Spoiler McSpoilerface!

Now one
of the things I really dig about Infinity War is
that it has a very definite
and, I think, very sophisticated theme.  Basically,
what is life worth?  When
– if ever – do you trade one person’s life for the lives of
many?  It’s a theme that the film explores from
a number of angles – from
Thanos’s merciless calculus (removing half the life in the universe
is worth it if it means the other half can live in prosperity and
safety), to Captain America’s firm principle that we
don’t sell lives – and in a
variety of ways.  What if it’s your own life you’re sacrificing?
What if it’s someone you care about?  What if it’s a stranger?
What if you have to listen to them in terrible pain?  What if you’re
the one who has to pull the trigger?

It’s an excellent theme, well
suited to such a high-stakes, cosmic story, and it’s interesting
watching the parallels that emerge:  Vision asking Wanda to kill him,
and Gamora asking Peter to kill her, with both partners finally
bringing themselves to pull the trigger only to find it’s too late;
Vision and Gamora both trying to end their own lives to deny Thanos
one of the stones, and having that choice ripped away from them;
Gamora and Loki as the two
siblings who can’t bear listening to their siblings being tortured,
even to save the universe.  The theme provides an excellent frame for
some of the best character moments in the film.

And there are a hell of
a lot of those.  Some personal favourites:

• Tony is just fantastic, all the way
  through:  self-sacrificing and snarky and indomitable and so very
  smart, and fiercely protective of Peter (Parker), his surrogate son.
  His back-and-forth with Strange is great fun – not least because
  it’s the two most famous modern Sherlock Holmeses squaring off! –
  and I think it’s all the better for the fact that the science vs.
  magic angle is understated (though Tony describing their situation
  as “[that guy] came from space to steal a necklace from a wizard”
  was one of the best bits of the movie :)).  But it’s really Tony’s
  dynamic with Peter that steals the show.  They’re so endearing
  together.  Peter vanishing in Tony’s arms just about did me in.
  (It helps a lot that, while the acting in the franchise tends to be
  excellent, Robert Downey Jr. is a cut above; he can convey so much
  emotion with just his eyes.)
• Everything Wakanda is
  terrific.  Shuri continues to be The Best, and Okoye’s line about
  how if this was the end of Wakanda, “it will be the noblest end”,
  gave me shivers.  In fact, Okoye is great throughout:  she’s
  another character who can get across so much in very few words, and
  her reaction makes T’Challa’s disappearance one of the most
  tear-jerking at the end.
• Seeing Okoye, Nat, and Wanda team
  up to crush a brutal
  alien general is absolute gold. 🙂
• I would never have guessed that a
  conversation between Rocket and Thor would deliver some of the most
  emotionally powerful moments in the movie, and yet here we are.  The
  scene between the two in the shuttle is quietly devastating.  It’s
  difficult not to feel for Thor, who is visibly barely holding it
  together and is almost undone by Rocket’s soft question: “What
  if you’re wrong?”  And seeing Rocket himself go from prickly and
  sometimes downright cruel to someone with the courage to comfort a
  stranger in pain – however awkwardly – makes me melt.  I love
  that Thor treating Rocket as the captain isn’t just a one-off
  joke, too:  it means something to Rocket, and he actually takes
  that responsibility seriously, murmuring,
  “Time to be the captain,” before he steels himself for a
  conversation that clearly intimidates him.  (Plus, we get Rocket
  saying that he has things in his life to lose, now.  D’awwww.)
• Even beyond that scene, Rocket and
  Thor’s subplot is great:  it feels mythological in scope and
  symbolism, it’s visually gorgeous, and Peter Dinklage steals every
  scene he’s in.
• Wanda and Vision break my heart.
  With too heavy a hand, their relationship could also have ended up
  feeling forced, and yet it doesn’t;
  their intimacy and affection are
  clear and genuine.  The chemistry between the actors helps a lot, as
  does the way the writers accept this being a relatively new
  relationship, and lean into that.  They don’t need to push the
  idea that Wanda and Vision are The Great Romance For The Ages.  It’s
  enough that they love each other, and are still discovering each
  other; the loss of all the time they don’t get
  to have makes their sacrifice all the more painful to watch.  (And
  the ending of this arc is so well done because it’s so horrifying
  – Vision being pulled back from his beatific, willing sacrifice
  and brought to life again, only to be ripped apart like a thing.
  *shudder*)
• I never expected this
  movie to deliver genuine Raccoonshipping flirtation AND YET. 😀

Theories
and that ending

So, what happens now?

