Avengers: Infinity War and the Choice between Love and Victory

Caution: This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Avengers: Infinity War.

Before Joss Whedon made 2012’s The Avengers and changed the caped crossover game forever, he created an arguably even more influential T.V. show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Despite its gothic overtones, Buffy had the rhythms of a superhero story, with special powers, recurring villains, and big deaths and resurrections. And in one particularly significant season finale [spoilers for a 15-year-old episode of television], Whedon gave his protagonist a choice: save the universe or save someone you love.

Buffy’s conflict had the same sort of stakes as Avengers: Infinity War, even if the contours were a bit different. A mad god was on the loose and threatening to destroy all of creation. To bring that apocalypse to fruition, she needed to use Buffy’s sister who was, through some magical mishegoss, the key to this grand undoing. When that threat reached a crisis point, friend and foe alike advised Buffy to make a hard choice and sacrifice her sister for the good of all mankind. But Buffy, undeterred, decided to find another way, to rally her allies and fight this evil, rather than capitulate to it.

It’s the kind of noble choice that heroic characters of all stripes make in these kinds of situations. When they’re presented with an ostensibly no-win scenario, these resourceful (oft-Kirkian) heroes nevertheless find a way to overcome the odds and protect those closest to them, while still slaying whatever dragon is threatening their various villages. In Buffy, that choice served as a tribute to the main character’s determination and loyalty, to her devotion to her sister, and to her resolve to never give up and never stop fighting as long as there’s a glimmer of hope.

But it left me yelling, “To hell with your sister! The entire universe is hanging in the balance, you crazy person!” at my television. Yes, it’s impossibly difficult to lose someone you love, but it’s reckless at best to risk the survival of the whole world for a single life, no matter how much you may care about that life.

 

 

In a strange way, that’s the core idea of Avengers: Infinity War, the current successor to Whedon’s 2012 superhero team-up, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. The film is one big, bejeweled scavenger hunt, with the long-teased uber-villain, Thanos, scouring the realms for the six titular infinity stones, in the hopes of wiping out half of all life in the universe.

His is a plan with innumerable points of failure — moments in which one hard choice, one hero sacrificing someone they love, could end Thanos’s otherwise relentless path of horror, or at least prevent the worst of it from coming to pass. And yet, at every step, none of The Avengers are capable of or willing to make that choice, or at least to do so in time for it to make a difference.

Loki, Gamora, Star-Lord, Eitri, Dr. Strange, and Scarlet Witch each had the chance to single-handedly end Thanos’s quest. But accomplishing that would require each to lose the people closest to them, to sacrifice someone they love in order to stop this madness. In the end, when the lives of those they care about hang in the balance, they cannot bring themselves to take that last, painful step.

The arc of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been, broadly speaking, one of connection, where unlikely allies of convenience and necessity find themselves forging unexpected bonds in trying times and achieving greater things through that shared purpose and unity. Infinity War, on the other hand, frames those bonds not as the source of strength that allows our heroes to face their latest, gargantuan threat, but as the thing that keeps them from being able to stop it.

 

The Mad Titan

No Avenger can bear the thought of losing those connections, even in the face of annihilation. The one character in the film who can, and does, is Thanos himself.

Thanos is the only person in Infinity War who faces that choice — sacrifice who you love or else see your grand plans fall to ruin — and finds the will to make the sacrifice. That horrible strength is the one thing he has over our heroes — more than his powers or his weapons or his guile — and it’s what lets him win this war. He is willing to do what none of The Avengers will or even can. And it creates one of the most devastating losses and final sequences in any superhero film so far.

It also helps establish a villain worthy of the magnitude of this moment. Until now, Thanos has been one big, vaguely-defined promise. A sinister smile in The Avengers, a brief appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy, and one final tease in Age of Ultron were all Marvel movie fans had to go on before this mega-crossover. The accumulated effect amount to a generic baddie who made the occasional threat and pulled strings behind the scenes, but who was still largely a blank slate when it came time for him to step into the spotlight and assume the major villain role in the team-up of team-ups.

