Avengers: Infinity War Review: Reviewing Every Marvel Movie #44/76:
The first half of the grand finale to the Infinity Saga can’t be viewed as anything but. As a standalone film, this movie is nigh-incomprehensible in a way that the first Avengers simply isn’t. The movie expects you to know who everyone is and what their deal is when they appear, sparing no time for introductions. As the finale in a series, though, it’s nearly perfect. By assuming you already know who everybody is, the film is able to hit the ground running and tell its sprawling story without ever feeling like there are pieces missing. Every scene is important, and almost every line of dialogue pushes the plot forward or further characterizes the characters since we’ve last seen them. There are maybe a few too many jokes, but they always come from characters who aren’t taking things as seriously as they should be, and the jokes dwindle over the course of the film to let the serious scenes be serious.
Spoilers Below:
The way the movie handles its sprawling cast is by splitting them into groups, each led by one or two focus characters that the supporting cast is there to support. By and large, this works, with everyone feeling as important as they should be. Falcon and Bucky for example don’t do much, but they’re there to support Captain America like they always have. Arguably, Captain America is there to support Wanda and Vision, since while he leads the new Avengers, he doesn’t have specific stakes in the battle against Thanos in the same way that Wanda and Vision do. We see them before we see Cap, and while Cap gets his moment holding off Thanos, the big emotional moment with this group is between Wanda and Vision when she breaks the Soul Stone out of his head.
It goes like this for the rest of the characters, too. Tony Stark gets a lot of focus because he’s the original hero of the MCU, but he doesn’t really do a lot except kill Ebony Maw. The star of his little group is instead Dr Strange, being the one who explains how all the Stones work and the one who comes up with the plan to stop Thanos by sacrificing the Time Stone to save Tony. Drax and Mantis don’t do a lot (Drax is maybe the one character who should do more), but the focus is placed on Quill and Gamora since Gamora has the most direct tie to Thanos, and they get some of the most emotional scenes in the movie. The scene where Quill tries to fulfill Gamora’s wish to kill her but is stopped when Thanos turns his gun into a bubble blower is heartbreaking. Gamora later trying to sacrifice herself again and Thanos doing the same thing is equally gut wrenching.
In my head, the star of the movie, aside from Thanos, is Thor. The movie starts Thanos slaughtering all the Asgardians that Thor spent Ragnarok saving, and then Loki sacrifices himself to save Thor. Heimdall sends Hulk to Earth, basically kicking off that whole half of the plot, even if Thanos would have shown up anyways. Thor is the most proactive throughout the movie, undertaking his own adventure to stop Thanos instead of reacting to what he’s doing like many of the others. The Guardians are also proactive, but only because Thor alerts them to what’s going on. Thor’s the one who turns the tide in the Battle of Wakanda, and the climax of the film is him coming within an inch of stopping Thanos by overpowering the Infinity Gauntlet. There’s a reason why “you should have gone for the head” became a meme, and it’s because it’s not the moment where Thanos wins, but the moment where Thor loses. He does the Goku arc of training off-world while everybody holds off the villain for as long as possible, and then fails to follow through by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory at the last moment. If Thor stops Thanos, this is his movie, his equivalent of flying the nuke into the portal above New York.
Thanos is arguably the main character of this film, but that’s really only because he wins at the end. As seemingly committed to his noble goals of universal balance as he is, the man is also a right bastard. He straight up tortures Nebula to get information out of her and Gamora, and is fully willing to sacrifice Gamora to get what he wants. He does seem to love her, but his love is so twisted in pragmatism that it doesn’t have any emotional weight and ruined both Gamora’s and Nebula’s lives. They don’t want to be heartless warriors, they just wanted to be with their families, and Thanos ruined that for them in pursuit of his own ideals. The most damning evidence that Thanos is pure evil is the fact that he kills every dwarf but 1 on Nidavellir, presumably because they have the power to stop him. It completely breaks his half rule, and proves that he’s willing to break his own rules to get what he wants, even if what he wants is seemingly noble. The movie also ends with the harrowing shot of him sitting in that field of flowers, showing him content with his victory just like he said he’d be. He achieved inner peace, regardless of how many lives he had to take to get there.
This movie isn’t really about character arcs, but about the distances people are willing to go to get what they want. People have argued that the reason the heroes lose is because they aren’t willing to make any sacrifices - or “trade lives” as Cap puts it - but that is just untrue. Both Wanda and Quill try to kill their partner, and Thanos stops them both times. You could argue that if they had just killed their partner sooner, then Thanos wouldn’t have been able to stop them, which is probably true, but the point stands that they were willing to make the sacrifice when they needed to. Even Gamora is willing to sacrifice herself to stop Thanos, but Thanos stops that too. Plus, with the context of Endgame, Strange sacrificing the Stone to save Tony is the only reason the heroes win at all.
