Avengers: Infinity War: reviews, news, and analysis of Marvel’s biggest movie to date

I spend a lot of time thinking about Captain America. I think about how, after six Marvel Studios films featuring Chris Evans in the role, we’ve gotten to the point where it’s impossible to trace where Evans ends and where Cap begins. I think about how he’s evolved from a character whose duty was to serve his country into a character whose country let him down. I think about how he bicep-curled a helicopter.

And after seeing Avengers: Infinity War, and after seeing Evans tweeting about his character’s presumed cinematic end, I’ve thought a lot about what happens when Captain America dies.

This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War.

At the tail end of Avengers: Infinity War’s post-credits scene, the camera focuses in on a star, flanked by stripes. It’s a Marvel riff on the iconic Bat Signal that alerts Batman that Gotham needs him. It tells us that the world is in dire need of help, and there’s only one person who can handle the job.

Superhero movies are often dismissed as teen adventure flicks writ large. But for my money, Marvel Studios has been downright daring in raising difficult, and very adult, moral dilemmas.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest entry, Avengers: Infinity War, raises a question familiar to hero stories — what is the worth of one life relative to many? — but avoids offering the usual easy answer. Instead, it asks audiences to sit with failure and doubt, in a way very few blockbusters do (and much more successfully than the recent Star Wars movie).

This post contains spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War. Do not read any further if you don’t want to be spoiled. Proceed at your own risk.

Avengers: Infinity War has one post-credits scene, and it’s huge — a teaser that sets the table for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

By now, if you’re a Marvel fan, or even someone who’s Marvel-curious, you’ve seen the studio’s biggest, wildest movie yet. Avengers: Infinity War goes out of its way to let you know that everything will change, and even if it seems likely the next film will undo some of those changes, the immediate effect of Infinity War is a little exhilarating.

But the movie also probably left you with some big unresolved questions. Allow us to step in and offer our own takes on what’s going on. If you still don’t quite understand the movie’s ending, or if you’re wondering just what Marvel’s plans are for the future, or if you want to know if Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are ever going to get married, you’ve come to the right place.

The ending of Avengers: Infinity War seems to leave viewers somewhere on a spectrum of baffled grief, confusion, outrage, and disgust.

In the final moments of Infinity War, there are gasps and a few scattered sobs. As the credits start to play, there is shocked laughter, scattered applause, yells of, “Fuck you, Thanos!”

Avengers: Infinity War is upon us.

For the past 10 years, Marvel has been building up its world of superheroes, supervillains, cosmic guardians, Wakandan warriors, Infinity Stone-enhanced AIs, telekinetic witches, strange doctors, and spidermen. And on Friday, when Infinity War is officially released in theaters (screenings begin Thursday night), audiences will finally get to see the movie that Marvel has promised will completely change everything we thought we knew about its cinematic universe.

From the outside, everything at Marvel Studios appears to be going just swimmingly.

The studio’s February release, Black Panther, has become the third highest-grossing film of all time in the United States and Canada, behind only Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Avatar. (The numbers, of course, do not adjust for inflation, but even adjusted for inflation, Black Panther is in the top 30, which is staggering.) And its most recent release, Avengers: Infinity War, smashed the record for opening weekend box office, held in the US and Canada by Force Awakens and internationally by Fate of the Furious.

Spoiler alert: Please don’t read this if you haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War and are planning to. There’s a major spoiler reveal here.

Heading into Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel was hinting quite aggressively that some of our favorites — characters we’d gotten to know through Marvel’s 10-year, 18-movie history — would bite the dust. And of course, those of us who have seen the movie now know exactly which heroes meet their grim outcomes.

One of the most remarkable things about Avengers: Infinity War is that it works at all. There are plenty of things to criticize about the movie, should you want to, but a muddy chronology is not one of them: Despite having dozens upon dozens of characters, the movie never collapses into a mess, and it’s always clear about why each character is doing what they’re doing, even if you might not buy individual emotional beats in the moment.

Some of this is thanks to a smart choice by screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely to collapse as many characters as possible into as few storylines as possible. As such, Iron Man ends up hanging out with Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and some of the Guardians of the Galaxy, while Thor hangs out with the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Rather than trying to give every individual a story arc, the writers try to give collections of characters story arcs.

It’s official: Avengers: Infinity War just had the best opening weekend of any movie in all of time.

In North America, the Marvel movie opened to more than $250 million, blowing past Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ $247.9 million. When combined with $380 million at the foreign box office, that’s more than $630 million — the biggest opening of all time.

Shane Campbell-Staton was deep into his grad school dissertation on the evolution of the green anole lizard when he started having intense dreams about the scientific origins of various superheroes.

“I was reading comic books and at night and then doing hardcore biology research by day,” he said. “The two started to cross over in my brain.”

At the end of my screening of Avengers: Infinity War, as the credit “Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo” flashed across the screen, the first thing audible was a louder-than-probably-intended voice saying, “What?!” followed by a few nervous giggles.

To some degree, the movie had worked its magic. We were disoriented and discombobulated, and as I exited the theater, there were more than a few people excitedly dissecting all the angles on that ending (which I am valiantly trying not to spoil, though I’m about to).

Avengers: Infinity War feels like a Marvel movie on bath salts. Trying to describe any part of it alone will make you sound like you’ve lost your mind; trying to describe it all kind of makes it sound like it’s lost its mind. And it’s all the more confounding for how closely it mirrors its decade of movie predecessors only to end up shattering that mirror: Infinity War moves, sounds, and acts like a typical Marvel movie, but then unmasks itself as a creature distinctly its own.

Throughout Marvel Studios’ 10-year cinematic history, we’ve seen the world saved multiple times, from threats ranging from a chunk of Earth poised to crash down and wipe us out like the dinosaurs in Avengers: Age of Ultron to the unkillable goddess of death in Thor: Ragnarok.

Looking at the poster for Avengers: Infinity War, it’s immediately apparent that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a very crowded place.

First came Iron Man, then came Hulk, and Thor and Captain America followed. Now, some 18 movies later, we’ve arrived at Infinity War, a knock-down, drag-out fight between Thanos and those Avengers, joined by all the friends they’ve made along the way, including Black Widow, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther and his Wakandan warriors, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Scarlet Witch, Vision, and the underloved Hawkeye.

He’s the Mad Titan. He wrecks planets. He wants to destroy half the universe. He swats away superheroes like they’re flies on his dessert. He could very possibly end the lives of some of, if not all of, the Avengers.

His name, as the Avengers: Infinity War marketing blitz has already seared into your brain, is Thanos.