Thankfully, that gave the Russo Bros. and writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus the opportunity to fill in those blanks with a distinctive and intriguing character. Rather than offering the standard stentorian, megalomaniacal baddie, this film’s version of the “Mad Titan” is a quiet, almost contemplative antagonist in Infinity War. There’s a genteel, even empathetic quality to him in the movie, one that makes him an unexpectedly subdued but no less effective challenge to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

 

 

Some of that comes from his modus operandi. Instead of world domination, Thanos’s goal is to wipe out half of all life in the universe. But rather than freighting him with the goal of slaughter for slaughter’s sake, Infinity War turns Thanos into an acolyte of Malthusian creative destruction, one who views himself as a humanitarian. In a universe with limited resources, he wants to eliminate half the population not out of revenge, vindictiveness, or cruelty, but as a controlled burn, so that the remainder can live and live well, and avoid the devastation that his own planet faced when those resources ran out.

In that, Thanos is the MCU’s Ozymandias — someone who does a terrible thing that results in the loss of countless lives, but who means for it to serve the greater good. Thanos’s perspective is efficiently conveyed and surprisingly heady for a popcorn flick, dealing with notions of the extremes of a utilitarian viewpoint that blends well with Thanos’s own seemingly dispassionate but subtly affected presence in the film.

Much of that sense owes to Josh Brolin’s outstanding performance. There is a wistfulness, almost a sense of resignation, in Thanos’s voice and bearing as he cuts his horrific path through the galaxy. It would be easy for Infinity War to come off misguided in its attempts to find depths of character and motivation in this murderous purple goon, but Brolin finds a balance between both menace and an unassuming warmth in Thanos that nigh-instantly makes him unique as a villain, not to mention deep and different enough to justify his position as the would-be final boss of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

 

 

But much of it also owes to the animators and artists who bring Thanos to life. A sizeable chunk of the action in Infinity War falls victim to the same, weightless CGI maelstrom that afflicts almost all blockbuster movies of recent vintage. While individual images of hordes of Avengers and their allies squaring off against alien attackers, or whirring ovoids hovering over New York City stand out, too often the film devolves into quick cuts of 3D cartoons smashing into one another, without enough clarity or realism to make them more than a high-speed collisions of computer-animated piñatas.

Thanos, however, is a consistent exception. More than any other computer-aided element of the film, his gravitas and impact as a character are dependent upon subtle changes in his facial expressions that reveal smaller shifts in his mood or reactions. As much as for any other CGI character on the silver screen, Brolin’s performance is captured in the slight curve of Thanos’s lips, the furrowing of his brow, or a weary, mournful look in his eyes.

Despite his appearance as an armor-clad, purple-skinned brute, Thanos is a villain with a soul, one conspicuously on display even as he toys with and eventually decimates our heroes. That alone is an achievement of performance, digital artistry, and writing that come together to produce a villain worthy the grand finale to a decade’s worth of adventures.

 

Too Many Capes

Unfortunately, Infinity War has trouble keeping up with the scads of characters who have accumulated on the MCU’s rolls in the course of that decade. While the Russo Bros. managed to strike a delicate balance in Captain America: Civil War, servicing a broad set of characters in a single story, they can’t quite manage the same feat for The Avengers writ large.

The opening act of Infinity War is full of throat-clearing and table setting for all of these characters. In addition to taking time to establish Thanos as a challenge beyond the everyday baddie (something the movie accomplishes by having him kill the bad guy from the first Avengers flick and manhandle The Hulk), the film has to check in with almost all the major figures on the Marvel movie roster, paying (at a minimum) lip service to what they’ve been up to since we last saw them and blazing through reunions and reactions galore.