The stronger argument is that the heroes lose because they are more emotional than Thanos, following their hearts instead of being purely pragmatic. Quill and Wanda really don’t want to kill their loved ones, not because they aren’t willing to make the sacrifice, but because it really hurts, and they believe there has to be another way. Gamora would rather sacrifice herself than Nebula, and Tony can’t make the call to Cap to warn him and Vision about Thanos’ Black Order. If he makes that call, then maybe Vision never destabilizes and they’re able to remove the Stone from his head before Thanos arrives. Hulk is also too scared to help after getting his ass kicked by Thanos in the opening scene, depriving the Avengers of one of their biggest guns.
The two biggest pieces of evidence for this theme, though, are Quill on Titan and Thor not going for the head. Thanos killed the love of Quill’s life, and Quill loses it, enabling Thanos to break free from Mantis’ control and win. Mantis also controls emotions, and Thanos is the only character able to resist her - he resists even better than Ego did - because he’s simply not in touch with his emotions at all. Thor then misses his opportunity to kill Thanos because he wants to make him suffer for killing Loki, which he swore to do at the start of the film. Thor’s path has been doomed from the start because he and Thanos are on opposite ends of the emotional/pragmatic spectrum and Thanos is the one who wins. The thing that will let the heroes eventually win - Strange saving Tony - isn’t done out of emotions, but because Strange knows that this is the practical play in the long term. This emotionality even runs down to their armies. The Wakandans have to hype themselves up with chants and rallying cries, while Thanos’ army is a mass of identical unthinking monsters willing to slaughter and die for their master. That’s why Thanos wins: because he’s an emotionless pragmatist, and he surrounds himself with people who feel the same.
The movie is basically a 150 minute long action scene, and the action almost always works. The characters feel like they’re fighting like themselves, using their own unique abilities to pull out everything they’ve got. Everything feels intense, yet you’re always able to understand what’s going on. The fights also almost never cut around, so even though events kinda happen at the same time, you’re almost never focused on more than one thing at once. Even when the two final fights happen at the same time, they’re always cut where it always feels like a natural break in the fight choreography. It makes things easy to understand and follow, which is good because of just how many moving parts there are.
There are a few things I don’t like. I do wish Hulk got to come back in this movie, even if that’s probably partly because I know they skip his arc between this movie and Endgame. Hawkeye feels like he should be here since he’s the only Avenger missing. Him being there would lend more to the idea that this is the last movie, but since we miss out on the Avengers reunion, there has to be more. I’m fine with Ant-Man being absent because, really, he wasn’t gonna do much, and Fury at least gets his post-credits to contribute.
The Infinity Stones also seem inconsistent. The Power Stone and Space Stone seem to have permanent effects, but the Reality Stone’s effects are undone as soon as Thanos leaves the area. You could argue he’s undoing them, but that doesn’t seem like something he would do, or you could argue that he has to keep the effects active, but that’s still inconsistent with the other Stones. I’m also literally not sure what the Soul Stone does, which is bizarre when a whole chunk of the movie is dedicated to Thanos killing Gamora to get it. It probably helps him delete half the universe, but that seems more like a Reality/Space/Power effect than Soul, especially since the bodies are disintegrated and not rendered lifeless. That said, they’re really minor complaints in the grand scheme of things. Of course the six Stones being together makes them powerful, and I understand why the characters are absent even if I wish they were there.
This movie is a certified banger in the context of what it is. This is what the whole MCU has been building towards, and it's a perfect juggling act of every single character to craft a tightly-knit yet sprawling story that is somehow easy to follow. Everyone gets their moment, and Thanos gets to be the threat that he was built up to be in the two Guardians films. The heroes lose, but it doesn’t feel unearned because you can see the path that they could have taken to win. The MCU is all about humans trying to be gods, and when a god-like threat shows up, even the real god acts all too human to truly stop him.
Random before sleep thought I had recently: Thanos' plan of dusting a random half of the population wouldn't have even worked. Overpopulation isn't the problem, overconsumption is part of the problem, but more specifically, the hoarding of resources by the ruling class. We could solve world hunger and poverty with our existing resources, we just don't because the ruling class doesn't want to.
Dusting a random half of the population would not change these things. In fact, knowing what we know, the ruling class would somehow manage to capitalize off of the disappearance of half the universe, and the impoverished would still be impoverished.
If anyone had a military that uses more advanced tactics than "run directly towards the enemy even when you have ranged weaponry" they could absolutely roll the MCU. Galactic conquerors. Maybe this was gonna be the Kang plotline.
