Let me just say this. If you haven't been following along with the 18 other movies that lead up to this, Avengers: Infinity War will probably make very little sense to you and will feel like a super expensive action spectacle with weird tonal shifts and lots of important looking, narratively unbalanced characters doing fun action-hero-looking stuff. If this is you, then you should not watch this movie. Infinity War fails as a standalone movie due to its reliance on the lore and characters that have been established over the last 10 years. However, it definitely succeeds as a sequel movie to a major episodic film franchise.
From the directors of the last two Captain America movies, the Russo brothers have once again delivered a stellar, well choreographed, well shot, and well edited action movie. Although a lot of the action scenes in the movie feel like filler (and they totally are just that), they always look great and feel very kinetic and exciting. In my opinion, the Russo brothers are some of the best contemporary action directors out there. For those who had difficulty keeping up with the frantic action of Winter Soldier and Civil War, you can rest easy knowing that they've decided to stick with longer takes and less cutting to maintain that sense of geography. That's key when you've got hundreds of characters fighting each other in the same scene at once. Well done.
Another thing I really love about this movie are some of the character introductions. They feel super heroic in the most romantic sense and the feeling is so pure and raw and bad ass. But then there are some characters who are just there and get really boring and crappy introductions and if you're a fan of those specific characters, you will be let down.
From a writing standpoint, some of these characters make weird choices that are counter intuitive to who they are and, looking at the big picture, I feel that those beats were written in to cause more action set pieces for the sake of showing action set pieces or were done to prevent certain characters from meeting up. It's kinda of like an episode from a TV show with a clear A plot and B plot, and C plot and D plot etc. As mentioned before, there are weird tonal shifts where there'll be super funny jokes during dramatic scenes and it's more apparent than ever now. It doesn't work except for this one part with Thor (maybe you'll know which scene I'm referring to or maybe not because it's hard to talk about this without spoilers so whatever).
Marvel has been cursed with terrible, forgettable, soulless villains. Thanos isn't terrible or forgettable and he's definitely not Soulless (there's a pun in there somewhere). He's one of the better villains in the MCU and I liked how the movie humanizes him. That being said, his motivation is hard to get behind and I don't really agree with the choices that were made at a script level. He's definitely an incredibly hard character to write and they had an opportunity to keep his original comic book motivation still intact using a certain character from another movie to be that character that was missing in this movie. But they didn't. In my opinion, that would've made Thanos, dare I say, relatable. Thanos has four henchmen. Besides acting as catalysts to some great looking action set pieces, they feel superficial and one-dimensional.
The exposition isn't bad but can be heavy at times. There was one scene in particular that has a character reveal and you understand how they got there but they are merely there for exposition and it's really dumb. Just like Thor's hot tub adventures in Age of Ultron, Thor's plot in Infinity War slows the somewhat slow but well paced almost 3-hour narrative to a crawl. It's really disappointing and it's a lot of down time that could've been spent on something else, in my opinion.
For a film franchise that has been repeatedly criticized for lacking stakes, Infinity War shows us that no one in the movie is safe. That's cool. I love the ending and it makes me more invested in its narrative than ever before. It's not my favourite Marvel movie, but it's currently up there with Winter Soldier, Civil War, Homecoming, and Black Panther. I think it's the best Avengers movie yet and it's definitely a must-see for super hero aficionados.
PS there's only one end credits scene and it comes at the very end. So don't panic if you don't see anything after the first set of credits.
