Avengers: Infinity War.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.
Avengers: Infinity War is an entertaining, impeccably paced, and visually stunning epic.
I hated it.
We’ve known since he popped up in 2012’s The Avengers: Thanos is coming. Now it’s 2018 and Thanos is here. And he’s collecting something else that has been popping up in Marvel movies: infinity stones. Collect all six and you become super-powerful. Like end the universe with a snap of your fingers powerful.
Fortunately for the universe, Thanos does not want to end it entirely. He just wants to kill half the people. “It's a simple calculus,” he explains. “This universe has finite resources. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.” After the culling, Thanos doesn’t even want to rule those remaining. He just wants to “rest, and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.”
And so the Avengers assemble to stop him. With the help of a few other people. Well, actually they disassemble, going in several different directions. Captain America, Bruce Banner, and a legion of lesser knowns go to Wakanda, home of Black Panther. Their mission: protect Vision, who has one of the stones embedded in his forehead. Thor, meanwhile, teams up with Rocket Raccoon and Groot of Guardians of the Galaxy on a quest to get a battle axe to replace his hammer, which you may recall his sister destroyed in Thor: Ragnarok. Parts of the mission are suicide, but, Thor reminds us, “So is facing Thanos without that axe.” As for the rest of the Guardians crew, they chase down another of the MacGuffin stones to try to keep it out of Thanos’s gauntlet. Which is a little stupid because they’re bound to run into him and Gamora knows the location of yet another one. Finally, Iron Man, Spidey, and Doctor Strange fly off into space to take the fight to Thanos. Which is very stupid, because Strange has one of the stones on him.
I was concerned that with four distinct plotlines and God knows how many characters, things would get confusing, and favorite characters would get short shrift. But the movie did a great job of keeping everything straight and giving the various heroes sufficient screen time. (Well, almost everyone. I would have like to see more of Cap.) I think one reason it worked was, despite the numerous threads, it's really a very simple plot. Thanos wants to get six things. The Avengers want to stop him. Far more straightforward than Zemo's overcomplicated plan in Civil War.
My favorite scene is one in which Thanos must make a choice. Standing at the edge of a cliff amid a bleak landscape and swelling, dramatic music, he is told that in order to collect the next stone, he must give up something he loves. Love vs. Power. And he’s in tears. It’s a truly Wagnerian moment (and those who know me understand that I mean that as a compliment).
The following scene features a joke about Starbucks coming to Wakanda. Nice pacing, interspersing the humor amid the drama that way, to give the viewer a bit of a respite before the next blow. Indeed, the humor we’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios was well in evidence. Spidey, having seen too many movies from the Alien franchise, can’t stop talking about extraterrestrials planting their eggs in people’s chests. Stark, on learning that Doctor Strange is a wizard, asks what he does besides make balloon animals. Peter Quill is jealous that Thor is so much more manly than he is. Drax doesn’t help, what with him waxing rhapsodic about Thor’s good looks and muscles. Mantis still gets expressions wrong (“Kick names. Take ass.”). And when Thor finally shows up at the final battle—with his new axe—Banner exultingly taunts the enemy, “You guys are so screwed now!”
Great characters. Drama. Humor. So why did I hate it?
There are two reasons.
The first is the political overtones. I can’t help thinking the writers have a secret sympathy for Thanos’s plan. American writers are, unfortunately, disproportionately Leftist. Raised on Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, many no doubt fantasize about having the power to wave their fingers, commit the unspeakable evil of making half of humanity disappear, and, since they won't be among the dead themselves of course, bask in the gratitude of the universe. Thanos is an eco-extremist’s wet dream. Tellingly, Infinity War isn’t the only major work in recent years based on this premise; Dan Brown’s Inferno might be literally more down to earth, but the plot is basically the same. And this view isn't confined to writers. I'm seeing many comments in Infinity War online discussions along the lines of "Thanos is right."
The underlying argument, that population growth inevitably outstrips resources, has been refuted time and again by events since Thomas Malthus first made it in 1798. It turns out humans have an uncanny knack for using technology to expand their resources. And yet, no one in the movie seems able to disprove Thanos. The best attempt, such as it is, comes from Gamora. When Thanos explains his reasoning to her, she replies with a lame “You don’t know that!”
If there’s any doubt that the writers are sympathetic to Thanos’s plan, it is removed by the second reason I hated the movie, and here I must warn the reader: THERE. WILL. BE. SPOILERS.
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SERIOUS SPOILERS.
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I'M NOT KIDDING.
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HERE IT IS...
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THANOS WINS.
He gets all six stones. He kills half the humanoids in the universe. Trillions of people just dissolve into a sort of floating black dust. The core team (Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor) survive, but Spider-man, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange, the Winter Soldier, and all the Guardians except Rocket are gone. Thanos settles down to watch the sun rise, and the screen fades to black.
What a downer.
Superhero movies fill an important psychological need. They are escape from a world where evil often wins. It’s comforting to have this group of powerful individuals to guarantee that the forces of niceness prevail—at least on the screen. It’s unsettling to see them so impotent that the outcome would have been exactly the same if they had stayed home and washed their tights.
I don’t have a problem with unhappy endings per se. Many great works of literature have unhappy endings. But there’s usually a twist. Romeo and Juliet “with their death bury their parents’ strife.” The Three Musketeers fail at stopping Milady de Winter from assassinating the Duke of Buckingham, but they make her pay for her crimes. Cyrano de Bergerac is killed by an unseen enemy, but with “mon panache” intact. Sydney Carton, in A Tale of Two Cities, goes to the guillotine, but finds redemption there, “a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.” Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, dies (presumably), in a hopeless battle, in a hopeless war, but he goes down fighting, determined to take as many of the enemy with him as he can.
But Infinity War has no silver lining, no justice done, no moral victory, no redemptive struggle, no glorious last stand. The bad guy just wins. Everybody dissolves, far too quickly, painlessly, and numerously for the viewers to feel anything other than shock that it was really going to end that way, followed by disappointment. When I saw it, the audience sat through the closing credits in icy silence. And of course you can’t leave. It’s a Marvel movie. You have to wait for the end credit scene, which is Nick Fury, his body dissolving, managing to send off a text.
That text tells us the story’s not over. Something is up. They’re going to Days of Future Past everyone back to life. In fact, they have to. A powerful environmentalist message is all very well and good, but dammit, there are profitable upcoming releases of Spider-man and Guardians on the calendar. It’s that Ovaltine moment that Kerey wrote about in his post yesterday. Ha ha, moviegoers! You only got half a movie. If you want to see the Part II, you have to wait a year and pay us another thirteen bucks to see some bulls--t that undoes Part I.
It’s a scurvy trick, and yet I’ll pay it. Because I really, really, want to see justice prevail, Thanos destroyed, the dead restored, and the effects of this miserable movie erased from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
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