Breaking News

More () »

local

Infinity War takes some risks, drastically changes the MCU, and will leave you wrecked

Credit: Marvel/Disney

It’s been 10 years since Iron Man came to the theaters and Marvel began putting together the pieces of of its’ cinematic universe. It begins to culminate and I say “begins” because even though we’ve had 18 leading us to this point, we still have a lot of ground to cover after Avengers: Infinity War.

If you’ve been paying attention to the Marvel films (which I’m sure you have) you know that there are these powerful gems called “Infinity Stones” that gives their wielder power over certain things. The mind gem made its’ official appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron and is what powers Vision and gives the Scarlet Witch some of her powers. The Time Stone showed up is in the amulet that Doctor Strange wears. The Power Stone was the subject of Guardians of the Galaxy. The Reality Stone was in Thor: The Dark World and the Space Stone is in the Tesseract which you probably remember from The Avengers and Captain America: The First Avenger. The only one we haven’t seen yet is the Soul Stone.

You probably also remember Thanos. He’s the big purple guy that first shows up in a post-credits scene in The Avengers and makes a couple of other appearance before finally getting some decent screen time in Guardians of the Galaxy. He’s the one that sent Loki to Earth with the alien army to get the Tesseract and he wanted Ronan the Accuser to get the Power Stone for him in Guardians of the Galaxy. He’s a tough bag guy. His desire is to get all the Infinity Stones and if he gets all of them, he could put an end to the universe with a snap of his finger.

That means its’ up to Earth’s (and the Galaxy’s) mightiest heroes to stop him. Keep in mind that a lot has happened to The Avengers since the Age of Ultron. It’s too much to retcon here but you need to be caught up on all those movies anyway so I’ll spare you but basically Tony Stark and Steve Rogers aren’t on the same team anymore, Doctor Strange is still protecting the Sanctum, Spider-Man is still in high school, Star Lord and the Guardians are still in space doing what they do, T’Challa is bringing Wakanda into the spotlight, while Thor, Hulk, and Loki were last seen on the Asgardian refugee ship with Thanos’ ship hovering in front of them.

So, there’s a lot happening here and it’s too much and too spoilery to really get into here regarding how they come together and what happens to them other than to say this film changes all of them and has the potential to drastically change the entire MCU depending on where the sequel (due in 2019) takes the story. A lot of risks were taken with the characters of this film and it’s going to be interesting and fun to see how those risks will pay off.

Thanos is the main character of this film which makes sense because there are too many other main characters to do them justice so the focus needed to be on the motivations of the villain. Marvel has finally started to get the villains right. Until Black Panther, and now Infinity War, aside from Loki, Killmonger, maybe Red Skull they've been generic "destroy the world" villains.

It’s neat to see some of out heroes work together with parings that you didn’t think would work and ones that you wanted to see come togethers but there are some combinations you probably wanted but don’t get to see. It’s exciting and fun.

I’m not going to say that Avengers: Infinity War is the best in the MCU but it’s pretty good. There’s a lot that happens in one movie which makes it feel disjointed at times but the impact it has on the MCU bumps it into the higher echelon of the franchise.

Where do I think it ranks in the MCU? Here’s my list presented without explanation:

Keep in mind that all the MCU films have been good, so these are all a variation of that range, I could even change this ranking based on various aspects such as pure entertainment, risk-taking, overall scope, characters, etc.