The result is a film that is both lopsided and overstuffed. Eventually, Infinity War’s narrative coalesces into a few distinct threads. Thor, Rocket, and Groot go off to forge a weapon to defeat the uber-villain. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and the remaining Guardians set out to stop Thanos on his home planet. Gamora is dragged along with the Mad Titan himself on his journey. And the remaining, earthbound Avengers (most notably Scarlet Witch and Vision) fend off Thanos’s minions on the home front.

 

 

But the rosters for each of these parties wax and wane over the course of these quests, and the movie never quite finds its center as this mass of characters ebbs and flows from one scene to the next.

That same hit-or-miss quality extends to the crossovers that had fans salivating in anticipation. Some of the film’s novel pairings work like gangbusters. The adulation Thor receives from the Guardians, along with Star-Lord’s instant jealousy and attempts to puff himself up, are a delight from beginning to end. Others, like the attempt to replicate Iron Man’s combative chemistry with Captain America by subbing in Dr. Strange, tend to fizzle. And others still, like the complicated dynamic between Thanos and Gamora, become the emotional backbone of Infinity War. But there’s little consistency to these mash-ups, and that makes an already top-heavy film feel more scattered and disjointed when it tries to assemble the pieces of its grand finale.

Infinity War also strains to maintain the trademark comedic bent of the MCU, to the point that the quipping starts to feel mandatory rather than organic. Peter Quill calling Thanos “Grimace” is in the proud tradition of Buffy poking fun of a bloody-lipped vampire for having “fruit punch mouth.” But eventually, the bon mots start to pile up and feel shoehorned in. Levity is one of the Marvel movies’ strengths, but after a while, the hit rate for the jokes in Infinity War starts to flag, and as the stakes increase, the smart remarks begin to feel like the writers meeting a quota rather than letting the repartee emerge naturally from the situation at hand.

The cumulative effect of all this unevenness is a movie full of tremendous moments — the heart-to-heart between Rocket and Thor, the elaborate head-fake at Knowhere, and badass lines from the likes of Black Panther and Captain America — but also one that has trouble finding its footing through much of the build to its final act. There are a ton of moving parts in Infinity War, and oftentimes they make the movie feel more like a twelve-car pileup than the elegant ballet the Russo Bros. meant to choreograph.

 

A Superheroic Trolley Problem

Still, despite the movie’s ungainliness, the unifying force of Infinity War is how so many of its far-flung characters face the same type of choice throughout the film. Time and again, the movie focuses on moments where one person could have stopped the threat of Thanos (or at least severely hindered him) but cannot bear what it would take to do so. At one point in Infinity War, Captain America tells a compatriot, “we don’t trade lives,” and that’s both the philosophy that unites each of The Avengers and, in a way, that also dooms them.

Loki could have avoided handing over the Space Gem to Thanos. But despite all their sibling rivalries, Loki cannot sit idly by while his brother dies at the hands of this monster. Gamora could deny her estranged father the knowledge of how to find the Soul Stone, but she gives up and gives in when she cannot tolerate seeing her sister, Nebula, enduring his torture. Eitri could have refused to craft the gauntlet for Thanos that makes his terrible deeds possible, but he’s willing to risk the fate of the universe in the futile hope it will give Thanos reason to spare his people.

Time and again, the individuals who could have stopped Thanos’s plan from succeeding cannot bear seeing their loved ones suffer or perish, and so his steady march to destruction continues.

Even the ones who try to make that sacrifice falter or dither until it’s too late. Though Star-Lord is eventually willing to follow Gamora’s wishes that she be killed instead of permitted to fall into her father’s hands, Thanos’s use of the Reality Stone sees that his efforts come to naught. And worse yet, it’s Star-Lord’s emotional connection to Gamora that causes him, in his the throes of his grief and anger at her death, to try to kill Thanos in a way that thwarts his allies’ attempts to simply stymie him for the time being. Once again, that sort of bond, reinforced here before it’s wiped away, is what causes Star-Lord, and The Avengers more broadly, to fail.