Well, future films are hardly going
to leave the universe like this.  I think it’s safe to say that
time travel is going to be involved in some way, given that the stone
Dr. Strange gives Thanos is the Time Stone.  It’s
also the only stone that’s freely surrendered on the giver’s
terms, on a very flimsy pretext – and after it was stashed away in
another dimension, where Strange could have done all sorts of things
to it.  I’m expecting some
shenanigans to come out of the fact that Strange himself faded before
he could explain why this was the “only way” or
what the hell the heroes are supposed to do,
but I’m betting that the clock will go back at least far enough to
save the people Thanos wiped out with the gauntlet.

My big question is, how
far will the clocks go back?
Who will they be able to save?  I WANT GAMORA BACK, DAMMIT.  (I mean,
I want Loki and Heimdall back, too, but Gamora still feels the most
unfair.)

I am
excited about the post-credit scene, though!!  I practically screamed
in the theatre.  I mean, in retrospect, it makes sense that this is
how they’d choose to introduce The Galaxy’s Strongest Hero, but
on a purely emotional level:

EEEEEEE CAPTAIN MARVEL
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

(I wonder if they’re going to
connect her to the GotG plotline somehow, given that her powers are
usually Kree in origin, like Ronan?)

So, in summary:  Very well done,
very gripping film, with plenty of found-family moments that made me
tear up.  Infinity War was
always going to be difficult to pull off, but I think they managed
it.

So, I’ve decided to split my reaction to Infinity War into two posts.  This one’s more about the bits I didn’t like (though there’s a fair amount of praise here, too); the second post will be up soon, with my favourite bits and some broad theories about where the story is going.

SPOILERS AHOY!  Many, many, many spoilers behind the cut.  You have been warned!

For the most part, I
really liked Infinity War.
The Russos took on a difficult project and pulled it off extremely
well, making the confrontations feel epic, giving us a lot of
character and relationship moments that have genuine emotional
weight, and managing to balance devising fitting scenes for a wide
range of characters (coming from movies that differ wildly in style
and tone) while still keeping the overall feel of the movie generally
consistent.  Most of the character development was very strong, with
one notable exception.  And before we go any further, let’s dig
into that exception.

We
Need To Talk About Peter

Oh, Peter Quill.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m
very fond of Star-Lord.  I love him
in the comics, and was excited to see the character come to the big
screen in the first Guardians of the Galaxy – and
even though film!Peter was a bit less mature and lacked some of the
emotional intelligence of his comics counterpart, I liked Chris
Pratt’s portrayal.  His immaturity was endearing.  And even when it
got less endearing (and more pronounced) in Volume 2, that
was fine; after all, Peter
finally growing up was the point of the movie (as he came to terms
with the loss of his mother, the image of his absent father, and his
very flawed adoptive father, all at once).

Turns out that did not happen.

Peter here is just… urgh.  In a
movie where there are a lot of comedic moments and many of the heroes
behave in a silly or petty way at some point – Thor, Peter Parker,
Tony, Bruce, and Dr. Strange among them, as well as most of the other
Guardians – Peter still stands out as uniquely annoying.  For the
other heroes, their sillier moments are humanising.  Thor thinking
Rocket is a rabbit, or Peter awkwardly introducing himself to the
older heroes, or Drax
thinking he’s invisible or
Strange good-naturedly bickering with Wong about buying him a tuna
melt:  those are genuinely cute moments that make the intense scenes
that precede or follow them more striking.  And even when the other
heroes are being petty, as with some of Iron Man’s and Strange’s
squabbling, it advances the characters and still comes across like
they’re taking the situation they’re in seriously.

Peter Quill, on the other hand,
tends to break the scenes he’s in.  He come across as too
petty, too frivolous,
and it undercuts the seriousness of what’s going on around him.
And he’s capable of
wresting control of any scene, no matter how serious, and making it
all about him.  Thor’s
introduction to the team becomes about Peter’s jealousy.  Gamora’s
heartrending plea for him to promise to
kill her rather than let
Thanos have her secret?  It’s constantly interspersed with Peter
nagging her about their
relationship.  His
unchecked rage ultimately
costs the good guys their best shot at claiming Thanos’s gauntlet
and stopping a massacre.  Through
all of this, Peter never seems to have a moment of introspection
where he realises what he’s done, even after he screws up the plan
and lets Thanos go free.  His emotions are always the most important
things about any given situation.  It says something when
30-something Peter Quill is acting less maturely than the literal
high school student on the team.

