Over a year later, Infinity War continues to impress

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2019)

I had almost no expectations for Infinity War when I entered the theater chamber to see it last year. It was several weeks after the movie's initial release so the theater itself was fairly light on visitors for Infinity War in particular. I was pretty much alone through my experience of the movie. For context, I have only a surface level knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have seen quite a bit of the older movies but only know most of the more recent characters through friends and online reviewers and the like. So, as a normie without any great attachment to most of the prior films, you can imagine my surprise when this movie becomes one of my favorite superhero movies ever made.
Much like the finale to the X-Men Cinematic Universe from a year before, Logan, Infinity War blows all expectations out of the water and provides an experience that stands above all of the prior films in its respective universe. But whereas Logan does this by providing a small-scale character study, Infinity War outdoes its predecessors by going bigger than ever before. A bigger cast, bigger fight scenes, and a wayyyyy bigger budget.
Understand me when I say that I am not a big fan of superhero movies, not even most of the Marvel ones aside from Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, and maybe the original Iron Man. But the culmination of all these stories really is greater than the sum of its parts. I believe a big part of this is because the directors and writers took several loathed superhero tropes (giant CG fight scenes, scary alien villain, the MacGuffin) and did them well. This movie, to me, is a shining example that the only thing keeping a trope from being good is how much effort you're willing to put in.
As this movie and Avengers: Endgame are the ultimate finale to the "Infinity Saga" of the MCU, almost all major characters introduced in the past movies are featured here. You have the original five Avengers (excluding Hawkeye), Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Black Panther, the Guardians of the Galaxy, War Machine, Scarlet Witch, etc. All in all, the movie has around 20 major protagonists to juggle. This sounds like it would be an absolute trainwreck if it weren't for the fact that the film dodges two of the biggest problems that Marvel movies tend to suffer from: bland scripts and meandering pace. The dialogue is solid, the story itself is interesting with plenty of unexpected turns, and every scene of the film pushes the story forward. If you want to see a great example of how to fail at these, I'd recommend the Antman movies.
All of this, however, would only amount to an alright movie if it weren't for the main antagonist, Thanos. In a cinematic universe filled with simplistic, uninteresting villains (with exceptions like Loki and the Winter Soldier), Thanos breaks the mold by being an intriguing, quotable, and identifiable villain. Despite being a warmongering space tyrant, Thanos has one of the most altruistic motivations for his evil doings; Thanos wants to destroy half of life in the universe to keep them from depleting the universe's finite resources and plunging into squalor. At first, he attempts this by manually traveling through space and slaughtering half of every intelligent species he finds. At some point, he realizes that his initial will never work and decides to track down the Infinity Stones, five gems that can manipulate the universe to the user's whim. With those stones, Thanos could peacefully and instantly erase half of all life in the universe with the snap of his fingers. Much of the fun of this movie is watching Thanos and his minions hop from place to place, interacting with the many different heroes and collecting the stones. The interactions with Ebony Maw are some of my favorites.
Another plus for the story is how it breaks from the formula and features the MCU cast losing to Thanos and many of them dying in the resulting universal mass killing. It adds much needed emotional weight to the movie since you don't know who could be next. It also helps that most characters dying or reacting to the deaths are effective in conveying genuine emotion. As memey as it is, the final scenes where characters just fade into leaves gives me chills. Shoutout to Drax, Bucky, Scarlet Witch, and Spider-Man for making me really uncomfortable.
All of these positives are held up even further with excellent production value. Visually, almost all of the settings are incredible. I have to give a special shoutout to the scenes in space as they are particularly beautiful. Most of the settings on Earth are nice, too, excluding Wakanda which looks so washed out compared to the rest of the movie. Wakanda is also the location of the weakest fight scene in the movie. In a movie filled with great fight scenes, it's not that bad, but it's the only one that features two giant armies of nameless characters clashing with one another. I prefer the fight scenes featuring prominent and important characters because that leaves more room for fun interaction with dialogue and choreography. Despite my complaints, I still overall enjoyed Wakanda in general and these quibbles should only show how much I love the rest of the movie. The fight scenes have a nice ramp-up, starting small and crescendoing to interplanetary mayhem; most of the humor works other than a few weird outliers like the Starbucks joke from one of the Wakanda scenes; the music is surprisingly nice here, with the orchestral pieces feeling more prominent and characterized than the more generic scores from past Marvel films.
Before I leave, I can't help but shout out the CGI team on their work here. This move has some of the best CGI in a live action movie I have ever seen. I don't just mean to say that looks advanced and expensive (even though it does), but rather that the models are well-integrated into scenes and they're stylized to age much better than contemporary renders. It honestly boggles my mind that the company that funded this is also funding the movie where Will Smith genie looks like an Adobe After Effects edit. The character design and animation of Thanos, along with the great performance by Josh Brolin, carries the character (and by extension, the movie) and saves him from being a laughing stock like most other CG superhero villains *cough Steppenwolf cough*.
To put it simply, there isn't a single thing that Infinity War does wrong. Pacing, action scenes, CGI, dialogue, art direction, comedy, drama ... While it isn't high art and won't satisfy someone with a palette that goes against Marvel movies even when they're good, I'd say that almost anyone other than those that are expressly against superhero movies will find something to remember and appreciate this movie for. For me, it's just about everything the movie does and the occasional slip-up every few scenes is nowhere near enough to put me off of rewatching it.