 

 

It’s the same thing that keeps Scarlet Witch from being able to quell this threat either. Vision is just as direct as Gamora in asking the woman he loves to let him die rather than risk the fate of galaxy on his account. But Wanda refuses and delays and does everything in her power to hold onto him, even with the world in the balance. Eventually she, like Peter, relents and, in a harrowing moment, removes the Mind Stone from Vision, seemingly stopping Thanos once and for all. But by then, Thanos has the Time Stone, and in the film’s penultimate gut punch, he rewinds the clock and renders her actions horrifically moot.

He’s able to undo all of this because Thanos himself is the only character in the film willing to make that type of impossible choice and make it without hesitation.

When a long-absent Red Skull returns and instructs Thanos that in order to obtain the Soul Stone, he must sacrifice something he loves, Gamora believes she’s won the day. After all, there’s no way the father who treated her as he did, who put her through what he has, could love anything, let alone her. But there are tears in Thanos’s eyes, tears that expose Thanos as something other than the monolithic bastion of evil he’s seemed until now. Instead the film portrays him as someone who knows what must be done, who accepts the costs that must be borne, to achieve what he believes must be achieved in order to save the galaxy from itself.

So he bears those costs. He throws his own daughter to her death and claims the fruits of his sacrifice. He offers sympathy to Scarlet Witch but undoes her own hard choice to serve his goals. He snaps his fingers and half the world comes to an end, as familiar faces shatter and blow away into nothingness.

It is an emotional wallop, for the film’s surviving heroes and for its audience. The one figure in Infinity War who most threatens the galaxy is also the only one willing to sever those bonds, to go to those lengths that The Avengers cannot bring themselves breach, and he wins the day because of it.

 

What the Future Holds

Predictions are a fool’s game, but there are a few things to remember in the shadow of that devastating finale. First and foremost, the heroes lost in Thanos’s final blight were, by and large, the new blood of the MCU. The likes of Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Dr. Strange are far more likely to anchor the next decade of Marvel movies than to disappear forever. It won’t take away the shock or power of the moments when they disintegrated before our eyes, but resurrection is the watchword in comic book stories, and Disney is unlikely to let the cornerstones of its next wave of cape flicks linger in oblivion for too long.

But more importantly, Infinity War is a film that seems keenly aware of how it’s in conversation with 2012’s The Avengers, the film that kicked this uber-franchise into another gear. And as much as the original Avengers movie was about the forging of those unlikely bonds among its heroes, it was also a story about self-sacrifice.

Tony Stark’s arc in the film centered on that theme. Captain America rebuked Stark for being all about himself and never willing to make the sacrifice play. It gave Tony the extra motivation to single-handedly redirect a nuclear bomb headed for New York City and take it through the portal to another world, with no hope of return. He nevertheless survives, naturally, but it’s that choice that truly matters — the choice to put oneself on the chopping block in order to save others, and maybe to save the world.

 

 

It’s the same choice that Buffy herself made in that same fateful finale. When push came to shove, and it became clear that fighting the good fight alone wouldn’t be enough to stop the power-mad god who threatened all of existence, Buffy still refused to put her sister in harm’s way. Instead, she took her sister’s place, sacrificing her own life to stop the villain and save all that there was to be saved. When someone has to die, these are the sorts of heroes who would rather the mortal obligation fall to them than the people they care about.

And maybe that portends the path forward for Avengers 4. The Avenger who comes closest to succeeding in Infinity War is Thor, and on the surface, that would seem to support the “personal connections only hold you back” theme of the film. Thor has a quiet but harrowing conversation with Rocket where he acknowledges that he’s basically lost everyone near and dear to him. In a movie where every hero is hindered by their unwillingness to let the people they love come to harm, even to save the universe, it’s the man with no one left who forms the plan and strikes the blow that nearly wins the war for the good guys.

