Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War

“Avengers: Infinity War”, a 160-minute long movie that brings together a world of superheroes formed over ten years, packs 76 characters into one story line while simultaneously juggling four to six different plot lines at a time. And yet somehow it manages to work. Thanos (Josh Brolin), the intergalactic bad guy, and his army of Green Goblin-esque warriors go from star system to star system torturing and killing their way through anyone who gets in their way as they gather six super powerful Infinity Stones to put into Thanos’ giant glove.

Once all six are collected, Thanos will be able to fulfill his dream of wiping out half the universe’s population in order to save its resources and restore “balance.” The Avengers Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) & Co., plus all the characters from “Black Panther,” plus all the ones from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” plus some other Marvel characters new to this film stand in his way.

Co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo, co-writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, their top billed cast members, and their hundreds of collaborators have gotten on the same page and stayed there. The film never flies by; that would be impossible for a work of this length. But neither does it ever seem to stall out, which is impressive when you consider how many big scenes consist mainly of people talking or emoting in close-up about cosmic doings that are completely imaginary but which we take more or less at face value because they’ve been established with such confidence by preceding films in this same series.

The Russos really swagger headfirst into melodrama here; if anything, they go a little too far. There are problems with their approach I’ll outline some of them in a moment but the gambit works, mostly, because this is an operatic tragedy that necessarily has to end with the heroes in a deep, dark place.

So some of our beloved characters don’t make it out alive; and if you emerge from the theater feeling bummed out and anxious rather than pumped up and energized, then I’m sorry to say that “Infinity War” has done its job just as “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One” did their jobs.

If only it were better modulated. Or perhaps longer. Or more elegantly shaped. Or well, it’s hard to put your finger exactly on what’s wrong here. But something’s not quite up to snuff.

This is one half of a story broken into two parts or at least that’s what Marvel Studios wants us to believe today but it feels like less than half somehow. Until fairly recently, movies set in the MCU had a habit of being collectively curve-graded by critics; each film seemed content to settle for being “better than expected,” as opposed to really good. That feeling returns here, unfortunately.

“Infinity War” faced so many challenges, many of them unique to this particular project, that it’s a small miracle that it works at all.

So on some level it feels ungrateful to ask a movie that already does the impossible (and spends much of its second hour showing off how impossibly easy it makes doing the impossible look) do anything else with more panache. What are superhero movies for if not panache? If there was ever a moment for the MCU’s swinger of bats phase or Rey Mysterio phase or whatever its equivalent is (I have no idea), this would be the perfect occasion for such an approach.

But instead we get more or less standard-issue phaser fire, mano a mano combat, and one-liners. I wish there were more of it.

I appreciate how the film is constructed around Josh Brolin’s motion-capture but still fully inhabited performance as Thanos, who is a curiously wistful and lonely figure more or less a religious fanatic, yet one who carries himself with the serene certainty of a military man who’s read the ancient Greeks and speaks sweetly to cadets while stepping on their necks.

(Thanos’ second in command, the snide and hateful space wizard Ebony Maw played by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor makes an equally strong impression, though he doesn’t have many scenes.) Some of the movie’s most affecting and/or frightening moments involve Thanos torturing captive heroes (including Zoe Saldana’s Gamora and her sister Nebula, played by Karen Gillan) until they give up the location of the stones, or forcing them to think about killing themselves (or having others kill them) in order to prevent Thanos from achieving his dream.

The film treats Thanos as if he were a pure force of chaos out of the Old Testament picking people up by their skulls, deconstructing them into three-dimensional puzzles with a wave of his hand, even rupturing the structural integrity of the universe.

He seems to have the brute strength of the Hulk plus all that conjuring skill that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange has; indeed, Strange is one of only two characters who can routinely counterbalance Thanos’ destructive power. At different points in “Infinity War,” characters wonder aloud if they’d have been better off sitting this one out. These are action heroes we’re talking about here; but such is their existential dread in the face of what looms over them that they contemplate an alternate reality where they don’t act at all.

