Friday, May 4, 2018

Movie Review - Avengers : Infinity War

   WARNING : AVENGERS : INFINITY WAR SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Avengers : Infinity War is Marvel Studios newest record breaking hit...

  I went with Kathy to see the Avengers : Infinity War in our local movie theatre for the Saturday afternoon matinee. Most of the opening weekend matinees I’ve attended have had attendance in the single digits but Infinity Wars played to a packed house which leads me to think this movie is on pace to the biggest super hero movie gross of all time.

  The movie follows three separate plots of ‘mini-teams’ that are trying to thwart the quest of Thanos to collect the six infinity stones and become the ruler of all reality. Thor and a part of the Guardians of the Galaxy are on a quest to create a weapon worthy of killing Thanos, the rest of the Guardians team with Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Spiderman to fight Thanos on his home planet of Titan, while Captain America leads the rest of the heroes to battle Thanos’s army in Wakanda to protect Vision and his ‘Mind Stone’. The first third of the movie sets up the teams in their locations and provides some funny character interactions. The rest of the movie is devoted to the battle and the star of the movie, Thanos.

  Make no mistake, Thanos is the star of the movie. We hear him repeatedly explain that the reason he needs the infinity stones is because he is the only being that has the will to bring balance to the universe by killing half the life in it. In the comics Thanos is in love with the personification of death and wants to kill every living being as an offering of his love. I have to say I like the half-measured Thanos better. Thanos tells Tony Stark how his homeworld had more people than resources but his calls to eliminate half the population went unheeded and everyone (except Thanos of course) died but the worlds where he eliminated half the populations are flourishing. The movie even gives a flashback to how he adopted his daughter Gamora while having his troops bring ‘balance’ to her world by killing half the population which includes her mother.

  Josh Brolin and the Marvel CGI team combine to make a fine Thanos. He was menacing and powerful enough to beat the Hulk in combat but was relatable enough to show his relationship with his daughter Gamora. At a point in the movie he has to prove his love for his daughter (in a twisted Thanos type of way) and is able to show it in a way that made me believe that he really believes killing half the universe is the only way to save it. In this way he is no different than other Marvel galactic beings like Ego, Galactus, and Eternity who have the proverbial 10,000 feet view of all things celestial.

  The CGI for the Marvel films just gets better and better. Spiderman’s new suit with mechanical extendable arachnid legs was especially cool. Tony Stark’s new nanotech embedded Iron Man armor that can generate any number of weapons and shapes made him believable as someone who could go toe to toe with Thanos. After taking a beating from Thanos, the Hulk doesn’t want to take over for Bruce Banner anymore which led to a number of ‘almost-Hulk’ transformations. Doctor Strange was another beneficiary of the improved CGI. His mystic powers are very dependent on CGI and the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak seemed to crackle in his hands.

  The actions scenes were also great. The battle featuring Thanos’s ‘war dog’ army against Wakanda was the lengthiest battle. It was fierce enough to rivet me to the screen but didn’t distract me with cutting back and forth in each mini-battle like ‘Transformers’ movies tend to do. Even the non-battle scene of Thor restarting the planetary forge in order to create his Thanos-killing weapon was exciting. As if that wasn’t enough the interactions between Tony Stark, Dr. Strange, and Spiderman along with Rocket Racoon and Thor were hilarious without being the sort of out of character interactions looking for laughs that creep into many Marvel films.

  There was nothing techinal about Avengers:Infinity War’s acting, special effects, of film-making that I didn’t like and yet I left the theater disappointed. Why? Lots of characters die the extremely unsatisfying death of turning to ash with a bare minimum allowed to utter a few last words. The first few deaths were shocking but after awhile I was pretty numb to it all and it is obvious that not many if any of these deaths will carry through past the next Avengers Movie scheduled for next year since lots of the newly dead actors and characters are scheduled for future movies. The death scale was so rapture-like with cars and helicopters crashing in New York as half the world’s population turns to dust that the only solution will have to be either an ‘alternate-reality switch’ or a ‘changing of the past to wipe out the entire Infinity War future so it never happened’ plot device.

  Avengers: infinity War is a great film but spending 2 and a half hours watching with no resolution and more questions than answers makes me think it a mediocre movie despite all the great components.As a youngster I always preferred DC comics to Marvel comics for this very reason – a DC comic ened with a conclusion while a Marvel comic always made me feel like I was missing out if I didn’t read the last issue or I would never find the resolution if I didn’t have a quarter to spare the next month. I’m Ok with leaving our characters in the wind like Captain America and his crew at the end of ‘Civil War’ or the Hulk after ‘Avengers : Age of Ultron’ but a year long cliffhanger with such a down ending is too much for me. I’m sure the Marvel universe show runners have it all figured out and the next Avengers will likely break all the records that Infinity Wars set but I would rather have had an extra half hour added to the film to make it a three hour movie and resolved the Thanos conflict once and for all or perhaps even ending this movie before Thanos kills half the universe and start part two with it. This ending seems very much like ‘the Walking Dead's’ much maligned fake ‘Glenn’ death and I could have done without it.

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