Avengers: Infinity War is the 19th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a sequel to The Avengers (2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Anthony and Joe Russo directed it from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. It runs 149 minutes. Its tagline states the terms plainly: “An entire universe. Once and for all.”
It earns most of that. Thanos, played by Josh Brolin, is the rare blockbuster villain whose plan is legible, whose power is shown rather than described, and whose cost is paid on screen. The film’s best decision is structural. It treats the Avengers as a group of people who lose, separately, in full view of each other.
Trailer, via Marvel Entertainment.
Thanos Collects the First Stones
The film opens with Thanos and his lieutenants — Ebony Maw, Cull Obsidian, Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive — intercepting the ship carrying the survivors of Asgard’s destruction. Thanos already holds the Power Stone, taken from Xandar. He subdues Thor, extracts the Space Stone from the Tesseract, overpowers the Hulk, kills Loki and fatally wounds Heimdall.
Before dying, Heimdall sends Hulk to Earth using the Bifröst. Thanos destroys the ship and leaves.
That sequence sets the rules. Thanos does not talk his way to victory. He takes what he came for and moves on. The threat is arithmetic, not menace.
Banner Lands in the Sanctum Sanctorum
Hulk crash-lands in the Sanctum Sanctorum in New York City and reverts to Bruce Banner, played by Mark Ruffalo. Banner warns Stephen Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, and Wong about Thanos’s plan to destroy half of all life in the universe. They recruit Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr.
Maw and Obsidian arrive to retrieve the Time Stone from Strange. The fight draws Peter Parker, played by Tom Holland. Maw cannot take the Time Stone because of Strange’s enchantment, so he captures Strange instead. Stark and Parker sneak aboard Maw’s ship. Wong stays behind to guard the Sanctum.
Ruffalo’s Banner spends the film trying to reintegrate with the Avengers and, as Joe Russo put it, to “impress upon everybody how dangerous Thanos is.” The Hulk refuses to appear for most of the film. Russo said that refusal was only partly fear. Banner, he argued, “only wants Hulk for fighting.”
Thor Goes to Nidavellir
The Guardians of the Galaxy answer the Asgardian ship’s distress call and rescue Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth. Thor reasons that Thanos is after the Reality Stone, which Taneleer Tivan holds on Knowhere. He travels with Rocket and Groot to Nidavellir to enlist the dwarf king Eitri in forging the battle-axe Stormbreaker.
Quill, Gamora, Drax and Mantis go to Knowhere and find Thanos already has the Reality Stone. Thanos kidnaps Gamora, played by Zoe Saldaña. She discloses the Soul Stone’s location to stop Nebula from being tortured.
On Vormir, the Stone’s keeper, Red Skull, tells Thanos he can only acquire it by sacrificing someone he loves. Thanos sacrifices Gamora and takes the Stone.
Joe Russo has said Thor carries “the driving hero’s arc of the movie which stands in direct opposition to Thanos’ argument.” That is the film’s cleanest piece of design. Thor loses everything and still chooses to build something. Thanos loses nothing he values and calls the loss a price.
Three Fronts in the Third Act
Midnight and Glaive ambush Wanda Maximoff and Vision in Edinburgh to retrieve the Mind Stone, which sits in Vision’s forehead. Steve Rogers, played by Chris Evans, intervenes. The film then splits into three fronts, and it handles the split better than most ensemble pictures manage a single one:
- Stark, Parker and Strange fight Thanos on Titan alongside Quill, Drax and Mantis.
- Thor, Rocket and Groot arrive with Stormbreaker.
- Rogers, Romanoff, Maximoff and Vision defend the Mind Stone on the ground.
The Titan fight is the film’s strongest scene. Strange has seen the futures available to him and says there is one where they win. The audience is given that information and then shown a loss anyway. That is a harder trick than it sounds.
A Cast That Justifies Its Own Size
The ensemble is enormous, and the film mostly earns it. Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark as a man doing everything in his power to keep the Earth safe, as Joe Russo described the character’s read on the coming threat. Downey has said Stark’s goals here are smaller than in previous films, and that restraint shows.
Chris Evans gives Steve Rogers the film’s steadiness. Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange and Tom Holland’s Peter Parker all get real work rather than cameos. Karen Gillan’s Nebula and Zoe Saldaña’s Gamora give Thanos a family. That is what makes his sacrifice of Gamora land.
Brolin is the reason the film works. Thanos is a despot of intergalactic infamy in the synopsis and a grieving, certain man on screen. The performance does not ask for sympathy. It asks for comprehension, and gets it.
Where the Film Slows Down
Infinity War has a middle stretch problem that its defenders tend to skip past. The film must move six stones, four lieutenants and roughly two dozen named characters into position, and the seams show. Some transitions exist to relocate a character rather than to advance anything.
The film draws on Jim Starlin’s 1991 comic The Infinity Gauntlet and Jonathan Hickman’s 2013 comic Infinity. It was announced in October 2014 as Avengers: Infinity War – Part 1, with the Russo brothers joining in April 2015 and Markus and McFeely signing on a month later. In 2016 Marvel shortened the title. Filming began in January 2017 at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayette County, Georgia.
None of that production history is on screen, and it should not be. What is on screen is a film that knows its ending and refuses to soften it. The final act kills characters the audience has followed for years, and it does so without a rescue. That choice is why the film is remembered.
The Verdict on Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers: Infinity War is an adventure, action and science fiction picture that sets out to be a culmination and succeeds at it more often than the MCU’s later attempts. Its 149-minute runtime is justified by the amount of story it has to move, though not every minute of it is.
The film’s weakness is that it is incomplete by design. It ends on a loss and hands the resolution to a film it does not contain. Judged on its own, that is a real cost. Judged as the first half of a two-part story, it is the rare case where the setup is better than most payoffs.
What matters here is Thanos. The MCU had spent a decade producing villains who were obstacles. Infinity War produced a character with a thesis, and then let him win. The film’s most quoted line is not a quip. It is a plan.
The score reflects that. The published audience score on TMDB is 8.2 out of 10 across 32,850 votes, and that number is fair. Infinity War is not the best film in its own franchise, but it is the one that took the largest swing, and it connected.
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