And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.
Avengers: Infinity War is essentially a terrible movie. It’s about an hour too long, it has too many characters and too many plot threads running at once, and most of the characters are either not introduced or barely introduced, get very little dialogue and don’t get any development. If you haven’t watched a long train of interminably dull prior movies in the sequence, you have nothing invested in this shlock, which is just as well because the movie suffers from a more fundamental problem: it bullies its viewers. This movie is basically a series of scenes in which a giant, invincible arsehole does whatever he wants and takes whatever he wants, and all the efforts of the people that we the movie-watchers are supposed to have emotional investment in amount to nothing. If this were an actually serious, well-made movie about a real topic – sexual abuse at Ohio State University, for example – we would be watching the same series of awful bullying scenes, and we would leave exhausted and shattered by the sheer brutal abusiveness of the experience. This isn’t how you make entertainment, it’s how you make documentaries.
Perhaps the movie-makers knew this, and this is why they made sure that not only is a casual viewer unable to invest anything in the characters, but is also unable to engage with the substance of the movie itself. The script wavers between a serious adventure/sci fi, a classic superhero movie, and a comedy. This means that the viewer cannot properly get into the flow of things. Has Thor just seen his entire crew murdered by a fatally powerful demon who aims to destroy half the living creatures in the universe, or has he had an entertaining evening at a bar with some friends? It’s impossible to tell. Is Spacedouche fighting to save his loved one from a fate worse than death, or just hamming it up for his friends at a keg party? It’s impossible to tell. This is one of the (many) fatal errors that sank the recent Star Wars effort, and it did no favours for this movie either. Well, perhaps it did the movie a small favour – the only reason I finished watching it was the dialogue. I watched the whole thing at a remove though, as a disengaged critic, because I had nothing invested in it or its characters.
And how bad were these characters? I have no sense of Thanos’s motivations, or any emotional engagement with his drive to get the infinity stones and destroy half the universe, which is terrible because a fundamental requirement of these kinds of movies is that you be on board with the bad guy’s plans. I felt more in common with the Alien queen in Aliens than I did with this boring dude and his gold fist. Spacedouche, obviously, is a waste of my effort and a completely awful character. Iron Man long since lost his shine and, like late-vintage Elon Musk, has become just a rich entitled white dude with bad ideas. Dr. Strange is a condescending prat who should have stuck with his original career as a detective. Insipid Witchgirl is weak and boring, and I have no idea why she is in love with Useless Robot (Phase? Nobody introduces themselves), who seems to have no purpose in this movie except spare parts. Black Panther might as well also be a robot for all the energy in his performance, and who was that Steve Rogers guy and why is he so useless? I think I was supposed to feel some emotion other than relief when Spiderman died but why would I, when his sole role in this movie is to act as a ham-fisted tool for breaking the fourth wall (and why are we breaking the fourth wall in a supposedly serious movie?) What is Black Widow’s purpose, and what is wrong with this world that Scarlet Johanson can be paid millions of bucks to turn up, say three lines, and then sit in a chair while her stunt double does 90% of her moves[1]? I think there was a guy who flew a thing and blew stuff up, but I don’t know his name and I don’t even remember if he died. Bruce Banner has now thoroughly ruined the Hulk, turning him from a metaphor for adolescent angst into a metaphor for middle aged male sexual dysfunction. Groot – now Groot is an example of how to really terribly mistreat a great character. In the original Space Daddy Issues movie he was a fun and interesting character, but baby Groot in Daddy Issues 2 was just a waste of space and this teenage Groot is such a depressingly bad form of comedy relief that it makes me want to go back in time and destroy the original movie.