And it’s
galling, especially since the other Guardians have
undergone character development
in the last two movies, and I’d thought that Peter has, as well.
Gamora’s gone on a hell of a journey, from near-suicidal former
living weapon to hero with her own found family.  Drax has
found his softer side.  Mantis, the abused servant, is starting to
operate as a real member of the team.  And Rocket – well, I’ll
touch on this more later, but Rocket’s gone from a hard-edged loner
who deliberately sabotaged his own friendships to a surprisingly
responsible and caring figure who’s got the potential to be a
leader.

All of this would have been
irritating, but not really a major problem…
except for the fact that the
writers chose to take the weakest of the major relationships – the
one between Peter and Gamora – and
put it at the heart of the film.

This
relationship feels hella forced to me.  The fact that the two didn’t
end Volume 2 with
a Big Damn Kiss, but rather with a platonic hug, always struck me as
one of the movie’s strengths.  I cringed at a lot of the pressure
Peter (and the narrative) piled on Gamora in that movie, but in the
end, it presented them as two people who cared about each other, but
weren’t in the right space to have a relationship yet (if ever).
Here, the relationship is just kind of dropped on us as a fait
accompli, with Gamora even declaring that she loves Peter “more
than anything” – just in time for her to get kidnapped, fuelling
his desperation and later rage, which become
the engine that drives the middle third of the movie.  It
feels
rushed – not so much
because the two haven’t had enough time together (after
all, Wanda and Vision’s relationship has even less buildup and
comes across far stronger),
but because previous movies made such a point of them not
getting together.  And, frankly,
Peter’s jealousy over Gamora comes across pretty badly.  In the
first Guardians, Peter
was clearly smitten but never possessive, and his easy, open
affection provided an appealing contrast to Gamora’s horrifyingly
possessive dad.  Here, with his constant harping on
don’t-look-at-that-other-guy and
whyyyy-aren’t-you-sharing-more-of-yourself-with-meeeee, Peter’s
starting to sound uncomfortably like Thanos
– to the point where, when he told Thanos that his calling Gamora
“his” was bullshit, I honestly didn’t know whether Peter meant,
“She’s her own,” or, “She’s mine.”
Just… yeah, not comfortable all around.  

The weakness of the relationship
becomes a real weakness of the film, because Peter’s frenzied
attack on Thanos (which ends up handing him his victory) doesn’t
feel justified, especially given that there are so many other people
in this movie who’ve lost someone.  It feels selfish.  Whatever
happened to everybody’s got dead people; that’s no
excuse to get everyone else dead along the way?

The worst thing, though, is that
there’s a perfect fix for all of these issues:

Give Peter’s arc to Nebula, you cowards.

If
you think about it, the entire plot surrounding Gamora and her death
– that’s the natural culmination of Nebula’s
arc,
not Peter’s.  The
reconciliation
between the two sisters was the most moving aspect of the last
Guardians movie,
with Nebula finding a way to forgive Gamora for letting her take the
brunt of Thanos’s abuse when they were both children, both equally
desperate to survive.  This plotline is the companion to that one.
Here, the adult Gamora, the one who’s gotten free of Thanos, makes
a choice to intervene to protect Nebula, in a way she wasn’t
equipped to as a child.  It’s a damned beautiful scene.  And
we do get
Nebula’s protective anger following that scene, her
grief,
her rage
– it’s just all sidelined so that we can concentrate on Peter’s.
Which is nuts, because in addition to being the person at the heart
of this arc alongside Gamora, Nebula is an angry antihero who’s
been trying to kill her dad for two
movies now.  Her
flying at him while he’s bound and accidentally waking him up makes
perfect sense, and comes across as understandable (especially after
she drags herself out of the torture chamber to try and save her
sister, only to be too late).  When Peter does it?  Not so much.

Argh.
Pete, man, I love you but oh
you must stop.

Death
and villainy

So, on to the rest of the movie!
These are the bits I was a bit more… conflicted about.  (We’re
getting to the unabashed squee, I swear.)

