Avengers: Infinity War Was Worth The 10 Year Wait

Warning: SPOILERS For Avengers: Infinity War:

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After ten years and eighteen films leading up to it, Avengers: Infinity War proved it was worth the wait. The apex of the Marvel Cinematic Universe up to this point, the third Avengers film is a massive, exhilarating, and awe-inspiring story about loss, sacrifice, death, and heroism. Infinity War puts nearly every superhero fans know and love to the ultimate test but then shatters the status quo of the entire MCU. It’s Marvel’s boldest, most epic film.

It has been an entire decade since Iron Man became a global success that launched the MCU to unprecedented acclaim from audiences and critics, becoming a franchise worth billions. Back then, the possibility that Iron Man could one day be joined by Thor and Captain America (if their solo movies were hits) in an Avengers team-up movie still felt like a pipe dream. Fans certainly had no idea of the scope of Marvel Studios’ ambitions. Now, Infinity War is all of that ambition writ large on the screen; along with being unequaled superhero movie spectacle, Avengers 3 transfers the palpable feeling of reading a Marvel Comics crossover event – in this case, the film’s source material, Jim Starlin’s The Infinity Gauntlet – to movie screens.

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As such, Infinity War is admittedly not an entry level Marvel film, it’s a grad school Marvel film. It’s for the True Believers who have absorbed the previous 18 MCU films (likely multiple times) and have forged relationships with heroes as diverse as Thor, Black Panther, Rocket Raccoon, and even Nebula. And to be fair, the “ten years” hype is a little misleading; fans have only waited for this particular film for the past six years since Thanos appeared in the end-credits scene of the first Avengers. But that cameo of the smiling purple Titan was a promise Marvel made to fans that they would adapt The Infinity Gauntlet. Marvel has now delivered on that promise. And to their credit, it is Thanos himself who powers Infinity War.

• This Page: Thanos Was A Worthy Villain For The Entire MCU

Thanos Was a Worthy Villain For The Entire MCU

Marvel boasts the grandest superhero universe in movies, and Thanos proved to be their best villain ever. The Great Titan was an adversary who could successfully threaten not just all of the Avengers, but the entire MCU cosmos. Thanos was a dicey proposition, however. A motion-captured CGI Big Bad has burned other movies, like Justice League. Even in Age of Ultron, the titular android villain underwhelmed, despite James Spader’s gung-ho performance. Thankfully, Thanos has virtues those other villains didn’t: a genuine personality, an intriguing inner life, and a powerful motivation. The Infinity Stones are MacGuffins that force the stakes of Infinity War to be the highest they can be. We’ve already seen superheroes save the world, but Thanos aimed to decide the fate of half of all life in every world. Only Thanos could deliver escalation of such magnitude.

True, Infinity War‘s Thanos is different from the loquacious nihilist in love with Mistress Death found in The Infinity Gauntlet. But he is the furthest thing from the one-dimensional non-entity Steppenwolf was in Justice League. The CGI for Thanos was the best-ever from Marvel; Infinity War never plunged into the uncanny valley, and by making him the main character, Thanos enjoyed the necessary emphasis that made him the most important person in the movie. It was smart writing to transfer Thanos’ desire to win Death’s love to instead making him torn from choosing between his genuine affection for his adopted daughter Gamora and his unrelenting belief that he alone must balance the universe by killing half of the people in it.

Thanks to Josh Brolin’s soulful performance, Thanos exhibited the best of all villainous traits: He is physically powerful enough to humble the Hulk and savage enough in battle to overwhelm the combined forces of the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, but there’s also a beating heart inside him. It may be black and twisted, but that heart leads Thanos to care for the young Gamora he personally orphaned and adopted to his cause. At times, Thanos feels regret and sorrow at the things he feels he must do – like sacrifice Gamora for the Soul Stone – but he fully embraces his self-imposed destiny as universal executioner.

Related: Marvel Should Have Made A Thanos Movie Before Infinity War

While Thanos is undoubtedly evil, he is nonetheless complex and he has a unique sense of fairness. Thanos even offers Tony Stark his respect for fighting so valiantly against him. The Mad Titan mournfully weighs the cost of his genocidal quest but he refuses to yield until he achieves his lifelong goal – and Thanos wins in the end! Not only does the villain completely triumph, which is already a rarity in superhero movies, but Thanos is the sole character in Infinity War who gets a happy ending. Meanwhile, the surviving heroes are broken, wondering what happened in utter disbelief because they failed.

