Good, but far from the best of the MCU films.

Rating: 7/10 (26 April 2018)

***SPOILERS AT THE BOTTOM***
The good:
-The film should be commended on managing to make a watchable film that brings together characters from the previous Avengers films, both Guardians films, Black Panther and Doctor Strange. It could have been a complete mess and thankfully it wasn't.
-Thanos is possibly the best MCU villain so far, although I know that isn't saying much. He had clear motivations, conflicts, personality, you know, all the things that go into a good character. He wasn't generic bad guy #7.
-As expected the film was pretty funny. Most of the jokes landed.
The bad:
-Although the film wasn't a mess, there were a fair few characters that did almost literally nothing. Kinda understandable when you have 35 or so characters but even so, it is still a negative.
-There was no single clear driving force in terms of plot. Instead we had three different groups of characters doing their own thing, and occasionally meet one of the other groups.
-Tonally it was kinda like watching two films at once, largely due to the integration of the Guardians characters with the Avengers.
-This film features a faceless CGI army for the heroes to dismember.
***SPOILERS BELOW***
SPOILER: And my biggest problem with this film is the ending. Throughout the film there are three characters (should have been four!!) that die and it is very clear that they are actually dead and Marvel isn't going to bring them back. They die for a reason. At the end of the film however, probably half the characters from the entire film die. So the way I see it is that one of two things happened, and one is infinitely more likely than the other.
Either a) Marvel legit killed off 15 of its characters in one scene or b) they wanted the audience to think they did so they could have a cheap cliffhanger. The problem is that if option A is correct, everyone is going to be thinking they actually went for option B! The way the scene is played is very straight, very emotional, loud music + slow motion etc so they are very clearly trying to make you care. But the problem is, regardless of whether these characters are going to remain dead, I spent the whole scene thinking that they would almost certainly all come back via Time Stone magic in the next film.
Had they killed off maybe two or three primary characters then it would have been believable but you can't kill off half your franchise in a universe where the Time Stone exists and expect me to care.
So overall, a mixed bag but generally positive. 6/10.