[8.8/10] Before Joss Whedon made 2012’s *The Avengers* and changed the caped crossover game forever, he made an incredible television series with a disarming title called *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*. Despite its gothic overtones, *Buffy* had the rhythms of a superhero story, with special abilities, recurring villains, and powerful deaths and resurrections. And in its fifth season finale [spoilers for a 15-year-old episode of television], Whedon presented his protagonist with a choice: save someone you love or save the universe.
The stakes were similar to *Avengers: Infinity War*’s, even if the contours were a little different. A mad god was on the loose, threatening to destroy all of creation. To complete this universal destruction, she needed Buffy’s sister, Dawn, who was, through some magical meddling, the key to this grand undoing. When the crisis became eminent, friend and foe alike advised Buffy to make a hard choice and sacrifice her sister for the good of the world. But Buffy, undeterred, chose to find a different option, to rally her allies and fight this evil rather than give into it.
It’s the kind of noble choice that characters in all kinds of stories make in these situations. There’s some kind of no-win scenario, and the resourceful, occasionally Kirkian hero finds a way to overcome the odds, protect those closest to them, and slay whatever dragon is threatening their village of choice. In that episode, it was meant as a tribute to Buffy’s steadfastness and loyalty, of her devotion to her sister, and her determination to never give up and never stop fighting as long as there’s a glimmer of hope.
The only problem was that I was yelling at my T.V., “To hell with your sister! The whole universe is hanging in the balance here!”
In an odd way, that’s the message, or at least the overarching theme, of *Avengers: Infinity War*. The film is one giant, bejeweled scavenger hunt, with the long-teased uber-villain Thanos scouring the realms for the six titular infinity stones in order to wipe out half of all life in the universe. It’s a plan with innumerable fault points -- moments in which one hard choice, one sacrifice of someone you love, could have ended this quiet path of horror, or at least prevented the worst of it from coming to pass.
And yet, every step of the way, none of the Avengers are able to make that choice, or at least, make it in time for it to make a difference. Loki, Gamora, Star-Lord, Eitri, Dr. Strange, and Scarlet Witch each have the chance to end Thanos’s quest. But in the end, when the lives of those they care about hang in the balance, they cannot bring themselves to do it.
The arc of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been, broadly speaking, one of love and connection, where unlikely allies find themselves forging bonds through trying circumstances and achieving greater things through that unity and shared purpose. *Infinity War* frames those bonds not as the thing that allows our heroes to face the newest, gargantuan threat, but as the thing that keeps them from being able to stop it.
Because they cannot bring themselves to let go of what, and more importantly who, they love. Whether that love is familial or romantic, The Avengers cannot bear to sacrifice it. The one figure in the whole film who can and does is Thanos himself. He is the only soul in *Infinity War* who faces down that choice -- sacrifice who you love or see your grand plans fall to ruin -- and finds within himself the will to do it. That horrible strength is the one thing he has on our heroes, more than his powers or weapons or ingenuity, that lets him win this war. He is willing to do what none of The Avenger will or even can, and it creates one of the most devastating losses and endings in any superhero film so far.
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It also creates a villain worthy of the moment. Until now, Thanos had been one big, vaguely-defined promise. A sinister smile in *The Avengers*, a minor appearance in *Guardians of the Galaxy*, and one final tease in *Age of Ultron* were all Marvel movie fans had to go on. The results amounted to a generic baddie who made the occasional threat and pulled strings behind the scenes, but was still largely a blank slate when it came time for him to step into the spotlight and assume the villain role for the team-up of team-ups.
Thankfully, that gave the directing duo of the Russo Bros. and the film’s writers the chance to fill in those blank spaces with a distinct and interesting character. Rather than the figure of the stentorian, megalomaniacal baddie Thanos has cut up until now, the “Mad Titan” is a quiet, almost contemplative antagonist in *Infinity War*. There’s a genteel, even empathetic quality to him in the film, one that makes him an unexpectedly subdued but no less effective a challenge to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
Some of that comes from his modus operandi. Rather than mere universal domination, Thanos’s goal is to wipe out half of all life in the universe. But rather than tasking him with destruction for destruction’s sake, *Infinity War* turns Thanos into an acolyte of creative destruction, one who sees himself as a humanitarian. In a universe with limited resources, he wants to slaughter half the population not out of revenge or vindictiveness, but so that the remainder can live and live well, and avoid the devastation that his own planet faced when those resources ran out.