A further mark of how bad this movie is is that it introduced time travel. It is a universal truth that a movie with incidental time travel is a bad movie, and that only two movies in the history of cinema have done time travel well: Terminator and Back to the Future. As soon as you casually insert time travel into a movie you ruin it. This was easily avoidable in this story simply by replacing the time stone with some other noun (the shit stone? the mcguffin stone? It doesn’t matter, because there is no sense in which anything Thanos does with his golden fist corresponds in any way to the supposed functions of the stones embedded in the fist). But no, the directors had to go there because there is no stupid thing that cannot be loaded into a modern American action movie. Of course, in keeping with this principle there were a bunch of other incredibly bad decisions that completely undermined the good guys’ efforts and made all their failures both predictable and frustrating:
- Spacedouche’s decision to punch Thanos in the face while he was sleeping, just as his friends were about to pull the glove off and save the universe, and indeed his decision to stand there arguing with sleeping Thanos and making everything in the universe all about him instead of helping his friends remove the glove and then punch the stupid blue dude when he was actually vulnerable
- Dr Strange’s decision to go with stupid Iron Man’s stupid plan to confront Thanos while holding the very thing Thanos wants, and then to give up that thing even though he asserted very strongly earlier in the movie that he would let Iron Man die rather than hand it over (we all know why he did this – see below).
- Dr Strange’s decision to scan all possible futures for the wisdom of his actions after going to confront Thanos instead of before
- The decision by the idiots at Wakanda to spend precious time and lives defending Wakanda against invading alien hordes so that Little Sister can extract the stone from Useless Robot’s head without killing him, thus ensuring Insipid Witchgirl doesn’t cry, even though ultimately Insipid Witchgirl has to kill Useless Robot anyway, but does it in front of Thanos so that he knows where the stone is[2] and can go back in time and stop her destroying it (but Useless Robot still dies at least)
- The dumb-arsed series of historical decisions which led the super people of Wakanda with their super-powered Bullshitanium super mineral and hyper high-tech social order to develop an army that fights with spears, has no air support, no artillery, and no projectile weapons of note, and also lacks the strategic sense to stay on the high ground focusing the piss-weak projectile weapons they do have on a narrow breach in an otherwise almost impassable wall
- Thanos randomly and incoherently spares people, like the entire crew of Spacedouche’s ship (who subsequently go on to try and remove his glove, almost successfully) and Iron Man, who is going to kill him in the next movie
It’s become a pretty much constant aspect of modern American movies that the main characters make bad decisions based on emotion rather than heart, and then at the end have to save the day by sheer grit and determination in the face of the avalanche of consequences their hot-headed decisions unleashed[3]. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Often these stupid decisions simply lead to long unnecessary extra scenes to undo the damage, and plot complications that make the movie less believable than it would otherwise have been, and frustrating. I have got to the point with movies like this and Star Wars that I am basically just hate-watching them: I watch them to see how terrible they are and to get angry at my cultural overlords, more than to enjoy the actual content of the movie. In truth this is why I skipped most of the Marvel movies leading up to this one, and only watched this one because I was on a plane[4].
I also previously avoided this movie because there is one crucial scene, where Dr. Strange hands over the time stone to prevent Iron Man being killed, which basically tells us that Iron Man is crucial to the one possible future in which Thanos is defeated. This means that the rich entitled white guy is going to be the person who saves the universe. Who could have guessed!? That amongst a cast of thousands of super heroes, all the non-white and non-human characters die “randomly” after Thanos gets the final stone, leaving white Iron Man, white Spacedouche, and white Black Widow[5] to save the universe, with rich white Iron Man as the central hero. I can’t wait to see this unusual and novel ending to a movie! It’s highly unlikely I’ll watch the next one, unless it’s playing on a plane in a typhoon, so it seemed like a waste of my time to watch this one too. Perhaps one day someone can remake these movies without all the stupid decisions and white entitlement, and then they might be actually enjoyable. But probably not.
