I've never expected more and gotten less from a Superhero movie

Rating: 5/10 (9 April 2019)

I'm not a hater; I loved the first two Avengers movies and I've loved or at least enjoyed every Marvel movie I've seen. But Infinity War was designed for those fans who've seen every single movie in the Marvel universe, not people like myself who pick and choose the ones they're interested in seeing. I don't understand the compulsion to get every character from the MCU in a single movie. Even in a two-and-a-half-hour movie it waters down character development to a weak broth. I've never seen (and I never will see) a Guardians of the Galaxy movie and when I saw the talking ferret or raccoon or whatever he is and the talking walking stick onscreen in this film my heart dropped as fast as my rating for the movie.
The MCU seems to be compelled to make each movie bigger and more spectacular than the last, real emotion and characters be damned. Marvel started out knowing precisely how to make great superhero films; its best effort, in my opinion, was its first, Iron Man. The scope in IM was considerably less grand, and the focus was more on emotion and the evolution of the characters, with enough thrills to keep it honest. Infinity War is about 80% thrills, and 20% emotion, with characters appearing onscreen for too short a time to make a real emotional investment in. It's as if the people in the MCU saw their competitor's dud, Batman vs. Superman and said, "We need to make more movies like that: overblown, disjointed, everything bagels of films that end up leaving the viewer drained and disheartened."
Without giving away much of anything to the three people on the planet who haven't seen Infinity War yet, I walk into superhero movies for escapism and hope to be uplifted a bit; I walked away from this one feeling thoroughly depressed. I give it the middling grade of five stars, and not less, because my interest in the outcome never flagged and I obviously cared enough about what was happening onscreen to be upset about it.
Hopefully, Marvel will self-correct with Endgame, though judging by the incomprehensibly high grades this movie has already gotten-higher than Iron Man and the two prior Avengers films-they may never know how miserably they failed at least one viewer.