Review: Avengers: Infinity War is both enormous and delivers emotional realism
It’s lengthy, intense, moving, action-packed, Marvel’s latest massive movie is everything fans have waited 10 years for…
★★★★★
Avengers: Infinity War is, without any hint of exaggeration, one of the most ambitious cinematic endeavours to arrive on the big screen. This is a film with over 20 important characters on the poster, and a running time of two hours and 40 minutes. It’s the culmination of what Marvel Studios has been building towards for ten years, and the sheer gigantic scale of the thing is very evident when you see it.
Here’s a quick snippet to give you a sense of the plot:
The Avengers and their allies must be willing to sacrifice all in an attempt to defeat the powerful Thanos before his blitz of devastation and ruin puts an end to the universe. (IMDb)
Pretty high stakes, right?
Impressively, it’s not an unwieldy movie. You’ll need to have seen multiple previous Marvel films for it to make sense but, if you have, it’s surprisingly coherent. It hits the ground running, doesn’t bother with character introductions, and manages to deliver on Marvel’s promise of a conclusive event movie to bring together the heroes and the villain that it’s been setting up for a long time now. It’s full of action and fast-paced, and while it’s very long it also builds to a satisfying ending and gives many of its key players meaningful emotional beats along the way.
It’s really big
Make sure you’re ready to be sat in your seat for a long time with this one. Avengers: Infinity War is very nearly three hours long and it doesn’t really ever slow down when it comes to pacing and action. It’s hard to say if a movie this big is unprecedented, but it certainly feels that way.
It’s remarkable how Marvel has assembled such a huge cast of big name stars, and it’s likely that this could be the biggest it goes for a long time. That doesn’t mean there won’t be many more team movies in the future, but I’d expect to see slightly smaller team-ups like we saw in Thor: Ragnarok be a bit more common than something on this huge a scale.
Earth’s mightiest heroes
Given that there are more than 20 characters in this thing, it’s unsurprising that it’ll probably take a couple of paragraphs to list them and their roles in this conflict!
At the start of the film, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) are left in a less than ideal situation with the arrival of supervillain Thanos (Josh Brolin); shortly after, Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Dr Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Wong (Benedict Wong) and Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland) have to defend New York from invaders; meanwhile, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) find their relatively new relationship interrupted by alien attackers too.
Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie) realise they’ll need to call on T’Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), the armies of Wakanda, and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) for help in the coming battles. And, back in space, the Guardians of the Galaxy make an important discovery and also get ready to join the fight against Thanos.
This is Thanos’s movie
While he is the antagonist, Thanos is hardly a moustache-twirling villain. The story of Avengers: Infinity War puts a lot of effort into making him feel real and motivated, and it does this by often making this his story. In fact, without necessarily spoiling anything, many of the beats of the hero’s journey are given to Thanos. The plot of this film is his quest to gather the Infinity Stones (most of them MacGuffins from previous movies) so that he will have the power to do something that he believes to be right but that everyone else sees as devastation for the universe.
It’s worth mentioning that Thanos wouldn’t work half as well as he does without a lot of very effective artistry from the visual effects teams that worked on this film. He has a lot of Brolin’s facial nuances, feels giant and physically imposing, and also honest and real enough to be a powerful force against our heroes. In general, the visual effects and action are highly impressive in this film, but a lot of time and energy has been put into making Thanos compelling (just look at the difference between him and his faithful cronies The Black Order) and it pays off.
No resurrections this time
Avengers: Infinity War is an intense movie, and it makes it very clear that there are serious consequences to Thanos’s arrival and his plan. From the off, it lets us know that this is much bigger than the attack on New York in the first Avengers film, and it’s no big spoiler at this point to say that some characters definitely don’t make it to the end of the film.
Because it’s the fate of the entire universe on the line, the stakes can feel almost cartoonishly high, but there are more than a number of moments where we feel how important this war is. The tone is, appropriately, darker than many of the Marvel movies before this. It is balanced with some great humour, but you shouldn’t be surprised to find that this isn’t quite as kid-friendly as things like Spider-Man: Homecoming or Ant-Man!
It’s non-stop
The pacing is very fast. It starts quickly and it stays that way for well over two hours. You get the sense that Thanos has been building up to delivering on his plan and he’s now going to do it as efficiently as he possibly can. It becomes clear over the course of the film that events have recently occurred that give him renewed confidence when it comes to finding the Infinity Stones, and there’s frequently very little the heroes can do when fighting against his superior strength.
More than just darting around to different locations on the globe, this is a huge movie with a lot of important locations all around the universe, and there seems to almost be a big action set piece in most of them. The Russo brothers direct the movie and its numerous characters incredibly well, and the action veers between coherent and chaotic in a way that effectively emphasises just how difficult it is to plan for a villain this mighty.
Destiny arrives
While the speed of the movie is fast and can often feel relentless, it does know when to slow down and deliver powerful character moments. What’s happening here is what Tony has been dreading for years. It’s his greatest fear come to life, and the movie does treat this as a climax of an arc years in the making. It also takes time to reckon with the sheer amount of loss that Thor has experienced and how it weighs on him emotionally in one of its best scenes — and it works hard to give Thanos emotional moments too. Thematically, it is about facing your greatest fears, and coming to terms with what you can or can’t sacrifice to achieve your goals. The movie throws together a lot of new character combinations, and it’s fantastic to see big egos and distinctive personalities clashing or coming together — it’s one of the things that makes a big team-up so entertaining.
A team divided
It’s important to note that this is the first part of a two-part story. While Avengers 4 is not going to be titled “Infinity War: Part 2”, we’ve been aware for some time that it’ll be dealing with the fallout from the events of this film. So, yes, the core Avengers team is still largely divided. It may be disappointing for some viewers to see that some character arcs aren’t complete or that some characters don’t feature that much or interact with each other all that much or at all. There’s a lot that’ll need to be unpacked and resolved in the next film that’s coming in 2019. These were filmed back-to-back, so thankfully we don’t have too long to wait. This movie is fully aware that the team is essentially still at odds after the events of Civil War, and how that separation affects how protected the world is. It’s fair to expect this part of the story to be revisited in the next instalment.
Verdict
Overall, Avengers: Infinity War absolutely delivers on its promises. This is a fast-paced and massive movie that brings enormous spectacle to the big screen but doesn’t forget about emotional arcs and consequences. It is just the first part of a larger story, but it’s a satisfying one, and it’s great to see so many of the characters we know coming together for this intense thrill-ride.
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