- UK release: April 2018
- Director: Anthony and Joe Russo · Writers: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
- Studio / distributor: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- Genre: Superhero ensemble / cosmic action adventure · Runtime: 149 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes) as Tony Stark; Chris Hemsworth (Thor, Rush) as Thor; Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) as Thanos; Zoe Saldaña (Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy) as Gamora
- Rotten Tomatoes: 85% critics / 91% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Marvel has spent ten years and eighteen films building towards a single afternoon, and the gamble of Infinity War is that all of it now has to pay off at once. This is the film where the threads finally meet: Iron Man and Doctor Strange, Thor and the Guardians, the soldiers of Wakanda and a half-built god from a purple corner of the galaxy nobody outside the comics shops had heard of in 2008. The reasonable expectation is a traffic jam, two and a half hours of beloved characters queuing for screen time. The surprise is that the Russo brothers, fresh from The Winter Soldier and Civil War, have worked out the only trick that could hold it together. They have handed the film to the bad guy.
The setup
Thanos (Josh Brolin) wants the six Infinity Stones. Gathered into one gauntlet, they let the bearer reshape reality on a whim, and his particular whim is to wipe out half of all life in the universe, which he has convinced himself is mercy rather than murder. Standing between him and the stones are most of the heroes the studio has introduced to date, scattered across Earth and deep space and largely out of contact with one another. The film moves between these clusters as Thanos works through his shopping list, and the dramatic engine is brutally simple: he is winning, and everyone watching can feel it. I will keep the back half to myself, but anyone who has only ever seen heroes turn it around in the final reel should brace for something the genre rarely allows itself.
The cast
The casting decision that matters most is Brolin’s. Thanos could have been a motion-capture slab of menace, and instead Brolin gives him a weary, paternal calm that is far more unsettling than rage. He believes he is the hero of his own story, and the film lets him, which is why his scenes with Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) carry a real ache. Saldaña, who has done this sort of digitally augmented heavy lifting before on Avatar, grounds the cosmic nonsense in actual grief. Around them the ensemble is managed with unexpected discipline. Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark a shade more frightened than usual, the bravado thinning out. Chris Hemsworth, having found Thor’s comic register in Ragnarok, now folds it back into loss. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange supplies the arrogance and the plan, and the Guardians wander in to puncture the solemnity at exactly the right moments. Nobody is given much, but almost everyone is given the right thing.
The craft
What keeps the film from buckling is structure rather than spectacle. Markus and McFeely’s script treats the sprawling cast as a problem to be engineered around, cross-cutting between three or four fronts so that no single group ever overstays its welcome. The action, shot by Trent Opaloch, is clean and legible where so much of the genre has gone to murk, and the set pieces, a siege on Titan, a battle across the Wakandan plains, are staged for stakes rather than noise. Alan Silvestri returns to give Thanos a heavy, processional theme that does a lot of the heavy emotional work the dialogue cannot. The 149 minutes move; the film is paced like a heist with too many crews, and it keeps the plates spinning longer than seems possible.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison the film invites is The Empire Strikes Back, and not unreasonably. Both are middle chapters with the confidence to end on a downbeat, to let the villain walk away ahead. Infinity War is the most Empire thing this franchise has attempted. Against Marvel’s own run it sits above the assembly-line entries and alongside Civil War, the Russos’ last juggling act, though this one carries twice the cast and far higher stakes. Set it next to the first Guardians of the Galaxy and you can see how much darker the house style has been willing to grow. The thing it shares with the best of the genre is that it earns its scale through character rather than asserting it through budget.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm but slightly hedged, sitting around 85%, and the recurring reservation is that this is half a story, a film that ends mid-sentence and asks you to come back next year for the resolution. That is a fair charge on paper. Audiences, at 91%, plainly do not care, and I am with them. A cliffhanger is only a cheat if it has not earned the suspense, and this one has. The complaint also undersells how much the film achieves as a standalone piece of construction. Knowing it is incomplete, it still delivers a complete villain, a complete argument, and an ending with genuine weight behind it.
Verdict
This is enormous studio machinery operating at the top of its craft, and the wonder of it is how rarely it feels like machinery. It should not work. There are too many characters, too many plot strands, too much riding on a decade of prior homework. It works because someone made the brave choice to centre it on Thanos and let the heroes orbit him, and because the people steering it understand momentum. It is hugely rewatchable, it knows exactly what it is, and it is the rare blockbuster that trusts its audience to sit with a defeat. Half a story it may be, but it is a magnificent half. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find; the IMAX presentation, shot for the format, is the one to chase.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the resolution arrived a year later in Avengers: Endgame (2019), which closed the story this film leaves hanging and pushed the two-part climax to its conclusion. Seen as a pair, Infinity War is the bolder, leaner half, with Endgame doing the emotional accounting. The film has settled in as the high-water mark of Marvel’s first decade, the moment the long build actually delivered. It now streams on Disney+ and is widely available on disc and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of moderate fantasy violence in which various characters with special powers fight each other or battle an army of aliens. The violence includes use of shooting with futuristic weapons, punches, kicks and blows from other weaponry.
Threat and horror: There is a scene in which a character is suspended by wires and pulled apart by a villain trying to extract information from her, but the torture is fantastical. The film also has a downbeat tone throughout, with the central villain’s threat to destroy half the universe.
Language: There is use of the middle finger gesture, as well as incomplete uses of ‘mother–’ and ‘chill the f– out’. There is also use of milder terms such as ‘shit’, ‘crap’, ‘bastards’, ‘ass’, ‘piss’ and ‘screw’.
Sex: There is some very mild rude humour and innuendo, such as a threat to attack a grenade to a character’s ‘junk’.
Injury detail: There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