There is one more aspect of this movie which I found amusing, though. It seems to me that there is a metaphor in this movie for the 2016 presidential election, with Thanos as Trump and the six stones as the swing states that he had to pick up to win the electoral college. Everything our heroes throw at him doesn’t stick or slides off, and while some of his buddies are sacrificed on the path to victory, he is ultimately unscathed, and seems to be protected by this strange otherworldly power that enables him to change reality to suit his whims and battle off any enemies. In this metaphor the glove is Russian interference, and the central scene is the moment where the intelligence agencies are trying to reveal the truth to the electorate – this is Spacedouche’s friends trying to pull the glove off – but instead of helping to reveal the horrible truth and fatally weaken him, the mainstream media (represented aptly in this metaphor by Spacedouche) is distracted by Hilary’s emails – a distraction put there by Trump himself – and the moment is lost in their fury. Thanos wakes up and shakes off the people trying to drag off the source of his power over reality, and he goes on to get everything he needs for ultimate victory. It’s up to you to decide whether the half of the universe destroyed by this are a metaphor for women, the Democratic electorate, or most of the rest of the planet. I guess we’ll find out in a year or so.
It’s a nice metaphor, but I have to ask the directors – why did you make us sit through your pain? Couldn’t you have made some other movie, in which the evil arsehole isn’t an invulnerable bully who rampages through the world taking whatever he wants until he gets ultimate power, and the people ranged against him were annoying, powerless losers who consistently make bad decisions? Because I’m not interested in workshopping your pain, and what the world needs now is more superheroes, not more shit superhero movies.
Other reviews you might be interested in
My review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which was a horrible movie in every way
My review of Mad Max: Fury Road, as an exemplar of eco-feminist violence
My review of Dunkirk, as a story set in the in-between
fn1: Sorry in advance if this is a slur on Johanson and she actually does all her own stunts. Even if she did, though, she still was almost not present in this movie.
fn2: This is the best gloss I can put on the insertion of time travel into this movie. Otherwise, why doesn’t Thanos just go back in time to the beginning of the universe and hoover up all the remaining stones as they come out of the big bang? This is why this movie is a railroad – you know Thanos is going to get what he wants, you just have to watch everyone suffer and die until he does.
fn3: See also, Battle of the Bastards
fn4: Did I mention that? I didn’t watch this movie by choice, but because I was flying past a typhoon and couldn’t work on my computer for fear it would fly up into the ceiling of the plane during turbulence
fn5: Wait, isn’t Major Kusanagi Asian?
Compromise and Conceit 
October 7, 2018 at 4:24 pm
“most of the characters are either not introduced or barely introduced”
On the contrary, that’s it’s strongest point. They don’t stuff around with introducing a massive cast. Your ignorance is just causing you to make poor judgments.
Did you read Return of the King and complain that this “Shire” place that Frodo and Sam keep longing for is never explained? Am I allowed to take every sequel you like and complain that I didn’t understand it because I didn’t watch the first? [1]
“This movie is basically a series of scenes in which a giant, invincible arsehole does whatever he wants and takes whatever he wants, and all the efforts of the people that we the movie-watchers are supposed to have emotional investment in amount to nothing.”
Yeah, it does suffer from being the first half of a story – the bit where the arsehole gets his just deserts isn’t released yet.
Of course, this does give me a different complaint – I now insist our D&D games go till my character is on top – no finishing mid-challenge, regardless of the time.
“The script wavers between a serious adventure/sci fi, a classic superhero movie, and a comedy.”
Have you seen Justice League? [2] Or read a comic? Making jokes in the face of universe destroying nonsense is the heart of the genre, otherwise it’s like reading GoT for 60 years- even GoT readers have only put up with 30 years of unrelenting bleakness so far.
“I have no sense of Thanos’s motivations, or any emotional engagement with his drive to get the infinity stones and destroy half the universe, which is terrible because a fundamental requirement of these kinds of movies is that you be on board with the bad guy’s plans.”
Really? They went to the trouble of explaining his nonsense plan and showing how much he loved a random child he abducted. I’m not going to claim it made much sense, but it was still better than the actual comics – I think there he wanted to kill half the universe to catch Death’s eye (because Death is an anthropomorphic female) and ask her out.
