinity Stones) and in the process of prying a third one from... somebody's cold, dead hands. He is the closest thing this movie has to a main character, and easily one of the greatest villains in superhero movie history, a man whose arc brings him pain, loss, a harrowing ordeal, and ultimately, in a weird way, fulfillment. Josh Brolin is utterly masterful as Thanos, having no problem filling the mo-cap and CGI on screen with his presence as he marches from one stage of his journey to the next. While the entire returning cast was as good as I would expect of them given their past films, this was truly Brolin's show, one that he stole out from under everybody despite he himself never appearing on screen in person. By the end, I was almost rooting for this guy, the film having used all the tricks of the Hero's Journey narrative and deployed them in service of the villain of the piece. God damn.
When it comes to the actual heroes, this film is faced with the unenviable task of corralling a staggering, star-studded, all-star cast of characters who have almost all been protagonists of their own films before this point, and while I'm still not entirely sure it fully stuck the landing, I can say that it came damn close. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo pull off much the same trick that Joss Whedon did on the last two movies, knowing how to pair off characters who play well against each other (Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy; Tony Stark, Peter Parker, and Doctor Strange; Steve Rogers' crew and T'Challa) and sending them off on their own separate journeys to manage and fight Thanos' plot at various points. With Thanos getting the lion's share of the focus, and the rest of the characters having been fleshed out in their prior films, their main job on screen here is to exchange witty banter and have each other's backs in various battles. At times, the film suffers from the problem of having too many storylines running at once, as it struggles to balance all of the many plates it has spinning in New York, Scotland, Wakanda, and outer space. At times, it almost feels like a fitting metaphor. The first Avengers arrived in theaters with the big question being "just how can all these characters work together?", and the central arc of the film was about precisely that, as Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. had to figure out just how this super-team was going to work. Here, in Infinity War, the main problem that it has as a film is that the team doesn't entirely work together... and I'll stop talking about plot right now.
I wasn't kidding about the comparisons to '50s/'60s Hollywood epics up there. During the fallout from Hollywood '30s/'40s Golden Age, a lot of the big epic movies they released were, much as summer blockbusters are now, accused of using spectacle to cover for faults in storytelling. But there's a reason why, even as Hollywood's business model was rotting behind the scenes, we still remember those gigantic epics like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Longest Day, and How the West Was Won, and it is for the same reason that this film worked on such a visceral level. This is the sort of movie that only Hollywood can make. Words cannot describe just how massive it is. I can sling all the superlatives I possibly can towards the special effects, the set design, the costuming, the cinematography, the action choreography, the performances, and every other facet of this production, but that doesn't change the fact that, on a technical level, this film is nigh-unimpeachable. It may not boast sweeping vistas or the creative visual design of an auteur filmmaker, but it is still a film that thrusts the viewer straight into fantastical locations and battles on Earth and beyond, with the sole purpose of pulling out the biggest possible emotions from viewers -- a task it performs superlatively. This may be a movie where, once you think about it, you realize that the massive stakes it puts into play cannot possibly be paid off, least of all because you already know that Disney/Marvel has at least five years' worth of new movies planned out. When you get home and think about it, you kind of realize how silly it is.
But when you're sitting in that theater, taking it all in with a wall-to-wall, sellout crowd of people doing the same... it just sweeps over you like a tsunami.
This movie may have united the massive new crop of Avengers that have emerged since Age of Ultron, but none of those characters is as important to this movie as the single central figure behind it all: Thanos. A big-ass alien who wants to wipe out half the population of every planet in the universe after seeing his homeworld destroyed by overpopulation run amok, Thanos gets what can only be called a twisted, inverted version of the classic Hero's Journey, first posited by Joseph Campbell as the "monomyth" and later popularized by Star Wars and copied by virtually every other blockbuster epic since. We meet Thanos well into his journey, having already acquired two of the seven MacGuffins he needs to complete it (the Infinity Gauntlet and one of the six Infinity Stones) and in the process of prying a third one from... somebody's cold, dead hands. He is the closest thing this movie has to a main character, and easily one of the greatest villains in superhero movie history, a man whose arc brings him pain, loss, a harrowing ordeal, and ultimately, in a weird way, fulfillment. Josh Brolin is utterly masterful as Thanos, having no problem filling the mo-cap and CGI on screen with his presence as he marches from one stage of his journey to the next. While the entire returning cast was as good as I would expect of them given their past films, this was truly Brolin's show, one that he stole out from under everybody despite he himself never appearing on screen in person. By the end, I was almost rooting for this guy, the film having used all the tricks of the Hero's Journey narrative and deployed them in service of the villain of the piece. God damn.
When it comes to the actual heroes, this film is faced with the unenviable task of corralling a staggering, star-studded, all-star cast of characters who have almost all been protagonists of their own films before this point, and while I'm still not entirely sure it fully stuck the landing, I can say that it came damn close. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo pull off much the same trick that Joss Whedon did on the last two movies, knowing how to pair off characters who play well against each other (Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy; Tony Stark, Peter Parker, and Doctor Strange; Steve Rogers' crew and T'Challa) and sending them off on their own separate journeys to manage and fight Thanos' plot at various points. With Thanos getting the lion's share of the focus, and the rest of the characters having been fleshed out in their prior films, their main job on screen here is to exchange witty banter and have each other's backs in various battles. At times, the film suffers from the problem of having too many storylines running at once, as it struggles to balance all of the many plates it has spinning in New York, Scotland, Wakanda, and outer space. At times, it almost feels like a fitting metaphor. The first Avengers arrived in theaters with the big question being "just how can all these characters work together?", and the central arc of the film was about precisely that, as Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. had to figure out just how this super-team was going to work. Here, in Infinity War, the main problem that it has as a film is that the team doesn't entirely work together... and I'll stop talking about plot right now.
I wasn't kidding about the comparisons to '50s/'60s Hollywood epics up there. During the fallout from Hollywood '30s/'40s Golden Age, a lot of the big epic movies they released were, much as summer blockbusters are now, accused of using spectacle to cover for faults in storytelling. But there's a reason why, even as Hollywood's business model was rotting behind the scenes, we still remember those gigantic epics like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Longest Day, and How the West Was Won, and it is for the same reason that this film worked on such a visceral level. This is the sort of movie that only Hollywood can make. Words cannot describe just how massive it is. I can sling all the superlatives I possibly can towards the special effects, the set design, the costuming, the cinematography, the action choreography, the performances, and every other facet of this production, but that doesn't change the fact that, on a technical level, this film is nigh-unimpeachable. It may not boast sweeping vistas or the creative visual design of an auteur filmmaker, but it is still a film that thrusts the viewer straight into fantastical locations and battles on Earth and beyond, with the sole purpose of pulling out the biggest possible emotions from viewers -- a task it performs superlatively. This may be a movie where, once you think about it, you realize that the massive stakes it puts into play cannot possibly be paid off, least of all because you already know that Disney/Marvel has at least five years' worth of new movies planned out. When you get home and think about it, you kind of realize how silly it is.
But when you're sitting in that theater, taking it all in with a wall-to-wall, sellout crowd of people doing the same... it just sweeps over you like a tsunami.
The Bottom Line
See this movie in theaters on the biggest damn screen you can. That's all.
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