And when all those wonderful characters who “died” are resurrected-maybe by a superhero(ine) we haven’t met yet-we can get back to our regularly scheduled stakes. These are purposefully mainstream spectacles, and hugely successful. And maybe that’s not an issue-Marvel’s The Avengers is the fifth biggest movie of all time, and Age of Ultron is right behind it at no. In that way, Infinity War is a regression. We learned that complicated visions of racial politics could sit comfortably beside throwdowns with vicious war rhinos. After 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok and this year’s Black Panther, the possibility and flexibility of a Marvel movie had been renewed. What worries me is the absence of purpose. I kind of respect it, even while I can feel the cynicism of the storytelling choices coursing through my body. This is a sleight of hand by the filmmakers, a theory-conjuring tactic that will have viewers immediately obsessing over the potential complexion of the fourth Avengers movie, slated for next summer. And some of the characters who are allowed to live are, in fact, leaving the MCU soon. And yet we know, given the enormous success of previous movies in which they’ve appeared, that they are not really gone. Characters that we are quite certain will be back for future films are disappeared. The body count, as it were, isn’t so much satisfying as confounding and even frustrating. My sister will be delighted to learn that a lot of characters do not make it out of Infinity War alive.
#AVENGERS INFINITY WAR MOVIE REVIEW PROFESSIONAL#
“When you see the movie (don’t tell me who dies) tell me how many people die.” That is an absolutely bizarre request that makes me worried she’s become a professional superhero movie handicapper, except I understand completely what she wants-the chance to weigh how excited she ought to be to see it for herself, how concerned she should feel for the ending, and how significant this movie actually is. My own 14-year-old sister, who has lately become enraptured of the MCU, even gave me a pointed but vague directive about what I should do after I’ve seen Infinity War. To many fans, these are more than movies they’re Super Bowls around which to schedule. Trouble is, our keen awareness of things like contractual obligations and social media snitching means that the narrative bubbling around a film like Avengers: Infinity War can be almost entirely predicated around who lives and who dies. The suspension of disbelief is paramount not only to the Marvel movies, but frankly, to all movies. It’s a massive storytelling delusion masquerading as a fanboy nitpick. Could there be a greater threat to the stakes of a story than the power to just get a do-over no matter what?
As in, don’t worry about anything that happens in this movie because there are these shining, colored crystals that can undo the damage instantaneously. They can even transmogrify artificial intelligence into a living superhero, in the case of Vision, possessor of the elusive “Mind Stone.” These things, like so many things in comic book and fantasy literature, are imperceptibly, ludicrously powerful. The Stones, well, they do different things. But it’s those same MacGuffins that mess with everything. It’s a remarkable maneuver, turning a big, purple, helmet-wearing brute who is acerbically referred to as “Grimace” at one point in the movie, into the believable force around whom this MacGuffin-laden film revolves. It’s a dumb thing to type and a worse thing to analyze, and yet somehow the Russos and the screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and especially the CGI-rendered presence of Josh Brolin, make Thanos credible, vulnerable, even sympathetic. Thanos, the alien survivor king of the ravaged planet Titan, is a despot seeking the six Infinity Stones for his Infinity Gauntlet, a golden glove that sucks in said Stones to form a power fist. They’re a tricky thing when your villain is a genocidal madman trying to vanquish one-half of the universe’s population to achieve a kind of civil and practical harmony. But What If the Avengers Were Mexican? Which Deaths in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Are Permanent?
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