I’ve been writing about superhero movies in this magazine for going on two decades now, and I think over that time I’ve established that I am not a fanboy. I didn’t read the comics, I don’t care how closely the characters or the plots hew to the originals, and I’m pretty bored by fight scenes between supernatural beings who can’t actually kill each other and whose blows don’t even seem to injure. I feel like an umpire with no rooting interest. I call balls and strikes. I like some superhero movies; some bore me; some are terrible. And I’ve learned to go in without preconceptions; I thought the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy made it look horrifically bad and then found to my amazement that the movie itself was wonderful.
The characters from that movie have been woven into the Woodstock of superhero adventures, Avengers: Infinity War—an epic that features just about every Marvel superhero but Ant-Man (one of the more charming, actually). The Guardians learn, pretty much in an aside, that the planet they saved at the end of the first Guardians movie has just been obliterated. The obliterator is an interstellar strongman named Thanos who has decided to purify and save half the peoples of the universe by deleting the other half from existence. The movie details the efforts of the Marvel superheroes to stop him—efforts that prove shockingly unsuccessful.
Infinity War violates several standard storytelling rules. It does little to explain who the characters are or their relationships with each other, so if you haven’t seen previous Marvel pictures, you’re going to find some of the action and plot developments confusing. But then, if you haven’t seen the previous Marvel pictures, why would you start with this one? The 19 movies in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” have grossed nearly $16 billion worldwide over the past decade at the box office. For many multiplex attendees, the Marvel Cinematic Universe pictures have comprised the bulk of their theatrical moviegoing since 2008. Infinity War is best understood not as a standalone movie but as a season finale. Not even that—it’s really just the first half of the season finale. And if the conclusion of Guardians of the Galaxy was as lighthearted as the resolution of Back to the Future, then you’d have to say Infinity War ends like The Empire Strikes Back.
In my role as the impartial umpire, I declare Infinity War a solid multibagger—maybe even a home run, though not a grand slam. It’s two-and-a-half hours long, and it held my interest the entire time, even when the pointless punching and fighting scenes started to get on my nerves. To prove my bona fides here, I must note that I deeply disliked the original Avengers and its sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron. Happily, Infinity War has a visual grandeur they lacked, as well as a genuine lightness of touch and sense of humor—qualities that came across in the other Avengers movies merely as petulant adolescent sarcasm. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely had to come up with a way to feature no fewer than 22 superheroes and sidekicks from previous Marvel movies, give each of them something distinctive to do, and connect them to others and to the larger tale told by the movie.
They achieve this aim by dividing up the characters into teams in different locations in the fight against Thanos and introducing each new team just as the story of the previous team’s efforts starts to flag. So we’re on earth with Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Spider-Man for a while, and then move into outer space, where the Guardians meet up with Thor before returning to Earth and saying hello to Captain America and Black Panther, among others.
This keeps things very lively, and some of the pairings are simply inspired. Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange) swan about arguing like aristocrats in a Noël Coward drawing room; their interactions are delightful. Meanwhile, Chris Pratt’s Star Lord desperately wants to compete with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, hurling quips at the Norse god who barely even knows he’s alive. Their scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, and these two should be paired up in buddy comedies from now until the end of time.
Thanos is a silly-looking villain, with a face that seems like it was carved out of rock and the muscles of a steroid freak. But in Josh Brolin’s beautifully modulated motion-capture performance, he comes across as an intellectual fanatic insanely committed to a Malthusian view of the universe’s limits—a set of ideas that makes him into a genocidal monster and gives surprising weight and depth to his villainy. Next to Erik Killmonger of Black Panther, he’s the best bad guy in the series. And what he does in the final 10 minutes of the movie, which are wholly unexpected and genuinely chilling, take Infinity War to a new place for a superhero picture: into the realm of tragedy.
