I saw Avengers: Infinity War last night, so I can finally respond to repeated pleas for me to write something about it. Warning that I will go fully into spoilers (including one spoiler/speculation at the very end about Avengers 4) and also that I saw it late last night and am running on not much sleep. 

Non-spoilery version: it’s really good (but not perfect), it’s a really daring gamble with the entire cinematic universe thing, although I feel like you’ll get more out of the movie if you’ve seen at least the first Avengers, Captain America: Civil War, at least the first Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Black Panther. (But given that those films made either almost or over a billion dollars each, I’m going to guess that there is a huge audience that has.)

Plot

The basic plot structure is pretty simple – Thanos wants to acquire all six infinity stones so that he can wipe out half the population of the universe in the name of Malthusian economics, and the heroes are racing to try and stop him in a number of ways: 

• Thor, Rocket, and Groot travel to Nidavellir to forge a weapon that can kill Thanos. 

• the rest of the Guardians race to Knowhere to find the Aether/Reality Stone before Thanos can take it from the Collector.

• Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange try to keep the Eye of Agamotto/Time Stone from Thanos and decide to stage an ambush against Thanos on his home planet of Titan.

• and the Vision and Scarlet Witch are attacked by two of Thanos’ goons and Cap and the rest of the Secret Avengers take them to Wakanda to try to remove the Mind Stone from Vision without killing him. 

Towards the end of the film, these strands re-integrate as Thor and co. show up to try to save the day in Wakanda, and the rest of the Guardians pursue Thanos to Titan and join in the ambush with Tony and co., and finally Thanos shows up in Wakanda to get the last stone from Vision. 

Character Interactions

In part because they’re working with a much larger cast, Infinity War is not as fleet as Civil War was in terms of balancing screen-time and pace so that (almost) every character gets a fully-realized arc. Some characters – Tony, Gamora, Star-Lord, Vision and Wanda – get much more developed arcs than another characters. (I was surprised by how little dialogue Cap gets, for example.)

What the Russo brothers give us instead is an incredible kalleidoscope of character interaction, throwing together different knots of characters so we can see them bounce off eachother – Doctor Strange and Tony Stark’s arrogant-off, Thor palling around with Rocket and Groot (he calls Rocket a rabbit, learned Groot’s language as an elective), Star-Lord’s outrage that Spider-Man doesn’t really think Footloose is the best movie of all time…I could go on forever. When you have ten years of building up a relationship between these characters and the audience, there is an enormous emotional payoff in getting to see all of them react to one another on a scale that’s as big or bigger as that scene from the first Avengers movie.

I do have one critique when it comes to character arcs, which is that this movie undoes a LOT of the work that was done in Thor: Ragnarok – Thor’s refugeed Asgardians are seemingly wiped out, his repaired relationship with Loki is ended by the latter’s death, Thor even gets a new eye and a new axe to replace what he lost in the film. This heightens the already-existing risk of the big tentpoles undermining the individual character movies, and will make it much harder to keep talented filmmakers like Taika Waititi coming back if they feel like their work is being disrespected.

However, as I’ll explain below, I think there are ways of rowing this back. 

Thanos as a Character

One of the biggest open questions heading into this movie was whether Thanos would be a worthy enough villain to justify the hype and the stakes of the film. While he’s been a Doctor Claw-style presence from Avengers on, the audience hasn’t really seen Thanos as an active character before. Add to that the difficulty of pulling off a CGI/Mocap villain, which can be done very well or very badly and almost never in the middle. 

I would argue they broadly succeeded in a number of areas:

• Thanos is a terrifying presence, who manhandles the main characters with ease, shrugs off seeming deaths repeatedly, and only becomes more terrifying as he acquires more stones and generates momentum until by the end where he is a runaway freight train that cannot be stopped. 
• By leaning heavily on Nebula, Gamora, and Josh Brolin’s weary conviction, emotional intensity, and underplayed charisma, Thanos gets as close as you can get to being a real character when it comes to a universal population control fanatic who’s trying to become god. But by the end of it, you do get the sense of someone utterly determined to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to achieve his ideal.
• In terms of plot structure, he’s absolutely the driving force of the film, a clear case of a villain protagonist on a dark version of the well-trod Hero’s Journey-by-way-of-Collection Quest. At every step, he’s one step ahead of the good guys, alternately using brawn, brains, and introspection to achieve his ultimate goal. 

