Movie Review: Avengers - Infinity War

  It’s been ten years since Marvel launched its cinematic universe in earnest with Iron Man, a movie in which the then-unbankable Robert Downey Jr. became a superhero most people had never heard of. The past really is another country.

In the interim we’ve had Norse gods, frozen supersoldiers, the guy from Sherlock learned to do magic and we really did believe a raccoon could talk. Finally, then, we arrive at Infinity War, a film which tries to tie all of these elements together. Does it succeed?

...Not really, no.

I’m writing this in the honeymoon period that every giant movie seems to enjoy, but I don’t think this is going to be one that suffers the sort of enormous backlash that, say, Phantom Menace did. It’s not a terrible film, it’s… an okay one. Which is about the best that can be hoped for when you consider that the task was probably impossible.

Much was made of Marvel’s claim that this was “the most ambitious crossover event in history,” but it was probably true.

I said "probably."

Unfortunately, however, ambition is a poor substitute for coherence. I was one of the cynics who didn’t think that The Avengers would work (Norse gods and Iron Man? Impossible…) but I was proven wrong by a terrific movie made by Joss Whedon.

Infinity War directors The Russo Brothers are not Joss Whedon (very few of us are...) but even if Whedon hadn’t jumped ship when the studio pissed him off with their meddling in “Age of Ultron,” there is now just too much going on in the Marvel Universe for even a Whedon level skill with ensemble writing. “Spider-man: Homecoming” ended on a cliffhanger that goes totally unaddressed, “Thor: Ragnarok” made huge changes to the character that this film spends a good chunk of the runtime trying to correct (via possibly the greatest nerd culture cameo ever), and we have to deal with flashbacks, long-vanished characters returning, outer space, New York City, Wakanda, the mystic arts, nanotech, introducing Thanos (and his unamed and underwritten henchmen) and somehow, ANOTHER appearance by Gwyneth Paltrow. She's like the herpes of the Marvel Universe - every time you think they've finally got rid of her she crops up again. Even if Paltrow weren't relentlessly bland, it's hard to concentrate on a performance by a woman you suspect of having a stone egg in her vagina during any given scene.

Even if there had been a smaller cast, lower stakes and a less convoluted backstory, the film has flaws entirely it's own. For several movies now, technology has been getting ridiculous in the Avengers franchise, and Iron Man's new nanotech suit basically turns him into the T-1000. Spider-man also dons a suit that Stark Industries made for him, giving both characters ill-defined powers that really feel like they were dreamt up with an eye to selling as many different action figures as possible.

Spider-man supposedly does whatever a spider can - we have a whole song about it - so giving him a robot suit seems strange and pointless. The Avengers made much out of the point that Iron Man is nothing without his armour. To take a character who IS superhuman and reduce him to another, slightly different suit of armour is just dumb.

Dumb is actually one of the biggest problems with Infinity War. Characters constantly make plans to defeat Thanos and then fail to stick to them, or do something stupid to sabotage them. Audiences like characters who are smart and capable. Marvel used to have a lot of those, but in this film they're reduced to idiocy for the sake of plot convenience.

[[[[[SPOILER SECTION HERE WITH MORE DETAIL: Why would Gamorra ask the one person who is least likely to kill her to be the one to kill her?! Rocket or Drax would probably have done it. Why did Vision decide to leave the operating table for a fist fight when the universe was hinging on him staying put?! Why did Dr. Strange give up the Time Stone to save the life of a man he spent the entire film not getting on with?! Why is nobody on Earth surprised to see a talking, heavily armed Raccoon arrive?!]]]]]

There are good parts of the film. It has some genuine laughs (although nothing to match Hulk's "puny god" moment) and Josh Brolin is great as Thanos. And then the ending... well, the ending is far and away the best thing in the film. Try to see it before anyone ruins the shock of it.

It's not a terrible film. I was consistently entertained. It's also not a great film, except for the great ending. The Russo Brothers genuinely seem to have done the best they could when faced with a daunting number of plates to spin. That they don't quite pull the trick off was perhaps inevitable. Maybe someone else would have done better, but it’s doubtful that “Infinity War” could ever have lived up to its own hype.

Seriously, though, it's worth it for the ending.