much better than could be hoped, boffo ending!

Rating: 8/10 (30 April 2018)

Who would have thunk it? This beast is complex, mostly well written and mostly well directed (some of the action scenes were a mess, per usual CGI hijinks). It starts fast, there is a battle scene with lots of dead and dying but they're not your typical soldiers, these are Asgard's finest, including Thor and Loki. World killing Thanos casually picks up one dying soldier and brings him to stage center, it's Thor........and we're on our way, there is an inevitability here that matches, for the most part, the scale of what is being presented - the killing of 50% of all sentient creatures in.........the universe. There is a quest, but depending on your POV, it's not necessarily a noble quest. A great coalition is brought together to battle Thanos and it's mostly not the cheesy typical "the gangs all here" Marvel cluster f__K, this is a big war and everyone is needed, even the guardians of the galaxy and their insipid banter, really out of place in this movie, as was the main guardian's move when they were about to stop Thanos, super mechanically maladroit "solution, again, the scale of the movie's intent was far beyond this hamfisted scene. This is quibbling though, the pathos embedded in this movie allowed it to achieve escape velocity, Thanos is not Sauron, he as a soul, he has deep feelings for what he does, he sacrifices that which he loves the most for what he believes are noble motives (that's the main problem with people, we all got our reasons). And Thanos most astounding of all, "wins", he get's all the infinity stones and 50% of the Universe's citizens simply turn into ash including many of the superheroes.....that was something I did not expect, so not the typical US blockbuster..........most of the apparent good guys die and the villain wins, resting in the long sunset, enjoying the fruits of his efforts. Credits role......