10 years. 18 movies. All of it lead up to this, the culmination of a decade of storytelling. I haven’t followed from the beginning; the first Marvel movie I saw in theaters was Guardians of the Galaxy. Regardless, Marvel Studios has spent half my life building up to this moment, this movie that brings together almost every hero brought to the screen in that time. Avengers: Infinity War is about the Mad Titan, Thanos (Josh Brolin), as he sets about collecting the six Infinity Stones to wipe out half the universe, and the army of heroes who stand in his way.
Infinity War picks up right after Thor: Ragnarok ended and the war begins as Thanos clashes with the Asgardians, and a Hulk. Yes, we do get a chance to see a nice plump grape fight a raisin. Yes, it’s awesome. No, I don’t consider it a spoiler because something BIG had to throw Banner through the roof of the New York Sanctum as we saw in the trailer. The action doesn’t stop for the rest of the movie, either; while there are a handful of touching scenes, moments of powerful characterization, there isn’t a wasted moment to be found in the two and a half hour run time.
This is remarkable because the story doesn’t feel rushed. A lot happens, but by the end of the movie I didn’t feel like the writers took on more than they could handle. Every character got their moment, every hero a chance to shine. Like we saw in the trailer, the story was split between space and Earth in a manner that helped keep the number of characters in a given scene at a manageable number and still provided great character interactions between pairs of characters that wouldn’t have been possible without the two worlds colliding. Even then, we saw interesting moments between characters who had never interacted on Earth before.
While we’re on the topic of characters, there are two I want to take a moment to speak about: Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Thanos. Before I go any further, I want to take a moment and speak about spoilers. When I post a spoiler-free review that means it won’t have any content that wouldn’t already be available to you if you really look, like clips from the trailer. Here, however, I’m going to talk about a spoiler that came from some toys released before the movie; I avoided looking at these toys to stay away from the spoilers, so if you’d also like to skip the toy-based spoilers, skip ahead to the paragraph with the first words in bold.
The first trailer for Infinity War told us a lot about the movie, including that the Hulkbuster armor was back. A Lego set revealed before the movie came out showed us something quite interesting: Rather than Tony Stark (Robert Downy Jr.) piloting the massive suit, Bruce seemed to be springing out of its chest. This was accurate to the movie, and I wanted to highlight it because of Bruce’s mini-trilogy. It was confirmed that while a solo movie isn’t in the works for the green machine, Banner and his counterpart will be getting a character arc built across three movies. The first of these was Thor: Ragnarok with Avengers: Infinity War being part two and Avengers 4 concluding the arc. Seeing Banner’s changes was interesting. After the events of Ragnarok, the Hulk has been building his own personality and it has been clashing with Banner’s, creating a interesting interaction. In the previous movies the Hulk wasn’t much of a character. He was just something big that got angry and liked to smash. Ragnarok changed that, and Infinity War builds on the idea of the Hulk being a defined person separate from Banner as the two almost start a conversation – but that’s getting a little too frisky with the spoiler/no spoiler line.
If you skipped the part about Banner, let’s talk about the Mad Titan because he helped make Infinity War work. See, there’s been a bit of a villain problem with Marvel movies in the past. While some villains like Loki and Killmonger have been great, a lot of others have seemed pretty bland. If Thanos had been one of these cardboard villains chasing after the Infinity Stones, then…well, this could have turned out a lot like Justice League. But Thanos isn’t Steppenwolf. He is one of the greatest villains to ever walk the MCU. While his origins have changed, he’s compelling and demands attention in every scene he’s in. Not because he’s the biggest guy in the room, or because he’s a CGI monstrosity, but because Thanos has the gravity a villain a movie like this needed. We get to see moments where he acts with true compassion, and while his goals seem cartoonish, there’s a past behind him and a deep-rooted conviction that makes it more believable than when Ultron wanted to smush Earth. It’s the heart behind the Mad Titan that makes this such a great movie.
Although the action scenes didn’t hurt. There was a moment or two during some fights where the CGI was…less than stunning, but easily overlooked. Every character got to show off their fighting skills, whether it was the deadly duo of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Okoye (Danai Gurira) or Spider-Man versus…well, I can’t spoiler one of the best fight scenes in the movie so I guess you’ll just have to watch it. But it was great, watching as some fights were fought on even ground and others were completely one-sided, watching as wills and powers clashed over the fate of the universe.
Avengers: Infinity War is an experience. There’s no other way to put it. The only movie I’ve seen with a build up like this was Star Wars: The Force Awakens. A movie that has had the support of millions of fans spanning multiple years. It unites all of our favorite heroes on one screen, in one movie, fighting a single battle that spans the galaxy. It brings the Avengers against an enemy with power equal to the universe itself, and alters the course of the MCU as we know it. Also, while there is an end credit scene there’s nothing in the middle so you have the perfect chance to run and use the bathroom before seeing it.
Movies, Magic, and Anime 