Disappointing Marvel Superhero Epic

Rating: 5/10 (28 April 2018)

Unfortunately, this much-hyped Marvel film fails to live up to the hype. The film surrounds basically all characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (sans Hawkeye, Ant-Man, and Wasp) as they must fight to stop an evil villain named Thanos, who wants to destroy half the world's population. Josh Brolin does an impressive job voicing Thanos, working to make him both depraved but also somewhat understandable as well. The visual effects are generally impressive, with the notable exception of Thanos' henchmen, whose CGI looks quite cheesy and almost akin to the villains in "Justice League."
Unfortunately, "Avengers: Infinity War" has an array of flaws. The first flaw is that the movie is almost impossibly convoluted. I consider myself a casual Marvel fan who has seen most MCU movies, and have seen a little over half of them in theaters (Iron Man, Thor, Avengers, Iron Man 3, Thor 2, The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Age of Ultron, Civil War, Black Panther, Infinity War.) I fully acknowledge the fact that I am unlikely to take away as much from this film as a hardcore fan. However, parts of the film were still difficult to follow--and I followed Civil War just fine. Additionally, while the film is ambitious, it is just unfortunately too overstuffed. There are too many characters and subplots to care about, so much that the audience becomes less engaged in the story until late in the narrative. I believe it would have been better to sort of "split up" some non-primary characters between this movie and 2019's "Avengers 4." This would allow for audiences to take away more from the two films. While the action is generally thrilling, it lacks a scene that feels wholly unique as compared to other superhero films. The climactic battle in Wakanda shown in the trailers, while a good scene, is pretty similar to other "large-scale people running" type battles in movies like the Lord of the Rings series. I guess I was hoping for an action piece that felt really unique to the specific movie itself like Civil War's airport scene or Black Panther's Busan car chase scene. I will not give away any details about the ending, although I will say that it didn't work for me and made it hard for me to suspend disbelief.
Due to its overstuffed nature and overtly convoluted plot, I cannot say this film met my expectations. 5/10
Note: I saw this movie in IMAX 3D. The picture and sound quality were both very good, although the 3D was weak and did not really add anything.