Avengers: Infinity War

At a friend's repeated insistence, I saw this last week. SPOILERS if you were waiting to watch it once it was on Netflix, like I was.

You know the deal. Thanos wants the Infinity Stones, the various heroes are too disorganized and stupid to stop him, Thanos appears to complete his mission, remaining heroes will need to get their shit together and do something. Thanos' goal is completely pointless, since all the remaining people will just repopulate the universe again in a relatively short period of time. Not to mention a whole lot of other people died as a result of all those people he erased being gone. Like the pilotless helicopter crashing into an office building in the end credits scene. Really doubt he accounted for those in his calculations.

Thanos is not very smart, is what I'm saying. Seriously, you have the Reality Gem, just alter reality so there's enough to go around, or so people don't fucking hoard all kinds of stuff they don't need. It's no wonder Death is constantly sending him back to the living world. That and all his mooning after her gets old fast.

There are some funny parts, and some touching parts. A lot of members of the teams are going to need counseling after all this. I'm sure it didn't do Steve any good to see Bucky die a second time. Thor clearly needs to take a break to work through some stuff. It's a little hard to care, knowing what we know about how things usually end up when the Gauntlet is involved. Also, I'm not buying any scenes where Thanos is supposedly sad about what he's doing, or what he's giving up. That shit's not working on me, sorry.

Having the teams split up and scattered over the universe kept most of the scenes from feeling too cluttered. But on the other side of that, it also meant there were long stretches where you don't know what's going on with one group or the other. Dr. Strange has been captured, Iron Man and Spider-Man need to rescue him to keep the Time Gem away from Thanos' extremely talkative and irritating minion and. . . we'll come back to that in 45 minutes or so. Set it up as this big deal, then wander off and forget about it for awhile. Probably a necessity, trying to keep this many balls in the air, trying to get them all in roughly the same places at the same time. But the pacing felt off. That misunderstanding fight between Stark/Strange/Spidey and the Guardians of the Galaxy felt like it was really late in the film for that sort of thing.

Of course, the movie is really long, maybe that's why. I lost all track of time, other than we'd been watching it for awhile, and the big final battles still hadn't started yet. And maybe I should be thinking of this as just the first half of a six-hour movie, instead of its own three hour thing. That would alter the math a little. Like those Hobbit movies. They've played Desolation of Smaug on TV a lot this year, to the point I've probably seen the whole thing from the various bits and pieces I catch as I go past it. It always annoys me it ends just before Smaug actually attacks Laketown, but it's more one piece of a larger story than its own entity.

There are a lot of individual scenes, or character bits that I enjoyed in this one. The fight against Thanos on Titan was fun, if ultimately doomed. Rocket and Thor was an interesting pairing. The Guardians maintained their particular tone and style, but were still able to interact with the rest of the cast without it feeling too off. Stark and Strange having an arrogance contest was interesting for the first couple of minutes. After that it's like, "OK boys, you both have immaculate facial hair, can we focus?" Still not a fan of Spider-Man as this rookie kid being taken under Stark's wing, but the ship has sailed on that. Overall though, I might have hit burnout on movies based on comics trying to do Big Events, the same way I have with comic books trying to do Big Events.