Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

The Avengers Infinity war is the result of the last 10 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe bringing together most of the characters into one blockbuster film. Including the originals such as Robert downey Jr's Iron man, Chris Evans’ Captain America, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange and Tom Holland’s newly reincarnated Spiderman. The heroes band together to stop Thanos from collecting all six infinity stones and wiping half of the universe. The story starts almost exactly where Thor Ragnarok ends...give or take a few months.

The Infinity War is used to finally introduce the big villain of the MCU, Thanos. Thanos has been in the shadows of all the movies ever since his first appearance in the Avengers where he helped supply Loki with his army to take over the earth. His character is very sophisticated and not like other villains in the sense that you could really feel for Thanos if he was the character that we followed from the beginning, he showed empathy towards Stark and was well aware of the good Stark had done for the world. He showed true emotions at certain points of the film which really made him real and shows that he’s not creating chaos for the sake of it, he truly believes what he is doing is helping the universe. He is a truly likable villain and even more so when eagle eye fans can see that he tries so hard to provide comfort to his adopted daughter Gamora when she confronts him about he home planet and how his plan is madness. He tells her that the remainder of her planet are happy and are never hungry...that's almost too good to be true, and it is! If you rewatch the first Guardians of the Galaxy film on Gamora’s rap sheet you can see that she is in fact the last of her kind they were all wiped out. This adds complexity to Thanos, he comes across big and bad and does this extend out to his children where he lies to them to keep them under control or does he do it to protect them?

The subject of the plot is the infinity stones, these have been passed about in the MCU not really showing any main importance until phase 2 of the movies when the Guardians discover the power stone and we all discover what's so important and how all the stones connect together and so starts the set up for the infinity war. In the last 10 years of the MCU we get introduced to all but one stone here's a quick overview of the ones seen before Infinity War:

-The Tesseract in the Captain America: The first Avenger, which contains the space stone which allows for teleportation.

-The Mind stone which originally is housed within Loki’s scepter which he uses to control minds.

-The Aether in Thor: A Dark World which contains the reality stone which as the name suggests can distort reality which is really shown in infinity war.

-The orb in Guardians of the galaxy which contained the power stone which is just raw power and can destroy a planet with a single touch (would have been real useful for the death star build....just sayin’).

-Then there's the time stone which fell under protection of Doctor Strange which allows him to mess with time and see into the future.

The final stone which doesn’t come into play until the Infinity war is the soul stone which Gamora was the only one who knew the location of the stone (we won’t go into too much details because this part is a spoiler minefield) but because it was introduced so late we haven’t really had a chance to see what it does. Thanos tries to gain all of these stones and put them on his gauntlet which was made to harness the powers of the stones.

This film was very good at bringing the entire character roster together in one film and leading the story forward and not focusing too much on a small set of characters and leaving others out (besides Hawkeye and Ant Man who weren’t even in the film). It didn't feel like an Avengers film and it didn’t feel like a Guardians film it got the balance just right. The main thing that really got to me was the ending, it was truly emotional to see but it felt somewhat incomplete in regards of the typical story telling technique known as the hero's journey when we look at this technique infinity war feels half complete and have to remind myself there’s another film coming to complete it. Which is probably why the directors ended it when they did, it distresses us that the journey isn’t complete so we as the audience feel the need to go watch the next part when it comes out to complete this.

This movie is very good bringing elements together from the other movies, the characters are amazing, Thanos was written and designed very well. It’s worth watching in cinema if you can appreciate the designs, and cinematography. If you’re only wanting to see it for the story might be better off waiting for the DVD release.