AVENGERS INFINITY WARS

Avengers: Infinity War review: Marvel’s biggest, most bizarre movie
Avengers: Infinity War isn’t the best Marvel movie. But it’s Marvel’s most daring.
By Alex Abad-Santos on April 24, 2018 6:00 pm

Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War Marvel Studios
Avengers: Infinity War feels like a Marvel movie on bath salts. Trying to describe any part of it alone will make you sound like you’ve lost your mind; trying to describe it all kind of makes it sound like it’s lost its mind. And it’s all the more confounding for how closely it mirrors its decade of movie predecessors only to end up shattering that mirror: Infinity War moves, sounds, and acts like a typical Marvel movie, but then unmasks itself as a creature distinctly its own.

Throughout Marvel Studios’ 10-year cinematic history, we’ve seen the world saved multiple times, from threats ranging from a chunk of Earth poised to crash down and wipe us out like the dinosaurs in Avengers: Age of Ultron to the unkillable goddess of death in Thor: Ragnarok.

You don’t have to squint too hard to see that all these villains and their endgames (take control of the planet and/or the universe), as well as our heroes’ efforts to stop them, have started to look essentially the same.

“We don’t trade lives,” Captain America (Chris Evans) tells his compatriots in Avengers: Infinity War, essentially summing up Marvel’s ethos over the past 18 movies: Leave no men, women, children, or any other life form behind.

Rating

Directed by the Russo brothers, the architects behind Captain America: Civil War and Captain America: Winter Soldier, Infinity War slyly betrays Cap, presenting his and the Avengers’ worldviews as naive and privileged. Instead, it dares to ask what happens if saving the day means taking real, tangible losses — a concept so foreign that it comes in the form of an intergalactic purple titan named Thanos (Josh Brolin).

It’s a testament to Marvel and the Russos’ daring that Thanos is actually one of the less surprising things about Infinity War. For the past six years, we’ve been told that he’s on a collision course with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, setting us up for the chaos that ensues in this long-heralded culmination. What I didn’t fully realize is just what that chaos would look like, and that Marvel had the guts to, mostly, pull it off.