Of course, the downside of the change is that it just leads to more questions like “If he’s worried about finite resources, why didn’t he click his fingers and doudle then instead of halving the population?” or “Accepting that targeted extermination of half the populace is bad, but his action just killed half the doctors currently performing surgery. Why?”
“A further mark of how bad this movie is is that it introduced time travel. It is a universal truth that a movie with incidental time travel is a bad movie, and that only two movies in the history of cinema have done time travel well: Terminator and Back to the Future.”
Apparently the movie Primer is the only one that actually handles time travel well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
I’ll be honest – I can’t even follow it’s wikipedia entry, so it’s bound to be good.
“pretty much constant aspect of modern American movies that the main characters make bad decisions based on emotion rather than heart, and then at the end have to save the day by sheer grit and determination in the face of the avalanche of consequences their hot-headed decisions unleashed”
Have you ever read Shonen Jump? For someone in Japan you come across as pretty America focused.
But your criticism of all the logical flaws is kinda unfocused. How it should have ended did it better.
[1] The exception is apparently Highlander 2. I’m told that’s a decent movie if you’ve never watched the first…
[2] I just watched it on a plane. It’s not as terrible as Batman vs Superman. But it’s still pretty bad.
October 9, 2018 at 5:21 pm
Wow! What a Mr Grumpy McGrumpface you were when you wrote that! 🙂
I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with everything Paul said!
I was stating to think I’ve maybe entered some alternate parallel universe and I checked in the mirror and it was true – I have a goatee!!!
(and the criticism about passion winning out over logic is like every episode of Star Trek ever!!!)
October 9, 2018 at 5:34 pm
Thank you both for these comments. I guess it’s true that some of my complaints are generic to many sequel movies (I have heard the complaint that characters aren’t introduced in LoTR as well). At least in the case of LoTR though you only have to watch two previous movies. In this one I have to watch GoTG, Thor (?), Ant Man (I guess? So I know who the guy not turning up is?), Captain America (he kills winter right?), the previous Avengers, Dr. Strange, and whatever godawful shlock starred Insipid Witchgirl and Useless Robot (was that straight-to-tv?) and lord knows what else. Also the sheer size of the cast means that they’re introduced without so much as a “this is so and so who did such and such in some place.” I still do not know what powers Useless Robot was supposed to have, because he didn’t use them, I barely heard his name, and nobody bothered to tell me what his thing is. That’s a pretty extreme level of commitment required just to understand this movie.
To respond to some specific points …
Yeah, it does suffer from being the first half of a story – the bit where the arsehole gets his just deserts isn’t released yet.
That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy two hours of being bullied. Some kind of redeeming features would be nice.
No, I haven’t seen Justice League, and it’s been a while since I read a comic. I only have so much time in the world and I’m not going to burn it on every single spandex-panted wanker who thinks he can save the world. Also note that this kind of argument (we have to make jokes or it would be too bleak) disagrees with your previous argument (it’s got to be bleak because it’s the first half of a story and the non-bleak bits have to come later). Do we need to modify the parameters of the movie to reduce the bleakness, or not?
“If he’s worried about finite resources, why didn’t he click his fingers and doudle then instead of halving the population?”
This is part of the reason I get so pissed at these hamfisted modern action movies. Just design a bad guy motivation that isn’t transparently stupid! The worst of these was the dumb-arsed star trek where the dude had time travel, and used it to go and destroy the Federation for not rescuing his planet, but forgot to use it to go back and rescue his planet. This level of movie making is just bullshit.
Have you ever read Shonen Jump? For someone in Japan you come across as pretty America focused.
I have managed to avoid Shonen Jump. But in any case most manga suffers from the deeper problem that the plot is so incomprehensible that you can’t fathom whether anyone’s decisions made sense or not. So you’re liberated from this particular concern!
Yes, I guess I was a grumpy mcgrumpface when I wrote this, and I think I will continue to get grumpier while hollywood continues to more and more comprehensively fail to make basic movies right. But at least I don’t have a goatee!