Avengers: Infinity War is one the best movies I have ever seen, and this is not an overstatement. With most movies, especially superhero movies, I do not say that phrase lightly. I sometimes walk out a movie and say, “That was good,” or “That was a pretty good movie.” Occasionally I’ll even say, “That was great,” or “fantastic.” However, I don’t like Infinity War for the obvious reasons as most of the reviews out there will discuss. I pride myself as a writer and the subtle story behind the face-value is some of the most genius and creative writing I have seen ever. I will preface this with a spoiler alert because I cannot discuss the story without spoiling it so for those that haven’t see it yet, stop now, and go watch it yourself and see what you think.
Most, if not all, movies start out with the protagonist being the first person you see. Sometimes it’s the second or third but it’s usually very early on. Infinity War starts off on the broken Asgardian spaceship right where Thor: Ragnarok left off where Thanos is seen coming out of the shadows, ready to be introduced and to kill off two major Thor characters: Loki and Heimdall. Now, there are speculations as to if these characters will come back somehow but it seems very improbable since the whole spaceship exploded. The point I am trying to make here is that this movie is not about the superheroes at all, it is about Thanos and his quest for success. I will produce several more points, but I am certain that this was the writer’s direction from the get go.
A protagonist’s purpose in a movie is to achieve his goal and this is very common in every superhero movie Marvel has made for the past 10 years and most other movies as well. All the heroes from Iron Man, to Spider-Man, to even Guardians of the Galaxy, have a goal they must achieve and the bad guy is in the way; therefore; they kill or destroy or arrest the bad guy, then they achieve their goal. The bad guy in this situation is the antagonist. Throughout Infinity War, Thanos’s goal is get all the infinity stones and put them in his gauntlet to kill half the universe so he could bring peace and order to the galaxy. That sounds a little cliché, especially when you involve the universe again, but this is exactly what the writers wanted to work around. For people seeing the movie, their initial reaction is that it’s a superhero movie where they must stop the antagonist and achieve their goal of rescuing somebody and the bad guy eventually loses because we as the audience have a general understanding of who the good guys and bad guys are. However, in Infinity War, the superheroes we have come to know are the antagonists because they get in the way of Thanos, but he eventually overcomes in the end and achieves his goal of killing half the universe.
I know it’s a lot to take in (I had to think about this for several hours because of how good it was) but I am certain that this was the direction the writers were taking. Now, obviously, the morality of Thanos’s goal was incorrect but there are a lot of characters in other movies whose morality is wrong and yet the audience still agrees with them. For instance, in Silence of the Lambs, although most of us (hopefully all of us) don’t agree with cannibalism, we still root for Anthony Hopkins characters at the end when he was going to take revenge on the sadistic guard by “having him for dinner.” Looking at Thanos from a moral standpoint, he is doing the incorrect thing, but he is shown overcoming all these obstacles and almost not achieving his goal, and he is able to look at the sunset and be at peace in the end, which is what we want with all our protagonists. Without the knowledge and love for all the superheroes, anybody seeing the movie would assume Thanos is the protagonist but because the writers knew their audience, it was such a flip for them when they were told what they thought they knew was wrong. If we were on Thanos’s side, we would be happy when most of the superheroes disappeared because it means Thanos won.
To top it all off, right before the black and white credit scroll, the words “Thanos will return” show up on the screen, and at that point I knew what the point of the movie was. Every superhero movie that is going to have a sequel always ends with “Spiderman will return” or “Black Panther will return” or something along those lines. The fact that the “bad guy” will return shows that maybe the story wasn’t about our famous superheroes after all.
That’s why Avengers: Infinity War is one of the best movies I have ever seen. They were innovative, creative, and smart when writing this script and I don’t even have to talk about the basic superhero plot and visual points that will be in most reviews. This is an uncommon review because I am not going to talk about the plot or the stuff I usually talk about in movies. Infinity War exceeds all "superhero" movies I’ve seen and a lot of movies in general. It deserves a 5/5 and I am not backing down from that score. It has some of the best writing and storytelling I have ever seen. Please go watch this movie again and understand why this deserves such a high score. Avengers: Infinity War is an amazing work of art.