In that, Thanos is the MCU’s Ozymandias -- doing a terrible thing that results in the loss of countless lives, but intending for it to serve the greater good. His perspective is efficiently conveyed and surprisingly heady for a popcorn flick, dealing with notions of the extremes of a utilitarian viewpoint that blend well with Thanos’s own seemingly dispassionate but subtly affected presence in the film.
Much of that owes to Josh Brolin’s performance. There is a wistfulness, almost a sense of resignation in his voice and bearing as Thanos cuts his path across the galaxy. It would be easy for the uber-baddie of the MCU to come off miscalibrated in the attempts to find depths of character and motivation in this big purple goon, but Brolin finds a balance between menace and an unassuming warmth in Thanos that nigh-instantly makes him unique as a villain and interesting enough to justify his position as the would-be final boss of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But much of it also owes to the animators and artists who bring Thanos to life. Much of the action in *Infinity War* falls victim to the same, weightless CGI maelstrom that afflicts blockbuster movies of all stripes. While individual images of armies of Avengers squaring off against alien attackers, or hollow mechanical ovoids hovering over New York City stand out, too often the film devolves into quick cuts of 3D cartoons smashing into one another, without enough clarity or realism to make them more than a clash of computer-animated piñatas.
Thanos, however, is a consistent exception. More than any other computer-assisted element of the film, his gravitas and impact as a character in the film is dependent on subtle changes in his facial expression that reveal smaller shifts in mood or reaction. As much as for any other fully-CGI character on film, Brolin’s performance is captured in the slight curve of Thanos’s lip, the furrowing of his brow, the squint of his eyes.
Despite his standing as an armor-clad, purple-skinned ruffian, Thanos is a villain with a soul, one conspicuously on display even as he toys with and decimates our heroes. That alone is an achievement of performance, digital artistry, and writing that comes together to craft a villain befitting of the grand finale to a decade’s worth of adventures.
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Unfortunately, *Infinity War* has trouble keeping up with all of the scads of characters who have accumulated on the MCU’s rolls in the course of that decade’s worth of adventures. While the Russo Bros. managed to strike a delicate balance in *Captain America: Civil War*, servicing a broad set of characters in a single story, they can’t quite manage the same feat for the Avengers writ large.
The opening act of *Infinity War* is full of throat-clearing. In addition to establishing Thanos as a challenge beyond the everyday (something the film accomplishes by having him kill the bad guy from the first *Avengers* flick and manhandle The Hulk with ease), the film has to check in with all the major figures from the Marvel movie roster, paying at least lip service to what they’ve been up to since we last saw them and running through reunions and updates galore.
The result is a film that is lopsided and overstuffed. Eventually, the film’s narrative coalesces into a few distinct threads. Thor, Rocket, and Groot go off to forge a weapon to defeat Thanos. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and the remaining Guardians aim to stop Thanos on his own planet. Gamora is dragged along with the mad titan himself. And the remaining, earthbound Avengers, most notably Scarlet Witch and Vision, fend off Thanos’s goons on the homefront. But the parties wax and wane over the course of these challenges, and the movie never quite finds its center as this mass of characters ebbs and flows from one scene to the next.
That extends to the crossover-based excitement promised by the very concept of the film. Some unique pairings work like gangbusters. Thor’s adulation from the Guardians, replete with Star-Lord’s instant jealousy and attempts to puff himself up, are a delight from beginning to end. Others, like the attempt to replicate Tony Stark’s combative chemistry with Steve Rogers by subbing in Dr. Strange, tend to fizzle. And others still, like the complicated dynamic between Thanos and Gamora, become the emotional backbone of *Infinity War*. But there’s little consistency on that front, and it helps make an already top-heavy film feel more scattered and disjointed in assembling the pieces of its grand finale.
It also tries to maintain the humorous bent of the MCU, to the point where the quipping starts to feel mandatory rather than organic. Calling Thanos “Grimace” is in the proud tradition of Buffy making fun of a bloody-lipped vampire opponent for having “fruit punch mouth.” But eventually, the bon mots start to pile up and feel shoehorned in. Levity is one of the Marvel movies’ strengths, but after a while in *Infinity War*, the hit rate for the jokes starts to waver, and as the stakes increase, the smart remarks begin to feel like the writers meeting a quota rather than letting the repartee emerge from the situation at hand.
