Visual and Action Extravaganza

Rating: 8/10 (27 April 2018)

The Avengers super-mash-up has out-done itself once again: more heroes, fiercer baddies, grander scope, and greater peril. It's almost too much and yet not enough in other ways, because the screen time for many characters get spread so thin. Assuming you have seen most of the MCU movies up to this point, you'll appreciate that a handful of the characters previously under-developed have gotten more attention, but many of the favorites who were previously better-developed got barely enough time to be a cue for a crowd cheer. For some of them, it felt like the actors/actresses couldn't even get into character or understand the context of the scene -- one may posit that the secrecy over the whole plot had a negative impact on their performances.
While the heroes may have come from the pages of comic books, their foes seemed to have come from grotesque video games. The setup is familiar: the big-bad has a handful of one-dimensional lieutenants and a horde of violent minions/beasts/robots/whatnot. However, I would say that Thanos was the star of the show, in a way we haven't seen nor talked about since the first Avengers (the enigmatic Loki). Not only is Thanos powerful, but this Mad Titan has some depth, development, and determination that's typically reserved the good guys.
This is an epic that I will surely like to watch again soon, because so much just whizzed by in a blur the first time, and there was more than one reason for that! This was my first visit to a new-ish 3D venue that might need to have some kinks worked out, because I felt the visuals were really muddy and dizzying during many fast action sequences -- more than the usual 3D blur. Maybe it was a technical issue with this particular showing, but personally I would recommend going to a non-3D showing.