Keeping
this spoiler-free, so it may be a little abstract at times!
I
greatly enjoyed Infinity War. These days I don't often go to the cinema, and I
don't tend to watch the standalone movies until a while after release day. I
didn't see Doctor Strange or the latest Thor until a few months later, and I
haven't seen Black Panther yet because I'm pretty sure it will
be available on my flight back to England in July. But when they all team up, I
get excited and want to go. Glad I saw it on opening day, too, because
inevitably my Facebook feed showed a spoiler the very next morning.
The
movie was everything I wanted it to be, which is more than I can say for the
first two Avengers movies. The first was fun but the final act had no real
sense of a genuine threat or bit emotional payoff. The second was marred by the
annoying way they wrote Ultron and his weird plan. This one was much bigger,
more spectacular and crazier than the others. Shifting the whole MCU into
Cosmic Marvel was always a bit risky, because when things become overblown
space operas, you risk losing the human element and the idea that characters
like Captain America can still hold their own seems a bit absurd. But the
comics manage it, and so have the movies. The careful build-up from the largely
human dramas of the first Iron Man movies and the original Captain America mean
we're invested in these characters even when realism is long-since cast out.
The battles and setpieces here are as far-fetched as anything in anime, but it
works.
Thanos
is also an excellent antagonist. Brutal and merciless but utterly convinced he
is right, vulnerable and not beyond suffering, with a dream of fixing the
universe and settling down quietly, he is actually convincing even at this
absurd intergalactic scale. It’s believable that he’s committed to his goal and
will stop at nothing to reach it. Honestly, his plan doesn't make that much
sense in this version. His comic motivation - pleasing Lady Death - probably
would seem too ridiculous to work here, but at least was logical. I can
understand his modus operandi, but getting the Infinity Gauntlet and unlimited power
surely offers alternate solutions to the original problem he wanted to fix?
What
impressed me was how elegantly all the different elements here were juggled.
The opening perhaps tramples on the triumph of a previous movie in something of
an Alien 3 shocker, but it gives us a strong focus for who to follow in the
narrative. We then have very clear points of focus during the fetch quest to
follow – who has the stones, who is coming for them, and who is there to defend
them. Thanos having his Black Order to split up and send to retrieve the stones
made sense, even if they could have had much less difficulty teaming up from
the start, and even if some of the heroes’ actions are dubious, the
scriptwriters put in quite a clever catch-all from Dr. Strange that waves away
any missed opportunities or seemingly misguided actions.
The
big battle scene is a bit dull, to be honest. It’s great to see lots of heroes
in action, but against CGI fodder it has very little impact. Still, this is a
bit of a tradition from the Avengers movies.
Probably the biggest thrill was having the Guardians of the Galaxy interacting
with the Avengers, providing some of the funniest and most awesome moments.
The
audience leaves probably a little surprised, perhaps moved, and almost
certainly eager for more. I know I want the Avengers 4 ASAP. The story clearly
isn’t over, and there are plenty more MCU movies to come. I have a feeling we’ll
leave the next movie with a feeling of almost perfect inversion of what we got
here. But I’m certainly curious to see what effect this is all going to have on
upcoming movies like the next Spiderman and
Guardians films. I’m assuming the new
Ant-man and Captain Marvel films will be set before this, with some scenes
perhaps in parallel. We’ll see.
Either way, this was an action-packed space melodrama with lots of battles that brought a smile to my face and a surprising range of emotions. I definitely enjoyed it, even if a little part of me was sad that we still can’t have the X-Men included in all this.
