Another superhero movie

Rating: 4/10 (2 August 2018)

Avengers Infinity War wasn't a film I was overly bothered about seeing, but my friend drags me to all of the superhero films, none of which I've found to be very interesting. Since the first Iron Man film (which was a pleasant surprise) these films have become more and more formulaic. This one has huge ambition by throwing every single Marvel superhero into the mix. If you love these characters then this is probably all your cinematic dreams come true. However if you're just a fan of good movies then this might well leave you cold.
On the positive side of things, it's very impressive that the filmmakers have assembled so many characters and given them all something to do, but it comes across like Wacky Races with 50 characters. It's kind of fun for a while but as more and more characters are introduced it becomes harder to care. And the plot, well, it's a problem. On the one hand they've kept it really simple by having one major bad guy (with a couple of sidekicks who show up now and again). And as is usually the case in these films, it's a maguffin chase. All of these big budget franchises have been using this lazy plot line for ages now. Thanos (the villain) needs to find a bunch of coloured stones to wear on his glove. And if he gets them all then it will mean the end of the world, universe, blah blah (same thing as the ring in LOTR, or the cube in Transformers, and most other big movies like this where everyone is after a magical artefact). The problem is, these magic stones don't really do anything. They just have nice names and the bad guy has to find them at any cost. That's your whole plot in a nutshell.
So to try and keep the audience engaged the filmmakers have decided that an overbearing soundtrack will tell you how to feel at every crucial moment in the film. And it's almost always the same thing - Character X is about to die (cue tragic sad music). A long drawn out sequence takes place where X says goodbye to someone. These scenes (which are repeated every ten minutes or so) either end with another avenger showing up to save the day (cue triumphant music) or X is killed / left to die by the bad guys. But because this is a superhero film and most of these characters are big cash cows, you know that they're not really dead. They're coming back, sometimes twenty minutes later. After a while the constant "don't let me die" scenes get beyond ridiculous, but I suppose if you're a kid and haven't seen this done a million times before, it might be "amazing". On the other hand, if you're an adult and you've seen this done enough times to know how it plays out, this becomes tedious really quickly. And the overbearing soundtrack telling you how to feel at all times, smacks of desperation from a studio that knows they have too many characters in the film and not enough time to make a casual viewer care about them, so the manipulative music is added in instead to trick you into feeling whatever they want you to feel.
Even though I didn't enjoy this film, I think they've done a great job of making it look fantastic. And every character gets their allotment of screentime without the pace of the story ever slowing down, but what you have is a 2 hour 15 minute action film with no downtime, probably in the hopes that younger viewers won't notice the absence of a proper story.
To summarise, this is great for fans, but probably boring for anyone else.