Mark Reviews Movies: AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 26, 2018

There are many things happening, characters, and consequences in Avengers: Infinity War, but within that multitude of stuff, there really isn't much to everything here. It's a lot of movie, and it's also not much movie. It's a long but slight, expansive but restricted, and busy but straightforward contradiction of a movie.

The selling point is bringing together a wide cast of superheroes, whose individual and connected stories have been playing out over the course of the 18 previous movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series. To count the exact number of heroes in this story would be easy enough, but it also would be pointless.

The heroes matter here, of course, since they do a lot of moving and talking and fighting. Because there are so many of them, the screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely reduces their purpose to their movements (around the globe and throughout space), their primarily plot-based conversations, and their participation in a series of action sequences. Their respective personalities come through mostly by means of some jovial banter and in the multiple moments in which they have to make life-or-death decisions.

The stakes here are about as high as they can be, with a villain who wants to wipe out half of the population of the universe (which makes him a bit of an underachiever in terms of megalomaniacal villains of unlimited power), but at this point, such an antagonist is pretty much the norm for such fare. In something of an unexpected move, the movie devotes a decent amount of time to its genocidal villain, a titan named Thanos (Josh Brolin, transformed into a convincingly computer-generated giant with purple skin). By the time the movie ends, it has become his story in a way that most superhero movies would never dare even to consider.

The plot has Thanos trying to retrieve the six Infinity Stones that have been vaguely established in the previous entries in this series. This time, we finally learn what they are: gems created and scattered across the universe during the Big Bang—each one representing some element of nature (time, reality, soul, etc.). Thanos has a gauntlet with six slots in it, and as he adds a stone to his glove, his power increases exponentially. When he has all six, his plan is to kill off half of the living things with a snap of his fingers, believing that it will end the problem of the scarcity of resources throughout the universe.

The heroes' job, naturally, is to stop him. The story finds the heroes where the previous movies last left them. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is on refugee spaceship with Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is trying to adjust to life without being Iron Man. Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), the psychic Scarlet Witch, and Vision (Paul Bettany) are on vacation in Scotland, thinking of leaving the superhero business to live a normal life, but Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the former Captain America, is keeping on an eye on them with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie).

Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is on a field trip when Thanos' goons arrive in New York City. Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is protecting his own Infinity Stone. The Guardians of the Galaxy—Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), and Groot (voice of Vin Diesel)—are still looking for infamy and fortune in space.

As Thanos moves closer to his goal, the old alliances are split, and new ones—like Thor teaming up with Rocket and Groot, Dr. Strange having to deal with Tony and Peter, or the renegade former Avengers finding their way to Black Panther's (Chadwick Boseman) realm of Wakanda—form. We return to familiar places, such as the Collector's (Benicio Del Toro) junk room on Knowhere, and discover new ones, such as a forge that operates on the heat of a star run by Eitri (Peter Dinklage). Mostly, though, we watch as the heroes crack wise, explain what they're going to do or currently doing, and fight an assortment of alien foes on spaceships, through city streets, and on the African plains. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo give us plenty of action, and it works for the most part, allowing the superheroes to use their unique powers in tandem. The climactic battle in Wakanda, though, is a lot of noise.

Markus and McFeely do a few things right. Knowing that the stakes here are fairly generic, they're at least smart enough to personalize the jeopardy, ensuring that there's always a sense that the heroes and their relationships are at risk. Thanos is a similarly generic villain in terms of his end goal, but there's more to him than a simple desire for death and destruction. In his mind, his sacrifices are as necessary and painful as those of the heroes.

All of it is, perhaps, too much, at least in terms of letting the heroes exist as more than pawns on a universe-sized chessboard. There are consequences, finally, and the ending of Avengers: Infinity War possesses the sort of finality that's pretty audacious. At least it would be if we didn't already know that these movies will keep going and almost assuredly deprive this movie of its most potent and despairing moments.

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