“Avengers: Infinity War” may be the most anticipated movie to ever come out and it did not disappoint. It made box office history by having the highest grossing opening weekend, passing “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Which is good news for Disney, who own the film rights to both Star Wars and Marvel.
The Marvel cinematic universe started with “Iron Man” in 2008 and nearly two dozen movies have added to the story to get us to this point. This is one of the few downfalls going into the movie. The amount of knowledge needed to catch little intricacies of the movie is exhausting. But if I’m being honest you only need to watch “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, “Captain America: Civil War” and both “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies to get the overall gist of what is going on.
The plot is pretty simple. Thanos, a big purple alien played by Josh Brolin, wants to destroy most of existing life and create his utopian universe. To do that he needs to find six infinity stones and put them on a glove — the Infinity Gauntlet — to change and distort reality to his liking. It’s something he’s been trying to do since the end of the first Avengers movie in 2012. Five minutes into Infinity War he already has two of them and this time, it’s pretty clear nothing is going to stop him, and the only people who might have a chance of stopping him are the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy.
The movie was exactly what a comic book movie should be. It had large amounts of action mixed with just enough dialogue. The only long monologues come from Thanos, which is typical of a villain, and Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) who is on his high horse in every movie he’s in. Some heroes are just in the movie to kick ass with no other plot necessity (Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, being the perfect example).
Thanos is a genocidal maniac and pretty good at it. The dude beats, kills and tortures his own children. Some of his children adore and work under him while others like Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) have a complete and utter hatred of him. He is the Marvel equivalent to Zeus — they’re probably sleeping around just a bit too much. Thanos is the best super villain to grace the silver screen.
Infinity War also gives us Chris Hemsworth’s best performance as the Asgardian god Thor. In his three solo films and the first two Avengers movies, Thor is essentially just a foreign exchange meathead who constantly gets outsmarted by his brother, Loki. In this movie we see an entire arc of a god who has fallen from grace looking for redemption. His interactions with the Guardians, namely Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and Groot (Vin Diesel), are some of the best in the entire film.
Even with over 20 Marvel characters, though, the movie never feels too congested. In just around two and a half hours the movie weaves multiple plot lines without compromising pacing.
For a movie with such a serious tone, Marvel continued with the unnecessary one liners. In all their movies, Marvel will drop quick jokes and make the audience laugh. Perfectly fine, unless there is, I don’t know, an alien trying to destroy the universe, which does not seem like a good time to have Chris Pratt, reprising his role as Star Lord, try to make a joke about his body insecurity.
And I don’t know how to say this nicely but I’m going to power through it. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk/Bruce Banner is the worst character in this movie. In short, he is the embodiment of fragile masculinity and if he wasn’t in the movie I would have been completely fine with that.
Ultimately, moviegoers will leave the theater feeling all sorts of emotion, but not with a feeling of discontent.
Darion Strugs be reached at dstrugs11@gmail.com on Twitter @dstrugs