What can be said that hasn't already been said about this Marvel Giant-Size issue come to the big screen? It's a struggle to not just head back to reviews of 2012's first Avengers film and cherry-pick both the praise and the reservations about Joss Whedon's first outing with Earth's mightiest heroes. The difference is scale, obviously. That first Avengers film creaked ever so slightly in the middle under the weight of six core heroes and a half dozen supporting players, with five films leading up to it. It's a whole new ballgame these six years on.
I feel as though the Russo brothers must have had a meeting with Kevin Feige and the other heads of the Five Marvel Families at some point to discuss all of the valid criticisms that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has taken since 2008, in an effort to eradicate them. Undercooked villain characters? Check. Secondary heroes have little to do? Check. Homogeneous humor and dialogue? Check. An overabundance of cityscape destruction (known on some movie podcasts as the "twenty-five 9/11's" problem)? Check. And a failure to really explain the chosen ubiquitous MacGuffins, the Infinity Stones? Check. If this film were meant to be the biggest epic crossover of all times, and also address these very common complaints about the meta-franchise, I'd call it a success. By all standards and measures, this film should not work, but it does. By casting Thanos as the lead character tying together all these satellite stories, the Russos managed to tell a coherent story that finally addresses some of the lingering lore, mixes up the tones, aesthetics, and dynamics of the individual characters or teams, and gave us a Marvel villain actually worthy of the fifty-odd characters working against him.
Just as a microcosm of the level of success, let's compare one plot thread with something similar from 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron. In that film, while the bulk of the cast works together to fight the titular artificial intelligence, Thor pikes off with Stellan Skarsgård to go on some mysterious vision quest that serves only to set up Thor: Ragnarok, and it even fails to do that properly. Granted, Joss Whedon didn't want to include that stuff; it was the basis for his split from the Marvel family. But while that acted as the most clunky piece of an already clunky sequel, Thor goes on a similar side-quest in Infinity War that should bog down the film, but might actually be it's most inspired and delightfully strange subplot. Between that and Dr. Strange's creepy form of mystical combat, the self-serious space opera at play between Thanos, Gamora, Nebula, and Star-Lord, and vicious alien animal hordes pouring into Wakanda, this film has artfully mixed all the most interesting flourishes of its various parts together. Great. That's exactly what this cornucopia of sci-fi, adventure, and urban fantasy needs is a "weirdness" factor.
Structure aside, it's also just a lot of fun to mix up all the different characters and settings like a large tub of action figures to see which combinations yield great scene partners. Chris Hemsworth's Thor fits in startlingly well with the Guardians of the Galaxy, the dueling egos of genius Tony Stark with genius Stephen Strange is a great use of Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch for their portion of the film, and the easily overlooked choice of making War Machine and Falcon each other's wingman is pretty inspired. There are bits that falter, largely due to the lack of development of Vision and Scarlet Witch up to this point, and I truly feel that Chris Evans is given short shrift as Captain America in this film. But with this many boxes to check off there was liable to be a few missed opportunities, and since the whole saga of Thanos and the Infinity Stones concerns the more cosmic and scientific of heroes on a deeper level, it makes sense.
At this point, "It feels like a real comic book" has become an aching cliché when talking about superhero films. But, hey, this one does. Specifically, it feels like a penultimate issue of a limited series, beginning in media res and never pausing for too long to belabor exposition. Though every comic book is someone's first comic book, much of them rely heavily on the weight of previous knowledge, and Infinity War demands active, recent viewing of all seventeen previous films, including the post-credits stingers. It's honestly the only option for something of this scale.
There's plenty to pick apart, but the action sequences are rock solid, the motivations of the characters--including the villain--are well defined, and the pace of the film kept me oblivious to the two-and-a-half hour run time. This is a gigantic blockbuster done right, and I'm at a point where I feel any "Marvel fatigue" complaints say a lot more about the person wielding them than it does the quality of the films.
This review is a part of Kyle's Letterboxd profile, which includes reviews and movie lists not covered here at the blog, including a ranking of several franchises and excerpts from the book, Cinema Autopsy, which is available on the Amazon Kindle store.