Vision (Paul Bettany), whose forehead bears one of those shiny stones (“infinity stones,” I’m told), gets attacked while he’s off-grid in Scotland, where he’s been enjoying the company of his beloved Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen); after they fight off Thanos’ goons at great personal cost, he quips, “I’m beginning to think we should’ve stayed in bed.”

Peter Parker/Spider-Man springs into action during a class trip to Manhattan after spotting Thanos’ enormous, doughnut-shaped spacecraft descend from the sky; then Thanos beats the stuffing out of him and he says, “I should’ve stayed on the bus.” The movie has wicked fun foreshadowing the possible demise of our heroes. In the only scene featuring Tony and his partner Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow), they discuss Tony’s dream that they had a baby; it feels like the superhero version of one of those scenes in a war flick where the young draftee shows off a photo of his fiancee and declares, “Ain’t she pretty?”

Thanos’ assault on Wakanda where Cap and the gang have taken Vision in hopes that Shuri (Letitia Wright) can preemptively extract and destroy his Infinity Stone is depicted as the logical, awful result of revealing to everyone what was once hidden while aligning it with global defense organizations after centuries of neutrality.

However, this movie does not feel special or powerful in the way it should despite its embrace of pain and fear exemplified by a scene where Thor names all the people he has lost and appears to be suffering from PTSD like Tony.

The direction is part of the issue. Here are some of Marvel’s best conceptual artists, visual effects technicians, colorists, sound designers, and mixers at what might be their aesthetic peak (and no wonder; this is the same company that has spent years refining a single style and tone). The panoramic vistas showing broken cities and space stations and alien planets and alternate dimensions, a psychedelic jumble of ironwork in the sky above them suggesting more than anything else Jack Kirby as reimagined by Taika Waititi on his disco-lark Thor: Ragnarok.

Instead they play it safe while their support team goes wild. They capture both violent (sometimes cruel) action and emotionally intense private moments either boringly flat or frantically hacky (snap-zooms on falling figures; herky-jerky camerawork/fast cutting during fight scenes you know the drill).

They use the camera expressively or poetically so rarely that when they do deploy an honest to God heartfelt flourish (like the long slow camera move that reveals the Guardians in their spaceship singing along to pop hits; or those “wipes” that reveal Thanos’ illusions for what they are; or the climactic fight between Thanos and multiple heroes), it’s as if someone had momentarily enlivened a dull wedding reception by getting up onto a riser with a bass drum.

This wouldn’t rankle nearly as much had not two MCU movies back to back Thor: Ragnarok & Black Panther proven that this system could still produce films with vivid directorial personalities (Waititi; Ryan Coogler) which took every stylistic/tonal risk its brand would bear.

The studio’s too bottom-line to allow the kind of eccentricity that would’ve let this project pop for real (Joss Whedon’s ungainly potluck Avengers: Age of Ultron, with its spiky wit and nihilistic robot philosopher baddie, is starting to look better in retrospect). But it’s no compliment to the Russos to say that you can’t tell by looking at this movie whether they were on a tight corporate leash the whole time or if they decided that the safest thing to do with a project this huge and hotly anticipated was keep all their choices vanilla.

And here’s the thing I’m being college philosophical, so bear with me but when you try to squeeze a superhero story through the format of a blockbuster MCU movie with 76 characters, it shows how limited this well-established cinematic template is as a means of telling those stories compared to the printed page, where everything that can be imagined by the writer and illustrated by the artist is possible. It’s not that the storytelling vocabulary of superhero movies has to be constricted (FX’s dazzlingly inventive TV series “Legion” is proof) but it feels very constricted here; it always has been, except for outliers like “Thor: Ragnarok,” “Black Panther” and “Ant Man.”

There are an infinite number of bold or subtle ways to convey exposition, character details and psychological states while simultaneously presenting events occurring in parallel storylines; you can do things like expand a single decisive instant so that it fills up six pages, or show Spider-Man swinging through midtown Manhattan in a full-page splash panel dotted with thought balloons that summarize a year’s worth of his life. But in the Marvel movies of this type released by the MCU since 2008, we’ve mostly been stuck in linear time, which is where most commercial narratives unfold.