Loki.  Oh god, Loki.  I
really wasn’t expecting that, especially after the wonderful,
earned hopeful ending
of Thor:  Ragnarok.  (And
honestly, it did upset me that Infinity War basically
snapped its fingers and undid that ending.  Heimdall’s emotional
line about how Asgard isn’t a place, it’s a people?  Welp, now
he’s dead – and so are half of those people.  However,
I was admittedly more upset
before Thor confirmed that it was only
half, since there’s no real
indication of survivors in the scene itself.  I can only hope that
Valkyrie, Korg, and Miep got shoved onto a shuttle or something with
the half who were spared, and that they’re on their way now to rain
down hell and revolutionary pamphlets.)

But even compared to Heimdall’s
death and the destruction of that dream of a new home, Loki’s death
is especially gutting.  He’s one of my absolute favourites, and
he’s cheated death so many times that it’s difficult to come to
grips with him being gone.  I’m glad, though, that he goes out in a
way that befits him as a character, and how he’s grown over the
last seven years.  Loki dies as a son of both Asgard and Jotenheim,
using his wits to defy Thanos and try and protect his beloved
brother.  It’s wrenching, watching Thor crouch over his body, only
a scant few hours after they finally reconciled.  He knew, at the
end, that Loki loved him, and that makes it both more satisfying and
worse.  (Tom Hiddleston’s performance in this scene is
pitch-perfect, by the way.)

Thanos.  I like him a lot
better here than in previous
films.  Granted, that’s a low bar – I always thought he was a
remarkably uninteresting villain before this, but then, the MCU has
not been generally blessed in its villains.*  Infinity War
elevates Thanos by at least
giving him a motivation that makes sense.  It
may not be the most fascinating motivation on its own, but it ties
into the theme of the story – do we sell lives to save
other lives? – so, so well that
I think it works.  I also like that Thanos has such
a strong belief that he’s the hero of the story.  His
vision of himself basking in the light of a grateful universe is such
a striking image, and if anything, his “sacrifice” in this film
probably proves his own nobility to him.  And that, I think, makes
him more interesting.  He’s fundamentally ruthless but never
pointlessly cruel.  He can even be tender, as we see when he stops to
comfort Wanda.  And then, seconds later, he undoes her sacrifice and
casually wipes her and half of the universe out of existence.  It’s
all the more terrifying because he doesn’t especially want to cause
pain.  He just will.

Importantly, the film also fleshes
him out through his
genuine-but-still-toxic affection for Gamora.  Their relationship
actually works very well here, to the point where it’s painful to
watch.  He loves her in his own awful, possessive way – he was so
charmed by this tiny child that he took her in, and sweetly
distracted her even while he had his soldiers murder her family a few
yards away.  He probably still believes that she’d be by his side
if Ronan hadn’t “alienated” her, because nothing is ever
Thanos’s fault.  And for Gamora – she loathes him and what he
made her, but it’s all tied up with a child’s desperate need to
please a parent (much more so one who makes it so clear that they
hold the power of life and death over the child).  He’s in her
head, bound into her very identity.  And
having gotten away once, she ends up going back to him to save her
sister, and dies at his hands.

I hate Gamora’s death for exactly
that reason:  she’s
murdered by her abuser for his own ends after having successfully
escaped him and built her own life.  Now,
I’m not saying that’s a
bad plot point.  But
especially after her otherwise excellent character arc in this film,
I was definitely not a fan.  Loki’s death hurts, but Gamora’s is
the one that leaves me feeling shitty.

(As a villainy side note, Red
Skull being here feels… kind of pointless?  Like, as a penalty for
his hubris, okay, I get it, but it doesn’t really add a ton to the
scene.  He doesn’t come across as particularly Red-Skull-like,
even.  It feels more like they wanted somebody we
would recognise, and it didn’t matter hugely who it was.)

* With
the exception of Erik Killmonger because DAMN.
My personal hierarchy goes:  Killmonger waaaay at the top; then
Hela; then villains with at least a dash of emotional resonance, like
Obediah Stane, Zemo, Pierce,
or Ultron; then the vast number of meh-but-eminently-punchable types
like Ronan and Red Skull.  With a few WTF villains down the bottom,
like wossname from Ant-Man
or other wossname from Iron Man 3.
Loki doesn’t count because he’s ultimately more of an antihero.

More to come!