We want to see them see each other, to watch them struggle against insurmountable odds, to feel their fear and hope as our own, and be transported by it.īy that metric, Avengers: Infinity War succeeds, with a confidence that is almost entirely earned. (Although we wouldn’t say no, Marvel’s most recent films - Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther - being exemplary proof that there’s life left in the much fretted-over bones of the superhero trend.) What we really expect from Infinity War is to see some old friends - because a decade in, that’s what the Avengers are. What we expect from the directing duo, the Russo Brothers, and the screenwriting duo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, isn’t so much that they reinvent the genre. Infinity War was never intended to function outside the web of a franchise, so there’s little value in judging it separately. Its strength is that we already know these characters, and that the movie is surrounded by a hype machine that has kept its central story - Thanos, the Infinity Stones, the Avengers - fresh in the audience’s minds.

It groans under the weight of its cast, strains with the tension of holding four central plots aloft in nearly a dozen locations, flexes mightily between tones to fit the moods we associate with different Marvel subfranchises. What do we expect from a Marvel movie these days?Īvengers: Infinity War is full of narrative challenges that would make a stand-alone film buckle. Every time I sit down to review a Marvel movie - and I’ve reviewed a lot of them - I ask myself the same question:

Marvel infinity war movie characters