Most scenes in “Infinity War” fall into one of two categories: (1) scenes where people go into rooms or out onto the street and talk to each other; and (2) action sequences where characters banter while punching and zapping each other and dodging falling rocks, buildings and spaceships while trying not to get sucked into time-space portals.

There’s only so much information you can put across when you’re telling your story that way. The ticking clock turns out to be a more formidable enemy than Thanos. There are only so many moments or lines that “Infinity War” can give Tony and Pepper; or Bruce and Natasha, who had a powerful connection in “Age of Ultron,” were separated soon after, and are confined to a couple of brief exchanges here; or Peter Quill/Starlord (Chris Pratt), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff), who spend much of the movie doing comic relief when they aren’t suffering horribly or setting Peter up to make some very bad, dumb choices.

Heimdall (Idris Elba) is barely in the film. The Collector (Benicio Del Toro) is barely in the film. Proxima Midnight (Carrie Coon) is barely in the film. Cap gets maybe two dozen lines and a few meaningful glances, most of them aimed at Sebastian Stan’s Bucky/Winter Soldier, who has even less to do than usual.

Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa/Black Panther, who anchored his own marvelous feature just a few months ago, is reduced to being a field general in “Infinity War,” standing alongside Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M’Baku (Winston Duke) and watching Thanos’ troops burn, trample, and otherwise disfigure the countryside (an image that’s more upsetting for various reasons than a lot of Thanos’ violence against individuals).

Another disadvantage of packing too many people into one film so many that they apparently had to cut a few; the film’s IMDb page lists several major players who are nowhere to be seen is that you start to realize that some characters are redundant variations on other characters, a realization you may not have had if you were watching them star in their own self-contained movies.

Tony, Peter Parker and Peter Quill in the same scenes ought to be a slam dunk but once you’ve spent a few minutes with them the wise-assery gets grating. It’s like being stuck at a party where every other guy in the room mistakenly believes he’s the funny one. (The scenes between Thor and the Guardians work much better because Thor plays straight man to Quill, who is threatened by his awesome masculine beauty.)

Humor has always come more vividly than action in the Russo-directed Marvels (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with its paranoid-thriller stylings and brutal close-quarters action, is still their zenith). The movie makes excellent use of Thor and his trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and gives Hemsworth more chances to show off his formidable deadpan (when Rocket expresses amazement that he can speak Groot’s language, he explains, “They taught it on Asgard it was an elective”). But as far as I’m concerned, all joking around does with this movie’s dark material is clash with it and undermine it.

The self-aware humor that MCU has always done so well works against “Infinity War” here at times. Marvel’s “just kidding” sensibility was a refreshing counterweight not only to the fashionable darkness of early DC Universe movies but also to what became of superhero movies after Nolan made Batman comics imitate his Batman movies’ success worldwide; but if there was ever time for Marvel Studios to bust out Zack Snyder style heavy metal gloom and slap this movie’s smirk off of its own face, it’s here, in a film that’s mostly about summoning the courage to fight battles that you know you can’t win, and accepting the likelihood of dying on your knees with your head held high.

This movie shouldn’t just engage and amuse and occasionally move us; it should shock and scar us. It should kill Ned Stark and Optimus Prime and Bambi’s mommy, then look us in the eye after each fresh wound and say, “Sorry, love. These things happen.” The last 15 minutes have the flavor of that sort of trauma, but without the actual trauma.

Deep down we all know that modern superhero movies are operating with even lower dramatic stakes than Star Wars or James Bond movies: beloved characters rarely stay dead after they’ve been killed; no plot development is irreversible no matter how grave; so there’s no possible way what seems to be happening on the screen could really be happening. But we shouldn’t be thinking about any of that as we watch Thanos hurt characters we’ve grown to love and cast the universe into ruin. The very sight should rip our hearts out.

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