Well, this is it. This is the big one. This is the reason for the whole recap.
No movie has so singularly captured my imagination since I saw Star Wars for the first time in 1997 (That’s a great story, actually. I’ll tell that one of these days). Infinity War has become a huge part of my cultural identity, and it hasn’t even been out for a year yet.
And not just mine. Shortly after the film premiered, the huge subreddit, /r/ThanosDidNothingWrong begged the reddit administration to ban half of the subreddit. I actually forget sometimes that I was one of the banned and so when I try to comment on stuff, Reddit won’t let me. The hardest choices require the strongest wills.
If it weren’t for Infinity War, I wouldn’t have done this recap project at all. There are some bad, bad Marvel movies out there, but somehow watching Infinity War makes me feel justified in sitting through Thor: The Dark World and Iron Man 2 for multiple viewings.
I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been said or memed a million times. It’s so pack with emotion that it’s difficult to unpack. For the last three weeks I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to phrase this review, and I had some big plans: Divide it up into 4 different stories (Avengers, Iron Man and the Guardians, Thor, and Thanos) and go over those individually, but honestly, you already know about all that.
Everything I have to criticize about it is minuscule. Some people don’t like that Red Skull was there. It makes sense in the lore, so I’m fine with it. Proxima Midnight’s CGI looked pretty bad, especially next to Thanos’ super-real-looking effects. There was no point in the movie that broke my suspension of disbelief, which is impressive because mine doesn’t work all that great.
One of the reasons the MCU was starting to feel so repetitive is that most of the movies so far have ended the same: Good guys win. Even the Russo movies (Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War), which ended with massive paradigm shifts, ended with a sense of “Hey, the heroes I liked won… right?” But not this time. Thanos wins, and we have to watch as half the universe dies.
A lot of people have said, “who cares? They’re not actually going to kill Black Panther after he made Marvel 1.3 billion dollars!” and while it’s true that I’ve complained… a lot.. about bringing characters back from the dead, this time is different. Avengers: Endgame isn’t going to pull the rug out from underneath us and go “haha! Bucky wasn’t actually dead after that first movie!” The whole point of the next movie is to bring back what was lost. It’s not a plot point inside of a larger story. It is the story. What matters most is that Tony Stark held Peter Parker while he faded into dust and how that affected him, thereby affecting us. That shit was haunting.
Watch Infinity War. Then watch it again. Then watch it, like 3 more times just to be sure.