Infinity War Is Marvel’s Lord of the Rings

One of the key aspects that separates Infinity War from other ‘typical’ superhero movies is its sheer scale. The movie brings together ten years of story and characters in a movie so big it has to do a lot to justify its existence. Instead of the typical action or sci-fi flicks that comic book movies usually emulate, the film is structured like an epic fantasy film with heroes forced to journey to far-flung locales to face impossible odds. We’ve already seen the Avengers save New York from aliens and Sokovia from robots. Infinity War raises the stakes so that the climax occurs on two different planets, with the conflict in Wakanda to defend the Vision’s Mind Stone from the Black Order’s alien horde staged as a war on a battlefield like one would see in Lord of the Rings. The Avengers and Black Panther’s Wakandan forces are like the alliance of humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits facing off against an army of extra-terrestrial orcs.

What’s more, Infinity War doesn’t just evoke Lord of the Rings in sheer spectacle, it culminates as the most emotional Marvel film to date. The Avengers suffer multiple deaths, and the ones who somehow remain alive are forced to watch in despair as their friends and loved ones fade to dust in front of their very eyes. The helplessness and sense of loss Tony Stark feels when Peter Parker clings to him begging not to die is as heartbreaking as when Boromir perished in battle but urged the Fellowship of the Ring to carry on and watch over Frodo and the Hobbits.

Related: Avengers: Infinity War Corrects Marvel’s Broken Timeline

While fans know Avengers 4 is just around the corner and that the heroes will somehow return, Infinity War‘s grand scale deaths are as resonant as when Gandalf died in The Fellowship of the Ring after he declared to the Balrog “You shall not pass!” Yes, Gandalf returned to life in the very next film, and so will the Avengers next summer. But watching the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy fight their hardest but die anyway loses none of its unsettling impact. This is because fans have come to love and invest in the MCU’s characters over the last decade. Other superhero films, like X-Men: Apocalypse, have attempted world-ending epic spectacle and heroes unleashing their powers on an unstoppable villain, but even the often recast and rebooted X-Men franchise doesn’t match the scope of the MCU. The fondness fans have for most of the mutants (besides Logan) overall pales in comparison to the type of affection often lavished on the Avengers and Guardians and their loyalty to Marvel Studios brand.

Infinity War Delivered Closure In Unexpected Ways

To paraphrase Gamora, all the roads the heroes have traveled eventually led to Thanos. The Infinity Stones were seeded in several of the previous MCU films, and enough characters know about the Stones so that everything was already set up beforehand. Infinity War was free to plunge right into the payoff of Thanos collecting the Stones, with the Avengers and Guardians playing games of catch up and keep away. Avengers 3 was touted as a culmination of many narrative threads and this was indeed the case. Gamora and Nebula’s history with their ‘father’ came to a tragic fruition, Spider-Man became an Avenger like he always wanted but died on Titan, and Thor, who lost Asgard and nearly everyone dear to him, gained a new weapon to replace Mjolnir.

Yet, the film’s payoffs brilliantly amounted to more set up. Thanos’ victory is so complete, there seems to be no way for the Avengers to restore the universe to what it was. The film offered no obvious ‘Rey offering Luke his lightsaber’ moment to give fans hope that this can all be reversed. (The end-credits scene promising Captain Marvel only raises more questions rather than creating solid reassurance.) However, Infinity War did drop subtle clues as to what comes next; with his declaration that this was the “endgame” and surrendering the Time Stone to Thanos was “the only way”, Doctor Strange must have a plan to achieve the one future in 14-million where the Avengers win but what could it be? Meanwhile, the personal animosity between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark that broke the Avengers apart is among the important events that remain unresolved.

To return to the Fellowship of the Ring comparison, Avengers: Infinity War does end on a heartstopping cliffhanger. Yet, it is nevertheless a complete movie with a defined ending while simultaneously leaving fans begging for something more to follow, which we know is indeed coming. Infinity War shoulders the weight of the previous decade of films, along with the loftiest of expectations, but it succeeds because of Marvel’s clarity of purpose and a willingness to take risks (a segment of the film, after all, involves Thor, Rocket, and Groot going on a side mission to ask a giant Peter Dinklage to build a magic ax). And with Avengers 4 on the way, Marvel Studios is like Doctor Strange – the master of the superhero arts poised to pull off his greatest trick yet.

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