The cumulative effect of all this unevenness is a movie full of tremendous moments in its first couple of acts -- the heart-to-heart between Rocket and Thor, the elaborate head-fake at Knowhere, and badass lines from the likes of Black Panther and Captain America -- but also one that has trouble finding its footing for much of that runtime. There are a ton of moving parts in *Infinity War*, and oftentimes the movie feels more like a twelve-car pileup than the elegant ballet the Russo Bros. mean to choreograph.
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Still, despite the movie ungainliness in places, the unifying force of *Infinity War* are those same choices faced by different characters across the landscape of the film. Time and again, the movie depicts moments where one person could have stopped all of this (or at least severely hindered it) and cannot bear what it would take to do so. At one point in the film, Captain America tells his compatriot, “we don’t trade lives” and it’s both the philosophy that unites each of the Avengers and, in a way, dooms them.
Loki could keep the Space Gem away from Thanos, but despite all their sibling rivalry, he cannot watch his brother dying at the hands of this brute and do nothing. Gamora could deny her estranged father access to the Soul Stone, but she relents when cannot tolerate seeing her sister, Nebula, being tortured. Eitri could have refused to make Thanos the implement that makes his terrible deeds possible, but is willing to risk the fate of the universe in the futile hope of saving his people’s lives. Time and again, the people who could have prevented Thanos’s plan from coming to fruition are unable to let the ones they care about suffer or perish in order to make that happen.
Even the ones who attempt to make that choice falter or dither until it’s too late. Though Peter Quill seems the only one willing to accede to his loved one’s wishes to kill her rather than let her fall into Thanos’s hands, the Reality Stone sees that his efforts come to nought. And worse yet, it’s the same emotional connection to Gamora that causes Quill, in his grief and anger, to try to hurt Thanos, in a way that thwarts his allies’ attempts to simply stop him for the time being. Once again, that bond, reinforced and cemented here before it’s wiped away, is what causes Star-Lord, and the Avengers more broadly, to fail.
It’s the same thing that keeps Scarlet Witch from being able to quell this threat. Vision is just as direct as Gamora in asking the one he loves to let him die rather than risk the fate of galaxy. But she resists and delays and does everything in her power to hold onto her loved one even with the world in the balance. Eventually she, like Peter, relents and, in a harrowing moment, removes the Mind Stone from Vision and seemingly stops Thanos, but by then, he has the Time Stone, and in the film’s penultimate gut punch, he rewinds the clock and renders her actions moot.
Thanos himself is the only character in the film willing to make that choice and make it without hesitation. In the climax of the film’s second act, a long-absent Red Skull returns to instruct the Mad Titan that in order to obtain the Soul Stone, he must sacrificing something he loves. Upon hearing the news, Gamora believes she’s won the day, because there’s no way the father who treated her as he did, who put her through what he did, could love anything, let alone her. There are tears in Thanos’s eyes, revealing that he is not the monolithic bastion of evil he seemed until now, but someone who knows what must be done, what costs must be borne, to achieve what he believes must be achieved in order to save the galaxy from itself.
So he bears those costs. He throws his own daughter to her death and claims the fruits of the sacrifice. He offers sympathy to Scarlet Witch but undoes her own hard choice to serve his ends. He snaps his fingers and half the world comes to an end, as familiar faces shatter and blow away into nothingness. It as an emotional wallop, for the film’s heroes and its audience, as the one figure in *Infinity War* who most threatens the galaxy is the one willing to sever those bonds, to go to those lengths, that the Avengers cannot bring themselves to trespass upon.
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Predictions are a fool’s game, but there are a few things to remember in the shadow of *Infinity War*’s devastating ending. First and foremost The heroes lost in this most recent Avengers outing were, largely, the new blood of the MCU. The likes of Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Dr. Strange are far more likely to anchor the next decade of Marvel movies than they are to disappear forever. It won’t take away the shock of power of the moments when they disintegrated before our eyes, but resurrection is the watchword in comic book stories, and Disney is unlikely to let the cornerstones of its next wave of cape flicks linger in oblivion for too long.
But more importantly, *Infinity War* is a film that seems keenly aware that it is in conversation with 2012’s *The Avengers*, the film that kicked this uber-franchise into another gear. And as much as the original *Avengers* flick was about the forging of those bonds between its heroes, it was also about self-sacrifice.
Tony Stark’s arc in the film centered on Steve Rogers’s challenge that Stark is all about himself, and never the sacrifice play. It gave Tony the extra motivation to redirect the nuclear bomb headed for New York City into the portal to another world, with no hope of returning to see Pepper, the person he loves most in the world, ever again. He survives, naturally, but it’s the choice he made that truly mattered -- the choice to put oneself on the chopping block in order to save others, and maybe to save the world.
