Sure It'll Be The Biggest Film Of The Year, But 'Avengers: Infinity War' Is A Messy Cluster-flick

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

It’s a lot of numbers to crunch. The first half of the two-part finale to the central trilogy that serves as the culmination to the third phase of an ever-expanding 22-movie ‘universe’, Avengers: Infinity War gathers 45 principle characters, 20 super-heroes — seven of whom lead their own standalone movies — and one uber-villain wielding six infinity stones into a 149-minute, $400mil multiplex monstrosity.

All of this is a dizzying confluence of multi-levelled synergistic marketing and serialised storytelling, a culmination of a decade of careful parent-company plotting and masterful brand-building. It’s not just going to be the year’s biggest film, but could easily be the biggest box-office earner of all-time. And yet, as an actual movie, Infinity War is chaotic, messy, maximalist, overwrought, and overegged. In all its corporate-mandated multi-character mania and parallel-narrative hyperactivity, it’s a grand cluster-flick; an excessive, aggressive act of cinematic cramming.

From the moment it begins at a climax that ends with a Thanos-on-Hulk rumble, Infinity War never relents, forever laying on more, more, more. More movie-stars, more superheroes, more banter, more drama, more wry pop-cultural references, more evocations of past Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, more emotional declarations of love and sacrifice, more swelling strings on the score, more battle sequences, more nano-tech mechanical suits, more alien spaceships, more distant planets, more mass destruction, more plotlines laid for future films, and more levitating, noseless, red-faced, pathetic-wretch demon-mystics whose first line — “it is my curse to know all who come here!” — is delivered as if he’s a Mighty Boosh character.

These are all laid on so thick and so fast that, instead of producing the hoped-for awe, it’s all much more likely to leave you with a headache. Viewers hoping for some visual clarity to offset the narrative cacophony are certainly done no favour by directors Anthony & Joe Russo, who offer no directorial vision or memorable moments of composition. The imagery of Infinity War leaves you no doubt that it was shot on some digital backlot in an Atlanta industrial park, its green-screen footage so many pixels to be slathered together in recombinant forms by a global army of unseen digital technicians. The Russos’ greatest directorial sin is a familiar one for viewers of CGI blockbusters: fight-sequences are reduced to a flurry of disconnected images, action not rising with increased tension, only getting lost to incoherence.

Trying to offer even a vague plot recap of all of this blessed mess is really just a recipe for typing out litanies of proper names, the cast almost occupying as much of the closing credit-roll as that global army of unseen digital technicians. But, basically: Thanos (Josh Brolin) — the purple dude with the wrinkly chin who’s long been hanging around in post-credits teasers — is coming to Earth to kill us all. Or maybe only half of us. This destroyer of worlds isn’t some bloodthirsty sadist, more an over-enthusiastic proponent of universal environmental sustainability. After all, all these galaxies have finite resources yet ballooning populations; so wiping out half the population of a planet — and, sure, okay, sometimes the whole planet itself — is really just a logical corrective, a way of restoring harmony and balance. That’s his plan. The plan of everybody else is, basically, to stop him.

And, so, here comes all of The Avengers, again (except for the lamest one, Hawkeye, who never shows up, assumedly taking time off to hang out on the farm with Lindsay Weir and the fam). And also the Guardians Of The Galaxy. And the peeps from Black Panther. And the high-flying pubescent Adonis himself, your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. There’s lots of Doctor Strange, too.

Hell, there’s pretty much everyone, even Bucky. There’s three participants in the Chris Wars (Evans, Hemsworth, Pratt; all sporting facial hair of varying description (let’s also mention: Anthony Mackie’s severe shrine to laborious facial manscaping), numerous Oscar nominees, and Hollywood celebrities in even the tiniest, most fleeting roles: Idris Elba, Tom Hiddleston, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Benicio del Toro all show up for a solitary scene, Marvel contractual obligation undoubtedly iron-clad.

Amidst all the juggling of plotlines and brand-management, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely return to two dramatic devices recurringly: Thanos threatens to kill a beloved-MCU-IP if another beloved-MCU-IP doesn’t hand over information, secrets, infinity stones; offset against the scenes where beloved-MCU-IPs pledge to sacrifice their life — or the lives of others — to keep these precious, magical, gotta-catch’-em-all MacGuffins out of Thanos’ big butch fist. Tragic sacrifice is often mooted, but usually thwarted, if not abandoned; the Good Guys siding with their emotional reactions — Love! Friendship! Pity! — over the more abstract concept of a greater cause. Which means that Thanos isn’t just the antagonist, or the engine of the film, but Infinity War’s sole ideologue. He’s the politician who’s taken a position; all Avengers affiliates only exist in opposition, standing against him.

Makes sense, then, that Thanos lords over this film, for better and worse. As first-half to a two-part saga, Infinity War is allowed to be the downbeat one, the episode in which the villain seizes power, and those opposed to him suffer. All the regular smart-alecky jokery of the MCU comes early, the best gags being those that are a meta-commentary on movies-like-these; such as when dramatic plot-devices from prior movies are turned into trivial, transient conversation, as when Hemsworth and Pratt recount the familial melodramas at the centre of Ragnarok and Vol. 2, or Dave Bautista brings up the infamous “dance-off to save the universe”.

Yet, eventually, the comedy leeches away, and the film ends with a grand — but kinda lame — battle in Wakanda, in which six-limbed CGI orcs come in wave after video-game-fodder wave, as generic Lord Of The Rings-esque embodiment of evil, and the music swells to a pompous din, and there’s even some Very Dramatic use of slow-motion. It gets dark, but only in that hour-before-the-dawn way, with all the developments here lacking any real gravity or consequence.

You know what you’re getting in for when you sign up for the MCU movie-club: no Avengers movie is ever its own standalone thing, this just another title in an ongoing entertainment instalment plan. We all know another Avengers film is due this time next year; the end of Infinity War just being yet another "To Be Continued", with teaser to come post-credits. “Where will you be, when it all ends?” asks its tagline. To which you can only wonder: will this ever end?