But his is also a choice of sacrifice. When it comes time to forge the weapon that may be able to slay a god, Thor has to put his own life on the line. He has to hold open the mechanism that lets the power of a star flow through him and to create his awesome weapon. He is severely wounded by the blast, but succeeds in helping produce something with the potential to defeat Thanos. And there, perhaps, Infinity War tips its hand.

Because even if The Avengers are not willing to trade lives, they are willing to offer their own. Even Dr. Strange, who seemed to be making the same sort of choice that Loki and Gamora and Scarlet Witch did, may be playing the long game. Having glimpsed the lone, possible future where The Avengers succeed, he could be allowing events to come to pass where he disintegrates into nothing, with the hope that it will set the surviving heroes on the singular path toward righting all that’s gone wrong.

 

 

Accomplishing that goal may very well require this same sort of ultimate personal sacrifice. Infinity War and its promised sequel represent a turning point for the franchise, a close of one significant chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the beginning of another. It’s conspicuous how many of those who survived the terrible geometry of Thanos’s snapped-finger are among the original set of Avengers from Phase One of the franchise.

If, as Infinity War seems to posit, the thing that sets Thanos apart — that allows him to succeed when there are so many chances for him to fail — is that he is willing to give up what he loves in order to achieve his goal, then maybe what sets The Avengers apart is an equal and opposite form of commitment and devotion.

Maybe it’s Iron Man carrying that nuke away from New York City. Maybe it’s Captain America letting his plane fall into the ocean. Maybe it’s the countless other times our heroes have won the day by placing themselves onto the altar rather than allowing who or what they love to be forced upon it.

No one knows for sure what the next installment of The Avengers mega franchise holds in store. But it’s not hard to imagine the current generation of Avengers collectively making the same sort of personal, sacrifice of their own lives in order to preserve the next — the choice not to let someone you love go to save the world, but to let yourself go to save them, and the world with them. It’s a form of love that Thanos, however teary-eyed and mournful of the prices he’s paid, may not be able to comprehend or, accordingly, defend against.

 

The Other Half

With all that moral weight and storytelling girth, Infinity War is not merely half a movie. It is, standing alone, a complete and harrowing story of single-minded devotion and loss, of good-hearted, courageous individuals unable to cross the line that could allow them to save everything while suffering unimaginable losses in the process.

Despite the movie’s overstuffed roster and variable quipping, the Russo Bros., MCU head honcho Kevin Feige, and Marvel Studios as a whole deserve to be applauded for delivering a film built around such a singular, unifying set of moral choices, one that commits to the painful consequences of its heroes’ actions with a conviction not seen in major franchise filmmaking since The Empire Strikes Back.

Those final moments — where heroes young and old, and the hope for the future they represent, disintegrate and fall away like ash — are heart-rending in the best and worst way. They’re accompanied not by maniacal laughs or vainglorious boasts, but instead by impressionistic reflections on whether this fraught endeavor was worth it, and quiet smiles at an alien sunrise. Infinity War is full of choices that allow it to transcend popcorn thrills and previz action and become art, by whatever definition you carry into the theater with you.

 

 

But the film is also a question waiting for an answer, a cinematic dangling participle, that makes the bold choice of leaving the viewer with the images of brave men and women fading to nothing, while implicitly gesturing toward an inevitable aftermath. As the shock of those images fades, they coalesce into a call that demands a response.

Avengers: Infinity War presents the story of a man who will sacrifice what he loves most in order to, by his own measure, save the world, when no one else is willing or able do the same. But it also asks, and leaves open the question, of what the heroes we’ve been watching for ten years will do, the depths of self-sacrifice they will embrace, when there’s never been more to avenge.

There’s another half of that equation. And the film’s jewel-covered glove reaches out what’s to come in the next chapter, as much as it clenches into the fist that strikes so devastating a blow at the end of this one.

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