Marvel's Most Impressive Film to Date

Rating: 9/10 (27 April 2018)

This is one of the most anticipated movies of the year for many people. The hype surrounding this movie after ten years of buildup in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is something many fans have been looking forward to for a long time. I have to admit, I too was greatly looking forward to this movie. After having seen it on a packed Thursday night IMAX showing, I am more than satisfied.
Possibly this movie's greatest accomplishment is how successfully it manages to balance its massive cast. Most everyone in this movie gets a noteworthy role or a shining moment in the film. Most of the characters got what I found to be a reasonable amount of screentime. To me this is an immense feat, one which I remain impressed by. I found the choices of which characters got to interact together through their storylines to be quite smart, making for a very entertaining and funny movie to watch.
This movie successfully manages to retain that wonderful Marvel fun, in what was advertised as quite a dark movie. The comedy in this movie is very present, but almost never when it is unwelcome. It succeeds in being funny an impressive amount of the time, while still mixing well around the dark aspects of the story. That was all balanced very nicely.
I think that this movie did a very good job with tone, I imagine it was a very difficult process to figure out how to juggle these different connecting storylines with tonally different characters originating from different movies. I thought that it was, like most of this movie, very impressively balanced and handled. Maybe once do I recall a tone shift being a little too dramatic, but that was a very minor hiccup that did not impact the overall movie whatsoever. The way they managed to balance the comedy and the menace of Thanos and his mission is quite excellent indeed.
This was what I was initially worried about, Thanos. But man I was completely needlessly worried. Thanos is easily one of Marvel's best villains to date, not just from Josh Brolin's great performance and the impressive cgi, but from the believability and engaging nature of Thanos as a villain. Thanos is such a captivating villain, and the movie does a wonderful job at showing why he believes that everything he is doing is for the greater good. Like many great villains, he believes in what he does, he's not just bad for the sake of bad. I believe the movie really sells that, which is a crucial point to his character being compelling. Equally importantly, Marvel makes its most intimidating villain in Thanos, giving the audience a feel that this movie has real stakes, that he is someone to worry about, and that when he is on the screen, one should be scared of him. I found myself very intimidated, and was almost always fearful for people in the same scene as him. Easily one of Marvel's best villains.
I think that somehow the Russo brothers managed to do a wonderful job at presenting both entertaining characters, and making them feel real and believable. It's an impressive feat to bring so many characters from so many other creator's movies into this one, and to successfully capture their characters, and make their actions believable. I think it's absolutely incredible how well this was pulled off.
Something unsurprising the Russo's pulled off was the directing. The directing and action was good, having a more epic scale than the Russo's previous two films. This one feels more grand, the camera is often much more still than would be found in their previous two movies, helping the viewer to feel more grounded and presenting the world as larger. When important action scenes were going down, I was always invested. When important character scenes were happening, I was invested.
The music was very serviceable, and helped to elevate crowd-pleasing moments and get the crowd excited. I think this movie very successfully got my Thursday night crowd excited many times, there was a great deal of applause throughout the movie. This movie really is nonstop, with endless fun, action, some truly incredible moments throughout, and some genuinely shocking material. I won't say what they were, but many of my predictions going into this movie were wrong, and this movie was all the better for it. I'm glad I wasn't given the incredible task of making such a massive film.
It is of course worth noting that the story is great, it feels absolutely epic and the proper culmination of the last ten years of Marvel. Everything manages to fit together very well, and the grand nature of it makes it endlessly entertaining to watch. The story is most useful for seeing our characters struggle against seemingly impossible circumstances.
Above all, I find this to be Marvel's most daring film to date. A tone is set with the villain of this movie, and it is not an empty one. Thanos is intimidating and terrifying, I can't say that enough. While it manages to appropriately inject fun throughout the movie, it still maintains the scary nature of Thanos. He is intimidating, and his power really feeds into a true hopelessness that infected me, something the movie captures quite well. I do believe that some of the choices made in this movie are the most daring ones made in any Marvel film to date. I do believe that these daring choices, at least for the purposes of this film, were very successful.
Overall, this movie is impressive on so many levels. It succeeds in juggling a huge cast, balancing dark and fun tones, appropriately representing characters, having impressive direction, having fantastically crowd-pleasing moments, never ceasing to engage its audience, telling a great epic of a story, as well as being Marvel's most daring film to date. There was next to nothing I took issue with over this movie, and a great deal of stuff that I absolutely loved. I was very invested throughout the whole movie, and I genuinely don't think the film could've been much better. As I have said many times throughout this review, this movie is incredibly impressive. Naturally this review won't have any sway in your decision to see this film, as you most likely either already have seen it or are doing so in the immediate future. I still would like to offer this movie my praise, as well as give it my full recommendation, as one of, if not, Marvel's best yet.