His henchmen, by contrast, are pretty disposable, with the exception of Ebony Maw’s evangelical preacher, who gets some semblance of character. 

The Snap and the MCU

So let’s talk about the ending: Thanos wins. He collects all the stones despite the heroes coming very close to stopping him, snaps his fingers, and half the universe – including Black Panther, Falcon, Vision, Bucky, Star-Lord, Mantis, Gamora, Drax, Groot, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury – suddenly ceases to exist. Even before that happens, Heimdall, Loki, an unknown number of Asgardians, Gamora, and Vision are dead at his hands. 

This is the daring gamble I spoke of above the fold. The Russo brothers have blown up a huge chunk of the MCU: a good half of the Avengers, most of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the stars of Black Panther and Spider-Man are gone. And even though on a meta level we know that some people are coming back – there’s a Black Panther 2 and Spider-Man 2 that’s going to happen, Black Widow has her solo movie, etc. – on an emotional level the loss felt real in the moment, and that’s all that matters. 

At the same time, Marvel have given themselves a huge number of outs:

• Doctor Strange and the Time Stone: there’s a quite prominent narrative trick that happens in the Iron Man/Doctor Strange plot, where Doctor Strange explains at some detail that he will stop at nothing to defend the Time Stone, including abandoning Tony Stark to Thanos. Then Doctor Strange uses the Time Stone to see every possible alternate future to find the one in which Thanos can be defeated. Then, after the ambush fails, Doctor Strange simply hands over the Time Stone to save Tony Stark’s life and, before he himself disintegrates into nothingness, tells Tony that “now we’re in the endgame.” Conceivably, the Time Stone can be used to reset ANYTHING that happened in the film: the fandom seems to be coming around to the idea that this can only reset the people who died as a result of the snap, there’s no reason why one couldn’t go back further.*
• Minds Set In Stone: while Gamora and Vision would seem to fall outside of the snap limitation, these two characters have specific outs. In Thanos’ vision, we see the soul of Gamora in the Soul Stone, so it’s quite possible that she could come back through that route. Likewise, Vision’s mind was actively being worked on by Shuri when they were attacked by Thanos’ goon, and it’s quite possible that she might have gotten close enough to separating Vision from the Mind Stone to have downloaded his consciousness or a copy thereof to her wrist computer. (And Vision has a history of reboots and upgrades to his consciousness in the comics…)
• Just That Tough: on paper, a LOT of Asgardians died on their refugee ship before or after it was blown up by the Power Stone. However, as we see from Thor’s case, Asgardians are tough enough to survive in the vaccuum of space, so it’s possible that other Asgardians might have survived their wounds and gotten picked up. Heimdall and Loki are a more difficult case: we saw the light go out in Heimdall’s eyes, and although Thanos lampshaded Loki’s habit of faking his death, he could be doing it again. Then again, given the Time Stone, they could hit the reset button on either or both deaths.

So what I find so daring is not just that Marvel is risking fan ire by blowing up their franchise, but that they are about to attempt an in-universe reboot that would theoretically allow them to bring back or leave dead whoever they want in order to produce their preferred new status quo for Phase 4-6. And if they can get the fans to accept that, they can do anything.

***SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS 4:

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Based on set and casting news about Avengers 4 – Steve Rogers being seen in his Avengers 1 uniform, Thor with his original long haircut, and Cassie Lang (Ant-Man’s daughter) being recast to an older actress from the one playing her in Ant-Man and the Wasp – it’s pretty clear that Avengers 4 will involve extensive time travel both backwards and forwards in time and possibly to alternate timelines. This is why I’m more bullish on the Time Stone being used for more than just reversing the snap.