Avengers: Infinity War

After I came home from watching Avengers: Infinity War at the local movie theater, I found a glowing review of it in the local newspaper's weekend edition. I now have to give the reviewer credit for two reasons. First, it is because of his review that I actually know the names of several of the characters in the movie I had just seen. Second, if I had read his review before I had gone to see the movie, I would have gone to see the movie. That second compliment may seem like faint praise, considering that I went to see the movie anyway. But if I somehow could have seen the movie before I went to see the movie, I wouldn't have gone to see the movie. Go on, work that out.

Before I discuss why I wouldn't have chosen to see the movie if I had seen the movie—aside from the general rule that one doesn't pay a box-office price to see the same movie twice—I should mention why I did choose to see it. This week my friendly neighborhood movie theater is screening three movies. My choices were this, Super Troopers 2 (a sequel to a movie I didn't see, described by the lady at the ticket counter as a raunchy comedy) and A Quiet Place (a scary movie about an invasion by killer aliens who are blind but can hear really well, so if you want to live you have to be very, very quiet). A few things worth knowing about me: I have a history of walking out of raunchy comedies while they're in progress; I don't as a rule go for sequels, especially when I haven't seen the original; and I have a low threshold for being scarred for life by a scary movie. Also, I had taken my chances on the last three comic-book films that came out (Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League, and Black Panther), and they were all right, in spite of the fact that I had missed virtually every Marvel and DC film leading up to them. I was hopeful that the latest Avengers film would continue the hot streak.

Instead, it took a whole franchise, or rather a super-franchise comprising a bunch of ongoing film franchises, and burned it to a crisp.

The fun part of this review is a recap of the enormous cast of this movie, featuring a super-size collection of comic-book heroes all joining in one stupendously, or perhaps I should say fatally, complicated effort to stop a bad guy from literally wiping out half of the universe. Thanks to the newspaper review I read after seeing the movie, I now have a lot of information I didn't know while I was watching the movie, like who the hell half of these people were. I have never seen a single "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, so that whole group of characters was new to me. The pace moved so quickly that I didn't have time to work out the names of several other characters, who were apparently last seen in one of the many Marvel movies I have missed.

I think the original Thor and the original Iron Man were the only Marvel movies I had seen until this latest crop came out. Thanks to them, I was familiar with Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk, Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange, Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa/Black Panther, and Paul Bettany as at least the voice of Tony Stark's computer who has now, apparently, evolved into an artificially intelligent android called Vision.

I'm not so disconnected from pop culture that I don't know that Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers/Capt. America and Tom Holland is the latest actor to play Peter Parker/Spiderman, though I've never seen any of the movies featuring them in these roles. I also knew that Chris Pratt was somebody or other in the Guardians of the Galaxy, but I didn't know his name (Peter Quill/Starlord) or anything about the character.

That meant, to keep up with what was going on in this movie, I only lacked background data about the characters played by Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Don Cheadle (James Rhodes/War Machine), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon), Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch), Bradley Cooper (Rocket Raccoon), David Bautista (Drax the Destroyer), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Vin Diesel (Groot), Pom Klementieff (Mantis) and villain Thanos (Josh Brolin), who I take it has appeared before in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not that I noticed. Rounding out the cast is Peter Dinklage as the biggest dwarf I've ever seen, not to mention various sidekicks and other recurring characters. To say I felt like I was behind the curve is the understatement of the galaxy. The only reason I wasn't yelling "Who the hell is that now?" every other minute was my sense of consideration toward other viewers in the theater.

I totally get how a complete comic-book nerd would be wowed by an opportunity to see practically the whole Marvel Universe, plus the Guardians of the Galaxy, on the screen together, at least in a variety of interesting combinations. There isn't a lot of time for talk, other than amusing banter or heroic posturing, between gosh-wow action sequences, each gosher and wower than the last. But the cost of it all is that the story has to keep so many plates spinning that it doesn't have much time to bring late-comers into the backstory. It just goes full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, and then it [spoiler deleted] about 30 seconds before an ordinary guy like me, who just came in preference to being grossed out by Troopers or freaked out by Quiet, would have caught up with who was who and what was going on. At the end, I was frankly mad at this set of characters; I was shocked at the audacity of Marvel Films to [spoiler deleted] most of its heroes at one blow; I was mystified as to where the franchise (or super-franchise) can go from here, and above all, I was bummed. I've heard I wasn't the only one to leave the theater looking like they had just watched their favorite dog get run over by an 18-wheeler. And this wasn't even my favorite dog.