Infinity War? Oh, for sure. (A decade of decadence)
If you want a show in a thunderstorm you set up a lightning rod and watch the pure power dance for your amusement. Our key heroes in the Marvel universe have stood like conduit towers of popular culture, risen like phoenixes from the ashes of a financially struggling 1990s Marvel, for the last 10 years. Not only breathing life into the bank accounts of Marvel but igniting the hunger for comics and movies like no other franchise in the history of cinema, much aided by the lackluster attempts of DC to recreate that magic and all while never quite understanding the complex science of it all.
And like lightning you have Avengers: Infinity War. Planned for and calculated but almost uncontrollable just due to the nature of the beast. More heroes than you can count on all your digits and more stories than an old book of fables from your childhood. Like controlling the floods, it takes the finest form of engineering, which is exactly what Joe and Anthony Russo have done, finely tuned and mathematically planned within an inch of its many lives. So how do you make a mathematically planned storm of countless tales coalesce into something that the smallest child can enjoy alongside their 90 year old grandparents and all inbetween? Simple, you take a Chris add another then add a Robert and this is how you tame the beast.
Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr are giants, holding the chains of each of the story lines together and pulling like titans to ensure your attention never moves, from heartbreaking deaths to not so heartbreaking deaths we move from story to story, from planet to planet and from hero to hero without a beat missed and they are the magnets for your attention. Battles that would be an entire movie in the hands of lesser studios are but tiny glances in Infinity Wars eyes, never glazed over or ignoring, they are given the perfect time for you to bite the bait and to drag you as if by a speedboat to the next baited hook.
From the last 10 years our heroes and villains have build the strongest foundations that have rewarded investment, if you immersed into the world then every motive and every stance is reasoned, every action justifiable and every conclusion as heartbreaking as it should be. But for the casual viewer you are rewarded with enough. Enough being the keyword for Infinity War, you are given enough action, enough story and enough character development to hook you in and, more importantly, hook you into the future of these intertwined tales. Never too much, never too little. And how they have brought this balance to such potential chaos, only Thanos can tell you that.
With the final black and white credits rolling you are greeted with a glaringly obvious fact, you have one year to wait to see the conclusion of this story and therein lies the potential problem. Time is a great healer, or so they say, but it is also gets people thinking. Minds tick and hope, like Doctor Strange looking into the future we see countless outcomes and hypothesize on our favourite, build the hype around it and others add to this with plots and hopes, growing over the months until the end result is lesser than the idealised version that sits in our frontal lobe. The recent Star Wars films have suffered from this, with a two year gap and a rabid fan base of optimistic thinkers that will always look for the best possible outcome and if the writer cannot match up to the thinkers then you get a damp firework (ala The Last Jedi and its infamously limp Snoke payoff), so will The Avengers 4 live up to the hype of a year of speculation and imaginative creations? Time will tell. But for now we have a film that can proudly stand among the rarest of clubs in media, a franchise that is constantly improving. And who can ask more than that.
