ur heroes having endured a string of storylines that saw Ant-Man join their ranks along with a Green Lantern type of rogues self-titled The Guardians, with nothing short of a galactic peace keeping force, the Nova Corps, at their beck and call, to whom our main evil colossal and unstoppable force Thanos, is just one more villain they plan on terminating.

The interesting shift from Guardians of the Galaxy universe to The Avengers creates a myopia for story telling effect that fails to take into account that the super invincible Thanos was on Nebula and Gamorra’s hit list and each one of his daughters felt sufficiently confident they could single-handedly wipe him out of existence.

So to have the Nova Corps AND The Avengers in your arsenal on your way to taking out this purple cosmos menace out to the cleaners is so much more firepower than Nebula and Gamorra would ever have thought possible and something that does not seem to be part of the pre-screening buzz playing out to the public all year long.

nd then there is the fact that the dumpy, goofy, trigger happy earthling Peter Quill turns out to be a Celestial, basically the half son of a god with yet to be determined powers, much like Thor, possibly greater than Thanos himself.  But with Ego gone from the picture, we’ll have to hold on for another sequel before the writers decide to unveil to the moviegoer the full scope of Star Lord’s powers – that’s not in the picture now because we are supposed to enjoy a more rudimentary and classic punch-them and kick their butt and have your ass handed to you Avengers storyline.

And still playing offsite away from the big canvas is the mafia of galactic scavengers that Star Lord can draw upon to bring hellfire upon Thanos – The Ravagers - which for some odd reason have not made as much as an honorary mention in a single line of dialogue – we'll hold our commentary until the second parter of Infinity War plays at the local theater.

That is a hell lot of bad news that our galaxy can bring down on Thanos if he decides to seek out all of the Infinity Stones in a bid to destroy not the Milky Way Galaxy with more than 400 billion star systems, but the entire cosmos with almost an infinite array of star systems.

he Nova Corps should have already been tipped, ever since Guardians of the Galaxy volume 2, that Thanos has the ambition of acquiring the fabled Infinity Stones that bequeath their owner of untold super powers.  The Nova Corps should have been monitoring his moves and his trek to Earth – although in the first chapter the dilemma is heralded as an Avengers only problem - should be paralleled by legions of advanced civilizations mobilizing to bring him down long before he enters Earth’s solar system.

But dramatic storylines be damned and action superhero movies with lovable characters teetering on the brink before making the impossible turn around are a specialty of the Hollywood house and “she” definitely knows how to cook and serve a hot spicy dish for audiences worldwide eager for end-of-the-world entertainment.

We are firmly confident that the highly innovative and crafty Russo Brothers, responsible for helming The Avengers series, will throw at audiences all kind of plot twists and developments that will make it impossible for any one of our good guys to take Thanos down.  Quite obviously, with The Hulk who can absorb and wield almost boundless energy and deploy strength and power to rival the practically indestructible planet-killing Kryptonians from another world of superheroes, Thanos’ demise could be a small laughable footnote in the annals of super hero showdowns.  But that would deprive both audiences and filmmakers of the opportunity to be entertained and to entertain.

So let’s be candid, The Avengers Infinity War, at two hours and forty minutes is a super lengthy prelude to the second piece to be released in 2019 and all five hours of cinema bravura are just a massive advertising campaign for the next chapter of Marvel productions with aspirations to release 20 more movies of superhero adventures that Disney hopes will make more box office history.

 

MERITORIOUS AVENGERS

hat are the critical and dramatic merits of watching Infinity War?  Let’s talk the good stuff first and then the bad stuff.  Despite the gushing and fawning praise from the powerhouse critics of The Verge, CNET, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and The Christian Science Monitor, there are several significant flaws with Infinity War.  Even those critics praising Infinity War have laced their commentary with cautionary notes and half-hearted praise.  Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor who gave the movie thumbs up on Rotten Tomatoes had this to say “Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.”  That is a very typical halfway praise from many of the critics who are compelled to deliver positive praise and yet temper their reviews with qualifiers.

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INFINITY WAR IS SWEEPING IN STORY SCOPE

You are a superhero movie lover who reads the comic book and you always wonder, but Superman is friends with Lantern, this is the kind of setup where a call to Hal would have made for a happier ending and a great adventure.

Fear not fellow moviegoer, Infinity War is so massive and rolls out the most powerful of villains in the Marvel Universe, there will be no shortage of action on the big screen, almost all of your favorites, minus the X-Men, are called to flex brawn and brains against the impending doom threatening our planet and the cosmos. This is the kind of action that has NEVER been attempted before on the big screen and has only been toyed with on television’s Arrowverse (Supergirl, Green Arrow, The Flash, Legends) with very mixed results from Warner Brothers in terms of story quality, ability to juggle a large roster of good guys and a meager budget to power up the SFX/CGI component.

