Ryan McNeil
The idea is to discuss a film like this without “spoiling it”. Let the story come to people for days and weeks. Don’t give away the end, and focus on themes and subtext. However, now and then a film comes along where the entire conversation revolves around spoiling it…since the end affects the beginning.
This is one of those moments. This is the point of no return. Spoilers ahead, and the demand discussion.
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR is the culmination of ten years of films from Marvel Studios.
The centre of the story is Thanos (Josh Brolin), a mad titan obsessed with restoring balance to the universe. “Balance” means eliminating half of the souls that inhabit it – without prejudice. To do this, he must bring together six Infinity Stones: relics from the creation of the universe itself. If he does that, he can weaponize them in a way that will wipe-out half of existence merely by snapping his fingers.
The first one he reaches for is The Space Stone, last seen in the Tesseract kept safe of Asgard. To retrieve it, he intercepts an Asgardian refugee ship where he meets Bruce Banner, Thor, Loki, and what remains of Asgard. The encounter is bloody, and sends stocks to the wind.
Banner is shot down to earth where he rallies with Tony Stark, Doctor Strange, Wong, and (eventually) Peter Parker. He warns them all that Thanos is coming, and in this moment Wong fills them all in on what The Infinity Stones are, and what Thanos could do if he retrieved them all. In this moment, Stark and Banner grow concerned about Vision – the only Avenger with an Infinity Stone embedded in his body. He has fallen off the grid, and Tony admits the only person who could find him is Captain Steve Rogers…though he too, is off the grid.
The action moves to Glasgow, where we find Vision and Scarlett Witch. They talk of a budding relationship, and how the Infinity Stone in his forehead is acting strangely. No sooner do they make mention of it than does a few of Thanos’ cronies come to pick a fight and walk away with his source of power. The skirmish is broken up by Steve Rogers, alongside Falcon and Black Widow – all fugitives from justice after the events of Civil War. The group fold Captain James Rhodes into the unit, and make for Wakanda.
There, the plan is to rally with Bucky Barnes, Banner, and make a stand against Thanos with Black Panther and his Wakandan fighters at their side.
Meanwhile, in space The Guardians of The Galaxy are likewise brought into the fray. After rescuing Thor, the group is split in two. Groot and Rocket Racoon take Thor on a quest to forge a weapon that can stop Thanos…a replacement for his shattered Mjolnir. Peter Quill, Drax, Mantis, and Gamora, split off in the hopes of stopping Thanos from retrieving another stone – and it’s this mission that rallies them with Strange, Stark, and Parker.
Our heroes are scattered. Do they stand any chance of finding one-another before Thanos finds what he’s looking for. Even if they do, might they stand even half a chance of standing up to a villain hoping to court Death herself?
By now it’s safe to say that there is a sizeable section of the moviegoing public that are suffering from ‘superhero fatigue’. They roll their eyes, they don’t like how many of them there are, they wish that the money given to these films could pay for somewhere between ten and twenty weightier dramas. I don’t consider myself one of these – if anything, I believe most of these people are reacting more to the hype than the films themselves. However, if there’s any one element to ‘superhero fatigue’ that I could relate to, it’s the lack of stakes. Worlds collide, gods lay waste to each-other, the universe as we know it is put in peril…for a moment or two anyway.
Things seem to have a way of working out before the credits roll, and actors’ contracts expire.
I bring that up, because as INFINITY WAR begins, it seems poised to challenge that entire notion. Characters we care about are dispatched violently. Actors whose careers were made, personae that have become integral parts of the universe. We are shocked and saddened at how quickly they are dispatched, how carelessly their spark is snuffed-out. There is even an utterance of “no resurrections” that seemingly reads our thoughts on how everything will be okay in the end. We already miss the fallen, we suddenly see peripheral characters in a more loving light, and we rally around the fight.
This is worth fighting for; this carefree distraction that thrills us and delights us and is as easy to find off any freeway off ramp and in any shopping mall. Surely this cannot be destroyed – the stakes cannot possibly be this high, can they?
No. Turns out they can’t.
Without getting specific about who, the body count in this film can handily be divided into two groups: collateral damage and the affected.
The former are characters that are slain along the way. They try to step in-front of Thanos or his cronies and pay a heavy price. Their fates are deeply affecting – sometimes surprisingly so. We might not have worn their tee shirt or pretended to be them on the playground, but we always believed they’d have a place in this world that delights us so much. We might have even quietly believed them expendable, and yet seeing them expended is shocking on a level we aren’t ready for.
In these moments, INFINITY WAR seems to look us in the eye and taunt “Oh, you thought everyone would be okay? That’s sweet…”. In these moments, Marvel Studios don’t pull their punches. We are hit square in the jaw and left to cope in ways these movies seldom make us cope.
That brings us to the latter – the characters affected by one moment of storytelling chaos. We watch these men and women fall one by one, taken indiscriminately. They fall mid-sentence, often breaking the hearts of those there to witness. Gods, monsters, icons, and heroes. Person by person they vanish like tears in the rain, and the true cost of Thanos’ mission is laid bare. We are left in the silence, in the dark, a silent cut to black and sent off to enjoy our summers.
Sounds bleak, right? Sounds even worse than witnessing collateral damage. Well, it would be…if any of it was believable.
The victims are random; both the mightiest and the scrappiest are among the taken. Some of the moments are especially heartbreaking, and properly executed could have destroyed summer audiences just looking for big dumb action. However, in amongst the mightiest and scrappiest are characters we know are in films to come. It’s hard to feel shocked or saddened when you know your shock and sadness is about to be undone in short order. It’s hard to believe in stakes when you can see them lowered with the next entry in the franchise. It feels cheap, and it likewise cheapens the sacrifices made in the name of collateral damage.
This miscalculation in storytelling is staggering. It betrays the scale and the scope not just of what INFINITY WAR hopes to do, but also in what Marvel Studios has been building for an entire decade. For ten years, it has played low-stakes hands with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. While it has seldom made us believe them vulnerable, it has often made allusions to how they could be…under the right set of circumstances…against the right opponent. Armour can be cracked, soldiers can be slain, monsters can be captured, assassins can be disarmed.
This was Marvel’s moment to prove it; to show that even the mighty can fall. It was their chance to use all of that bombast and spectacle in the name of something truly catastrophic. It was their chance to make us feel great sadness and loss for true icons, and challenge our ideas of what their whole genre is capable of doing.
Unfortunately instead of raising the stakes, Marvel just lowered them. To the ground.
SPOILERS OBVS
I recall you weren’t a fan of Days of Future Past. One thing they both have in common is wiping out a lot of familiar faces, only to undo everything by the end.
The reason it worked for me then and again here, isn’t because I believed it was permanent, but because it presented me with a cathartic image I didnt expect to see, and gave you a taste of what it would look like if they did it for real. Like having a dream where a loved one dies and then waking up next to them, and still feeling a pang of pain. When it comes to both of those movies it just told me that I cared more about those characters than I maybe thought I did, even if only because I had invested so much time in them.
I enjoyed the movie for a number of reasons (As we’ve discussed elsewhere, I lean far more towards the cosmic Marvel stuff – which this clearly was). Do I think the eventual undoing of what happened here could be clumsy or definitive evidence that Marvel can’t commit to killing anyone off for anything other than contractual reasons? Maybe. But I can’t hate on the movie based on what might happen. I give it the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.
SECOND SPOILER – The next time you see Nikki she is going to make this about Harry Potter, of course.