AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR
“I hope they remember you…”
A film ten years in the making was always going to be difficult to make perfect on Marvel’s part. It is, after all, Infinity War, the be all and end all what the MCU has been building towards. And pardon my French, but its fucking mind-blowing.
As we’ve seen slowly building ever since the first Avengers film, Thanos is on a quest to assemble the Infinity stones and bring balance to the Universe by wiping out half of it out. In his way stand a rag-tag group of rebels us movie-goers like to call The Avengers, and a couple of new friends to back them up. And what follows is two and a half hours of non-stop brilliance and perfection.
I want to point out that it’s quite difficult to write this without going into spoilers, but I’ll do my best.
I want to start by talking about Thanos, the film, and MCU’s, big bad, brilliantly portrayed by Josh Brolin.
The MCU has built a lot of good reputations over the years, but its villains aren’t one of them. Luckily, Thanos has seemingly broken this curse. The film is very much his from start to finish and you’d be wrong not to even consider him as the main character. It’s his story at play and the film does him and his story a tremendous justice. As with all great villains, Thanos is very much the hero of his story and its clear as day why he thinks he’s doing the right thing. He’s even given unexpected and hellishly emotional moments that took me by surprise, especially as it’s not often I sympathise with MCU villains, it just doesn’t happen. But it did here, and a good thing too. After all these years of build-up, a bad villain would’ve been an unspeakable hinderance for the film.
Of course, along with Thanos come the Infinity Stones, and I have to say, this film does a lot to show them off. While the majority have been shown already in other MCU films, Infinity War is the first time that their individual abilities are shown off, and it produces some really cool moments in the film.
Besides Thanos, it’s quite difficult to pick a favourite character from the film, mainly because, and I don’t say this lightly, the majority give their best performance to date. The standards like Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Chris Evans’ Captain America still shine, but newer characters like Doctor Strange are starting to win me over too. And believe me, Benedict Cumberbatch was much better in this than his own film, for me at least. But that’s one of the best aspects of this film: Characters aren’t really on their own, they’re divided into groups, some of which we’ve not seen before, and it works bloody well on all fronts. That being said, the trio of Iron Man, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange might just win it for me.
This group is together for a good portion of the film, and the chemistry between them never fails. That being said, it was a missed opportunity for a 'no shit Sherlock' joke.
Of course, with a film so long in the making, it does stand the risk of not being able to balance its immense number of characters, but I’ll put those fears to rest now. Yes, there are times when you won’t see a character for a while, but I promise they’re just around the corner. Not only does Infinity War balance its ensemble better than most movies do with about four characters, it gives the characters who need more time just that, and isn’t afraid to put other, slightly more minor characters back a bit to do this. There’s a reason why this is the longest Marvel film to date, and believe me, everyone gets at least one moment to shine.
Its cast may be expansive, but the characters and their worlds blend to near perfection, and that stands as a true testament to Marvel’s world building and storytelling.
Another quite vital factor that helps the film was its special effects. Especially with a character as central as Thanos, having spectacular CGI was a must have for the film, and thankfully it did have it. From start to finish the impossible looked perfect, with my two highlights being Iron Man’s new form of suiting up and, well, just Thanos in general really.
Not the best Gif to show it off, but Tony’s new Nano-bots are my new favourite thing.
Now, as much as I would like to go into the deaths and how each one affected both the plot and myself, I really don’t want to spoil it just in case. So instead, I shall just say this, they were handled incredibly well, and they packed the exact emotional gut-punch the movie needed. There aren’t deaths for the sake of deaths and it doesn’t do anyone any injustices. There were a couple in particular that stood out, but again, I’m not going to mention any names. How these deaths will affect future movies is yet to be seen, but it will be interesting to see where things go from here.
On a slightly different note, it was delightful to hear Alan Silvestri’s score blasting at full volume once again, especially as helped the first Avengers film so iconic. It’s used sparingly in the film but when it is there, it’ll give you goose bumps, especially for one moment in the third act in particular.
To try and wrap this up, Infinity War was pretty much exactly the movie it needed to be after being built up ever since the post-credits scene of the first Iron Man film. As Nick Fury says, ‘You’re part of a bigger universe.’ And this here is that bigger universe. Characters far and wide come together for the near perfect culmination of ten years of story telling in a film that had one hell of a job to do, and somehow pulls it off. Where things go from here, and what goes down in next year’s Avengers 4 will be incredibly interesting to see, and I’m more excited than ever. But as for Infinity War, the Russo’s once again prove why they’re Marvel’s best directors. The characters and stories are balanced perfectly, the action and fight scenes are as majestic as ever, and unlike Thor: Ragnarok, the jokes are actually funny. And unlike so other many Marvel films, where there’s seemingly no consequences on a grander scale, this film has some serious repercussions, and it will leave your mind blown and your jaw dropped.