Well dear viewer, with both Lucasfilm and Marvel in its portfolio and with Disney itself, for decades, having proven its mettle of being a cinematic wizard – there is almost nothing they cannot achieve visually on the big screen. Lovers of superhero adventures will be delighted to no end, the quality and technical effects of the production are unquestionable, seamlessly authentic and believable and the budget so large it guarantees not a single scene suffers from lackluster effects or set design issues. With Justice League, the climactic battle against Steppenwolf was markedly below par. The final act of Justice League seemed to suffer both in CGI/FX quality and an insufficient budget to cover the expense of meticulously crafted scenes in the first and second act of the movie.

There are very few instances in Infinity War where the viewer will question the visual authenticity of the world they are visiting and the threat is gradually unveiled to be daunting and real as Thanos foils our heroes one by one and acquires the gems of power that confer upon him the ability to snuff the cosmos with two snaps of his fingers.

 

DRAMA AND ACTING CHOPS

inema is not theater, even though both are very close cousins. In Cinema, the visual canvas and the editing, the smoothness of changing gears and moving the narrative along, are paramount. The choice of lenses, color texture, color filters, soft focus, wide angle, tight close-ups, and so on, are dramatic tools in moviemaking just as actors thumping their boots on stage for accentuating their delivery of a line can heighten the story element to the audience.

Yet acting chops and ability to make a character breathe the qualities of a real person is essential in moviemaking second to the overall quality of cinematography. Many movies have been truly successful, for example Star Wars (1977), with innovations in capturing images and very little in terms of acting capabilities. In the aforementioned case, the technical wizardry, the music and the editing became the overriding factors in selling a simple story on a very large and alien canvas, to an adoring worldwide audience.

Infinity War has true acting talent on board, hemmed by years of experience from the actors and production team. This is Disney and Marvel we’re talking about and Disney is practically supreme in the field of fantasy storytelling weaving personal dramatic moments to punctuate cosmic scale events. The over saturation of characters from multiple superhero franchises, lamented universally by critics, fills the movie to the brim. Not a single moment of dead space or slow narrative – except where the pace slows down intentionally to give the principal villain a dimension beyond a cartoon cutout. The beauty in Infinity War is that the story elements of your favorite superheroes are picked up practically from the very last scenes of each of the films of the five principal franchises.

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ne of the tried and true delights of cross-over comic books is the dialogue, humor, antagonism and camaraderie for the fan that reads each superhero comic book series on its own and for month after month, each hero evolves their own personality and character and acquires a living dimension since comic books often intersperse elements to the reader from the social, economic and political scenes. When a crossover happens, the reader has the opportunity of enjoying their favorite hero character interact not only with a villain they never tangoed with (the villain could be the nemesis of another superhero series who is not the reader’s regular staple) but also with another superhero and find out who has more wit, more power and more leadership qualities. The typically larger edition (oftentimes twice as many pages) boasts more edge-of-your-seat action panels and more tantalizing situations.

The writers and editors of these special issues are careful that none of these elements stick out but they are all extra bonus points in the story that make the special edition issue all the more valuable and sought after.

Infinity War has some truly cool setups with Chris Hemsworth, Thor, the first of his team to find out that there are other alien creatures out there who have it in for Thanos, the accidental encounter with The Guardians of The Galaxy (Chris Pratt as Peter Quill and Zoe Saldana as Gamora) is an instant classic.

While most may believe that Infinity War is truly the closing arc for Iron Man and that this is his adventure could be reinforced by the initial drama on Earth with Tony Stark telling Pepper Potts that he had a really strange dream – we won’t spill the beans right here although this review will include plenty of spoilers later and you have to go to the Members Edition for the full read).

ruth be told Infinity War is really Thor’s story and quest, following Ragnarok, mixed in with Spider-Man’s arc coming of age from a neighborhood-friendly superhero to a full-fledged Avenger, the youngest Avenger, traveling the galaxy to secure the future of his friends at school and his yet undiscovered love for Mary Jane.

Infinity War is also by large the story of the incredibly entertaining and flawed Guardians finally meeting their counterparts and future friends on Earth, and the pleasure of seeing galactic characters that deal with alien beings on a daily basis throughout the galaxy and working with incredibly advanced technologies versus, by comparison, the highly illiterate “hillbillies” Avengers where Wakanda’s weapons are considered state-of-the-art and where Thor is a suspicious alien that somehow manages to walk and talk and smile like the rest of us.

The meet up with the Guardians is arguably at the heart of the dramatic development in the Avengers storylines in Infinity War. The Guardians are the only “revolutionary” revelation as opposed to incremental character growth with the Avengers lineup that we are so familiar with.

Drax (Dave Bautista fresh from Blade Runner 2049) and Mantis are absolutely delightful in this movie and provide very brief dialogue yet those very brief scenes flesh out the humanity of the movie and allow Peter Quill, Gamora, Thor and Iron Man to show us their qualities.

 

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