I’m starting to be less cynical about Marvel. 2017 was a good year for the MCU, and “Black Panther” might be the best movie of the year so far. So in the case of “Avengers: Infinity War,” I’m willing to accept that this is a movie of teases, surprises, punch lines and cliffhangers all stuffed into a giant package.
It’s designed to make you cheer, applaud and gasp. It’s supposed to be catnip for people who all their lives never thought they’d see these characters meet up anywhere outside their imaginations. It wants to have you guessing at what’s next even beyond asking what you just saw. It’s obviously going to be shameless, empty fun, even at the expense of substance. And “Infinity War” is all of the above in droves.
Anthony and Joe Russo’s movie feels like it has 10 directors behind it, not two. And that’s probably by design as well. The Avengers are broken up into groups and spread across the galaxy. And it’s even segmented into careful chapters and set pieces such that each Avenger can have their own trailer-ready moment to step into the spotlight.
The jokes, the fight scenes, the quippy one-liners, they all fly at you a mile a minute as though it’s calculated that a certain number will stick their landing, even if the rest immediately fade away. The Avengers in this film are like bickering married couples. You love to just watch them at their best and at their worst.
It’s to the point that there’s so much that will make fans and even casual audiences salivate that you’ll ignore the things that don’t make sense, the characters that don’t appear at all, or the side plots that fall flat and feel tacked on. I read a million theories, many of them plausible, that explained what might happen in the events of “Infinity War.” All of them were wrong. And the story they did come up with, it’s not as though this is some brilliantly conceived storytelling where the 10-year-long continuity finally pays off. “Infinity War” isn’t “Lost.” Fanboys will cite an hour’s worth of context to explain how it actually did made sense all along. But it doesn’t matter, because everyone else is more than happy to just go along with the ride.
More fascinating to me is Thanos and the morbid glee fans must get from seeing this 8-foot-tall purple warlord pummel the crap out of their beloved superheroes. As a villain of sheer invincible power, it’d be tough to find a better villain. Whether or not he’s an empathetic, complex character is another story altogether.
And Thanos gets at the root of what “Infinity War” feels like. It’s an epic event more so than a great movie. Does it have the style, the creativity or the meaning behind it that “Black Panther” does? Of course not. It pays fleeting lip service to themes of sacrifice, theology and the apocalypse. But those ideas will hardly be on the minds of anyone after the film.
But again, I find it hard to be too cynical about any of this. Increasingly I don’t see Marvel as just some inevitable, pop culture juggernaut I’m forced to constantly talk about. I can admire the MCU for doing something no franchise has done before and be positive that the whole country, if not the world, can rally behind this single pop cultural moment. And I’ll be happy to keep doing this until the next one.
3 stars