It’s the same choice that Buffy the Vampire Slayer made in her own fateful finale. When push came to shove, and it became clear that fighting the good fight alone wouldn’t be enough to fell the mad god who threatened all of existence, Buffy still refused to put her sister on the chopping block. Instead, she stepped into that blow in her sister’s place, sacrificing her own life to stop the villain and save all that there was to be saved.
And maybe that portends the path forward for *Avengers 4*. The Avenger who comes closest to succeeding in *Infinity War* is Thor, and on the surface, that would seem to support the “connections to others only hold you back” theme of the film. Thor has a quietly harrowing conversation with Rocket where he acknowledges that he’s basically lost everyone. In a movie where every hero is stymied by their unwillingness to let the people they love come to harm in order to save the universe, it’s the one man with no one left who forms the plan and strikes the blow that nearly wins this war for the good guys.
But his is also a choice of sacrifice. When it comes time to forge the weapon that may be able to slay a god, Thor himself must put his life on the line. He has to hold open the mechanism to let the power of a star flow through him and into the enchanted metal that could create the awesome implement. He is severely weakened and wounded by the blast, but succeeds in creating something with the potential to defeat Thanos. And there, perhaps, *Infinity War* tips it hand.
Because even if The Avengers are not willing to trade lives, they are willing to offer their own. Even Dr. Strange, who seems to be making the same sort of choice that Loki and Gamora and Scarlet Witch did, may be playing the long game. Having glimpsed the lone, possible future where The Avengers succeed, he could be allowing events to come to pass where he disintegrates into nothing, with the hope that it will set the surviving heroes on the path to righting all that’s gone wrong.
That effort may very well require just this sort of ultimate personal sacrifice. There’s been lots of talk about how *Infinity War* and its successor represent a turning point, a close of one significant chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the beginning of another. It’s conspicuous how many of those who survived the terrible geometry of Thanos’s finger snap are among the original set of Avengers who broke out in Whedon’s 2012 blockbuster.
If, as *Infinity War* seems to posit, the thing that sets Thanos apart, that allows him to succeed when there are so many chances for him to fail, is that he is willing to give up what he loves in order to achieve his goal, then maybe what sets The Avengers apart is a reciprocal form of devotion. From Captain America letting his plane fall into the ocean, to Iron Man carrying that Nuke away from New York City, countless time our heroes have won the day by placing themselves onto the altar rather than allowing who or what they love to be forced onto it.
No one knows for sure what the next installment of *The Avengers* mega franchise holds in store. But it’s not hard to imagine the current generation of Avengers collectively making that sort of choice to preserve the next, not to let someone you love go to save the world, but to let yourself go to save them, and the world with it, a form of love that Thanos, however teary-eyed and mournful of prices paid, may not be able to comprehend or, accordingly, defend against.
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*Infinity War* is not simply half a movie. It is, standing alone, a complete and harrowing story of single-minded devotion and loss, of good-hearted, courageous individuals unable to cross the line that could save everything, and suffering unimaginable losses in the process. Despite the movie’s overstuffed roster and uneven quipping, the Russo Bros., Kevin Feige, and Marvel Studios as a whole deserve to be applauded for delivering a film built around such a singular, unifying set of moral choices, that commits to the painful consequences of those actions with a conviction not seen in major franchise filmmaking since *The Empire Strikes Back*.
Those final moments -- where heroes young and old, and the hope for the future they represent, disintegrate and fall away like ash -- are heart-rending in the best and worst way, accompanied not by maniacal laughs or vainglorious boasts, but instead by impressionistic reflections on whether this fraught endeavor was worth it, and quiet smiles at the sunrise. It transcends popcorn thrills and pre-viz action and becomes art, by whatever definition you’d like to throw at it.
But the film is also a question waiting for an answer, a cinematic dangling participle, that makes the bold choice of leaving the viewer with the images of brave men and women fading to nothing, while implicitly gestures toward an inevitable aftermath. As the shock of those images fades, they reveal a call that demands a response.
*Avengers: Infinity War* tells the story of a man who will sacrifice what he loves in order to, by his own measure, save the world, when no one else can do the same. But it asks, and leaves open the question, of what the heroes we’ve been watching for ten years *will* do, the depths of self-sacrifice and lengths to which they will go, when there’s never been more to avenge.
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