Avengers: infinity war
Throwing down the Gauntlet
released OUT NOW! 12a | 149 minutes Directors Joe and anthony russo Cast robert downey Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris evans, Josh Brolin, scarlett Johansson, Tom Holland
We called them comic book movies, but they never really were. Even at their finest and most faithful – Burton’s Batman, Donner’s Superman, Raimi’s Spider-Man – they were still movies cosplaying as comics, one entertainment medium dressing up as another.
Avengers: Infinity War feels different. The payoff to Marvel’s decade-long masterplan, it’s the closest thing yet to a genuine comic book movie, on an almost molecular level. It plugs into a shared universe – one that’s been coalescing over 18 movies now – and packs the kind of connective tissue usually only found on comic store shelves. That flickering Marvel Studios ident, showcasing its roll call of heroes, has never felt so loaded, so electric. Where else would a simple on-screen caption – “Wakanda” – earn a cheer?
But this is a specific kind of comic book. Think Crisis On Infinite Earths or Secret Wars – or, indeed, 1991’s The Infinity Gauntlet, direct inspiration for what’s on screen. Huge, multi-part crossovers that revel in scope and scale, in their fan-baiting threat to the status quo. Comics that unite entire publishing empires against next-level perils. “It’s not overstating it to say the fate of the universe is at stake,” declares Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange – an eloquent spin on the hype usually splashed on covers. You want him to add, “And things will never be the same again!”
We sense the stakes from the get-go. Infinity War immediately establishes the credentials of Big Bad Thanos, previously the shadowy master-manipulator of the MCU. He’s a commanding physical presence now, towering among the wounded of the Asgardian refugee ship, delivering the first shock death in a film that endlessly toys with audience expectations of a bodycount. It’s a grim, desperate coda to the end of Thor: Ragnarok; it feels like we’ve missed a reel somewhere in the ever-unspooling Marvel saga.
The stakes are so grand, so cosmic, that the first act invasion of New York already feels like a climax. The arrival of Thanos’s horde leans into the eerie rather than the epic: we glimpse a stampede of people outside the doors of Strange’s mansion and then a handheld camera spins us into sudden, inexplicable chaos on the streets. It’s instant, visceral, authentically unnerving, one of many memorable choices by the Russo brothers, who handle the macrocosmic – armies sweeping across the plains of Wakanda – and the micro – a tear on the face of Zoe Saldana – with equal skill, just as they balance the tonal shifts between the glib and the operatic.
Of course the true joy here is seeing so many compelling, charismatic characters pinball off each other. The comedy sparks when it’s playing up symmetries
It’s instant, visceral and authentically unnerving
rather than avoiding comparisons: Stark and Strange in a sneer-off, Star-Lord and Quill in a jock-off. With so many characters to deploy, so many situations to juggle, there are bound to be weak links – Captain America and Black Widow are surprisingly underwritten – but Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s screenplay never loses structural integrity. A miracle, given that this could so easily have collapsed into a windblown pile of trading cards.
Holding it all together is Thanos, whose all-consuming quest for the Infinity Stones makes him as much the film’s protagonist as its antagonist. Josh Brolin gives an astonishingly nuanced performance as the Mad Titan, aided by some sympathetic mo-cap work that tracks every emotion on his face. As he chooses to trade his daughter’s life for his lifelong goal – a scene that plays with all the grand passion of pulp Shakespeare – you glimpse his awareness of the terrible choice he’s making. He’s up there with
Black Panther’s Killmonger as the best of Marvel’s villains.
And then there’s the ending. Well, not so much an ending as maybe the most audacious act of trolling in Hollywood history, dusting half of Marvel’s roster like a fire in the contracts department. Of course, we know there’s a reset looming – one of those godlike Infinity Stones will doubtlessly step up to the task – but for now let’s cherish a studio with the sheer brass to rewrite the commandments of big-screen storytelling and let the bad guy win. It’s Marvel’s universe. We just live in it.