AVENGERS INFINITY WAR - Mixed Reviews Ahead

[AndyDursin]

Just a word of warning -- when this guy (who loves nearly everything) isn't entirely on-board, you know we might have another LAST JEDI on our hands.

[AndyDursin]

Also....

[Paul MacLean]

They're still making Avengers movies?

[AndyDursin]

Oh yes it's sure to be the highest grossing film of the decade probably. Why aren't you onboard the fanboy wagon Paul?!?

[jkholm]

I think the buzz for this movie is less about the plot and more about which character dies and what the next movie will be about. Ten years of Marvel movies are leading not to a definitive conclusion or final confrontation but rather...ten more years of Marvel movies.

[AndyDursin]

Exactly John.

Michael Phillips review pretty much says it all. Gladly going to avoid planning a night out for this lol. Mass genocide, heavy handed cgi...and he's right too: there's another one coming next year that however many people die, will reverse some of it. Though my guess is Cap is dead because it's time for a black Cap in today's political climate.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertain ... story.html

Avengers: Infinity War” is a lot of movie. You can hate it and still say that much with confidence. Its various, overlapping fan bases won’t hold what they don’t like against it, I bet. “A lot,” though, doesn’t mean it’s much fun or even very good.

No hate here, honestly. The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction. The nervy fatalism of its climax might actually count for something if you didn’t know in your bones that the “Avengers” movie coming out a year from now will very likely undo what and who we’re left with, at the end of these two hours and 40 minutes.

The stealth question lurking underneath “Infinity War” is a simple one. After “Black Panther,” does anyone care about that louche, narcissistic playboy Tony Stark as much as they used to? Ten years ago this month, the Marvel universe was launched with the fresh, lively, relatively easygoing “Iron Man.” It seems more like 100.

[KevinEK]

SPOILERS HERE

I saw the movie last night. It’s too long, with too many characters to service, while basically holding to a pretty simple plot of “Watch Thanos Win”. Enough of this is based on the Infinity Gauntlet material for people who’ve read those issues to be certain how the next movie will play out what happened here.

I went into this expecting a couple of characters to die, and I had figured Andy was right, that they’d kill off Chris Evans’ Captain America along the way, as Marvel has made some noises about various cast contracts being up and changes being afoot. That’s not what happened, and the Marvel comments appear now to me to just have been a feint to get the audience nervous and expecting some Game of Thrones styled surprise killings of fan favorites. The movie certainly builds up to and milks several very near deaths, including Thor and Iron Man. And it starts with the killing of pretty much the entire Asgardians of the Galaxy that just got established in the Ragnarok movie - with special attention to killing Heimdall and Loki, presumably as a way to show “this is serious”. Then as we go through the various confrontations between various combinations of the Marvel movie heroes and Thanos and his minions, the battles are always tilted heavily toward the villains. There’s an unrelenting pessimism in this film, starting with the Asgardian massacre in the opening moments. They temper it with some humor along the way, and some inventive biplay, but the basic thrust here is actually similar to the movie “Se7en”, in that we’re watching an inevitable progression as Thanos puts more and more of those stones into his metal glove. By the end of the movie, he’s got his full complement of stones, snaps his fingers, and half of the characters disintegrate.

Again, had the death toll just been a few isolated casualties, I’d see that as Marvel shaking up their cast roster. But this movie overplays that hand hard - the death count here is gigantic, including nearly all of the Guardians, Spider-Man, Dr Strange, Vision, Black Panther, Nick Fury, etc. (Thanos’ minions are also killed, some in fairly gruesome ways.) When you see a death count that high, and you know Marvel is planning more Guardians and Spider-Man movies to come right after the next Avengers, that would sound like a “Shenanigans!” call to me. My instincts say that the next movie will pretty much undo the death toll by having a minor character grab that Gauntlet, as was done in the comic issues to reverse the damage. I’m honestly unsure that any of the big character deaths seen here will be cemented. My thinking is that the next movie reunites the core Avengers members from the 2012 movie, along with a much smaller bunch of ancillaries, leading up to the big reversal and a finale where you see that the Marvel heroes are all back alive and well and that they’re all set to move on to the next set of franchise movies. And they’re adding in Captain Marvel as a heavily powered hero that has not been seen in these movies yet.

There’s at least one major contradiction in the movie - the Ragnarok film established Thor as having incredible lightning powers that did not require a hammer or any other weapon to activate. Suddenly in this movie, which follows right after that one, Thor has lost those powers. So he’s pretty much helpless until he gets his hands on his new axe, named and shaped for the one built in the Simonson run for Beta Ray Bill. Vision is played as damaged early on, and they never really try to repair him, as part of the fatalistic tone. Both Iron Man and Cap are played as morose throughout much of the events. Even the Guardians wind up being played more for their darker sides.

It’s not surprising the movie is doing good business - it’s packed with nearly every actor who’s been in the Marvel movies. (And the rest that didn’t appear are sure to be in the next one). I expect it to keep doing big business for some time, and I expect the home video release this year to be huge.

[AndyDursin]

Agreed. As I wrote in my review this week, it's much more an "All-Star Marvel" movie than it even is an Avengers film. The team barely interacts with one another, and it's filled with appearances from pretty much everyone who's carried a Marvel branded film in the last 10 years.

Not only does it overplay its hand on the "death front" Kevin, but we already know that they prevail -- because Dr. Strange does. He runs his "simulation" and finds out there's 1 way for the heroes to win. As a result, his acceptance of the "fate of humanity" is a part of that 1 path to victory so to speak, it's not throwing in the towel.

I mean what suspense is there now? Had he not revealed that fact, maybe someone might feel that some of these characters are truly goners...but they killed so many of them (including characters they JUST INTRODUCED like Holland's Spider-Man and Black Panther lol), everybody knows that's not going to happen. And besides, Dr. Strange knows they can win! All we don't know is the "how" (something tells me it will involve beating up lots of things lol).

I still think it's possible Evans will be really gone -- he barely had anything to do in this movie, and my guess is he'll have a larger role and sacrifice himself for everyone in the next one.

[jkholm]

spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen it yet




I watched it yesterday with my son. I didn't enjoy it much. The ending ruined any sort of dramatic stakes the movie had going for it. Of course Black Panther and Spider-Man are coming back.

These movies are starting to become similar to The Walking Dead. The creators of both are not remotely interested in ending either the filmed versions or the comics any time soon. And in both properties, if you read the comics you can get a pretty good sense of where each is heading, even if some details are changed to keep viewers in suspense.

One other observation. Before the movie we saw a trailer for Deadpool 2 in which a character joked about someone being too dark...just like the DC Universe. Ummm... Infinty War was awfully dark.

[AndyDursin]

John I had the same reaction. I think the singular biggest issue I have with basically all of the Marvel movies is their lack of dramatic tension. There's never any sense of completion or real stakes involved. Each film is often as much about setting up "the next one" as it is trying to tell its own story.

The best comic book movies have those moments -- Donner's Superman, Raimis first two Spider-Mans, Nolan's Batman trilogy are obviously the ones that come to mind first and foremost -- but Marvel's films lack that kind of personality and sense that "something important" is happening. Even at their best they're "good" but often very impersonal.

I'm admit im totally bored of this genre. If I were 10 I'd be all over it, but these things are products, almost all the same, and there's never going to be an endgame for any of it because Disney needs 2 a year of these things to placate the shareholders.