Marvel started the year strongly with Black Panther; the movie was inventive, took risks, introduced new themes into the MCU and made over 1 billion for Marvel. Infinity War is here, and it's already breaking box office records but is the hype real? Let's dig in...
The Russo brothers gave us one of the best Avengers team-up movies in Captain America: Civil War, where they told a story with lots of characters but still delivered on character development from the leads, created conflict that has far reaching consequences for the MCU and introduced two new characters in Spiderman and Black Panther that did not feel forced or underwhelming.
Fast-forward to the present and the Russo brothers have quadrupled the character… whereby every MCU character is in Infinity War, except for Antman, Wasp and Hawkeye.
Marvel has learned a thing or two from Age of Ultron. They made sure Thanos, the big bad guy that was teased at in the first Avengers movie, has motivation and is not a one note villain. We kinda see his logic and understand its toll on him.
Yet, for something that’s been cooking for 10 years one can't help feel that Marvel probably only started writing this two or three years ago. There are some logic problems and plot holes that don’t make sense -some major story elements happen off screen.
The Black Order (from the comic books) has now been turned into another group of Thanos children. They are basically nameless henchmen, with little to no character and it's like they’ve existed all this time but never been mentioned or alluded to not once in the past 10 years and the only one who gets some decent screen time is Ebony Maw the telepath.
Then there’s the story. It’s action packed and Marvel throws in its trademark humour in almost every scene, which works most of the time but the overall story is weak.
It’s the Tony Stark / Guardians of the Galaxy team-up that works 'cause there’s personal and external motivations for the individual in the group, and these motivations bring about the conflict and the drama outside of Thanos's big threat.
Unfortunately the Rocket/Thor team-up and the Tachala/Captain America team-up is devoid of any conflict or drama. These guys only exist to push up the numbers and for the third act “twist” and to have a setting for the ''epic" battle.
The “twist” only works if you’ve never seen any season of Dragon Ball Z or watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang …if you have, the pathos of the third act becomes meaningless… another fake out by Marvel that the fanboy will want to claim is “dark” but if you been keeping up with announcements around the Marvel schedule you know it's all gimmick, another ruse to keep getting us back into cinema.
Then, my other big gripe with Infinity War is the very bad CGI work and green screen/blue screen compositing in a couple of scenes and certain characters.
If you watch it a second time, it really jumps out at you… at first I thought it was the 3D conversion but I went to watch it in 2D and bam!
Although they did a great job on Thanos… but Proxima Midnight is wonky, Thor's major flight stuff is too CG and there's one horrible scene towards the end you can actually see that the characters have been individually composited into the scene.
The issues of plates was there even in Black Panther… someone at Marvel is not doing their job right when it comes to background VFX. There's some very cheap looking green screen in multi million movie that looks like it was done by 1 st year film students.
On the upside, two hours pass quickly, the jokes mostly stick, the Tony Stark/Guardians/Doctor Strange team-up works but the rest of the movie doesn't bring anything new, it doesn't push MCU forward in any new direction - all it does is to cater to fandom. Thanos transcends his CG origin.
Pandering to fandom is supposed to distract from a very average plot, with little to say or offer that’s new, inventive or engaging. If you're not invested in the characters due to past movies, this movie won't do much for you to get invested in them mow, unless you rooting for Stark and his team members who are only one third of the movie whilst the other two thirds dont work that well.
It felt like: A less cohesive Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back with Dragon Ball Z sensibility without King Kai or training montages… maybe they're saving the training montages for Avengers 4.
Rating
**1/2
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* rubbish ** ja nee ***its aight ****now we cooking with gas *****it’s a Classic ,man