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Josh Brolin is hero-villain Thanos in the latest chapter (and it really is a chapter) of the Marvel franchise Avengers: Infinity War |
Director: Anthony & Joe Russo
Cast: Robert Downey Jnr (Tony Stark), Chris Hemsworth
(Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers), Scarlett
Johansson (Natasha Romanoff), Josh Brolin (Thanos), Chris Pratt (Peter Quill), Benedict
Cumberbatch (Dr Stephen Strange), Don Cheadle (James Rhodes), Tom Holland
(Peter Parker), Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa), Paul Bettany (Vision), Elizabeth
Olsen (Wanda Maximoff), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson), Sebastian Stan (Bucky
Barnes), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Peter Dinklage (Eitri),
Benedict Wong (Wong), Pom Klementieff (Mantis), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Dave
Bautista (Deax), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Vin Diesel (Groot), Bradley Cooper
(Rocket), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Benecio del Toro (Collector), William
Hurt (Thaddeus Ross), Danai Gurira (Okota), Letita Wright (Shuri)

This time the Avengers come together (and overcome inevitable
personality clashes) to defeat Thanos (a motion-captured Josh Brolin). Thanos
is a lunking purple beast who believes the universe is vastly overpopulated.
The solution? Why kill half the universe’s population, so the other half can
lead lives of perfect contentment on the remaining resources. How? Well he
needs the Infinity Stones, six all-powerful gems that, together, will give him
control of time and space. He just needs to wrestle them from their various
hiding places.
Avengers: Infinity War
has been called less of film and more an episode in a long running TV series. I
think that’s fair. This film is in no way designed for anyone new to the saga
to step in – half of the expansive cast are not even fully introduced. And
actually it’s a good thing: we’re almost 20 films in now into this expanded
universe, and if you are one of those critics sniffing that there wasn’t any
concession made to the newcomer, well tough. One of the film’s strengths is that
it understanding its playing to the galleries of long-established fans. Your
enjoyment of the film will only increase the more Marvel films you’ve seen.
Unfortunately this sort of “dive straight in and to hell
with the consequences” approach is also the root of the film’s weaknesses. This
film’s primary aim is to juggle all its characters successfully, balancing its
huge number of events and locations so they remain coherent, throwing in enough
set pieces along the way for whoops and cheers. What it manifestly is not for
is to tell a story about character or to give us striking visual images.
It’s like a mega, mega, mega budget all-action crossover
episode of something. The excitement for the viewer is, say, Iron Man and
Doctor Strange butting heads or Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy exchanging
comic riffs. It’s not designed for us to learn anything new about these heroes.
In fact, the character beats are pretty formulaic. A standard arc generally
goes like this: brief individual introduction doing something everyday, a
meeting where much plot is quickly exchanged, bickering, a huge battle and some
self sacrifice. Repeat. The film does nothing fresh on this formula which Joss
Whedon introduced so well in The Avengers.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The difference with The
Avengers was that it felt like a real novelty, and there was a smaller
number of characters to bring together (it seems almost timid now to remember
the original Avengers gang was only 6-7 strong – it’s almost 20+ now). Each
character had more time and we got a much better sense of how their individual
personalities affected the other. Here the Russos have to try and deal with the
vast number of heroes by effectively breaking them up into 3-4 silos, giving
even the most prominent ones probably no more than 20 minutes of screen time
On top of which, despite the much vaunted “all bets are off”
promotion of the movie, the action still has a stakes-free weightlessness to
it. Yes some characters die, and while 1-2 of these might well stick, by the
end of the film the main question is how
many of the deaths will be reversed, not the impact of them. In fact the final
sequence (which sees several deaths) slowly carries less and less weight the
more you realise these deaths are really serving as a cheeky “how will they get
out of that” moment.
Which is the dark secret of Avengers: Infinity War: it’s really nothing more than a trailer for
its sequel. At the end of its vast running time – after all the functionally
filmed action and odd decent one liner – you realise you have watched an extended
prologue for the next film. That’s the
one we’ve all been building for. The events of this film, in the long run, are the
long road we need to take to get there.
This is not to say the film doesn’t have moments of
enjoyment. The spectacle may not be filmed with much more than a derivative
traditionalism, but it can’t help but be enjoyable. There isn’t much
imagination about the implications of these heroes’ powers, in the way of say X-Men 2, but it’s still impressive to
watch. Thor and Captain America get some pretty cool entrances.
But I got the impression it must have been pretty boring to
act in. Most of the vast cast have very little to do except a few one-liners
and then punching. The character who most emerges as a three-dimensional figure
is Thanos. Josh Brolin’s interpretation of the character as a sort of misguided
humanitarian, who feels to do a great right he must do a greater wrong, yearns
not for control of the universe but (in a perverse way) to save it. His quest
for these stones is built like some sort of Arthurian epic, involving sacrifice
and struggle. It would have been easy to make Thanos a sadistic maniac, but
making him someone who believes he is doing the right thing is much more
interesting. Essentially he’s the main character of the film.
Of the rest those that get the most to do are those with a
connection with Thanos. Zoe Saldana as his adopted daughter turned foe Gamora
gets some meaty emotional material, as does Chris Pratt as her would-be
boyfriend Peter Quill (Pratt is the actor who probably gets the most “actorly”
material in the film by far). Paul Bettany as Vision (the robot with an
infinity stone in his head) gets to centre a plot that balances self-sacrifice
with his love for Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olson pretty good, even if her
character oscillates between bad assery and weeping).
For the rest, it’s just their actor’s charisma that carries
them through. Robert Downey Jnr gets a touching moment or two (most notably his
reaction to another character’s distressed fear on facing death). Benedict
Cumberbatch is great value as Strange. Chris Hemsworth gets to continue flexing
his comic muscle as Thor. Others like Chris Evans are criminally wasted.
But then their time will come. Because there is another film
in the pipeline – and if our heroes still feel slightly like they can survive
anything up to and including getting crushed by a moon, it’s because we know
that there are still movies to be made, and money for Marvel to take to the
bank. And that’s probably the real nemesis of these expansive, bombastic films:
the lack of danger is only going to continue while the studio doesn’t want to
kill anyone major off. Hopefully that will change, but without it it’s still a
film of the invulnerable hitting the inevitable.
Avengers: Infinity War
is pretty good – but largely as a spectacle and because it superficially pays
off what you were being hyped up to see in its action and character
partnerships. But give it a year or so – and repeat viewings – and I think its
stock will fall. Because it doesn’t
really do anything that unexpected, and most of its more daring movies are designed
with loopholes to undo them. There are enough bright lights to entertain you
(and I mostly was) but I don’t think there is much depth for you to swim in
when you come back for a second dip.
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