Showing posts with label The Avengers:Infinity Wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Avengers:Infinity Wars. Show all posts

Saturday, May 5, 2018

"THE AVENGERS: Infinity Wars" three hours of frantic, distracted agitation



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The Avengers The Infinity War is a big, fat, slobbering mess of a movie, a gluttonous rampage of straggling superheroes, thinly connected storylines that are incomprehensible if one hasn't seen most of the Marvel movies that have come out in the last ten years. It is a great looking film, colorful (for a change, as Marvel films have tended to have a bleached out effect for most of what they have done so far), the special effects, especially the special effects, are cast cleverly, and the set pieces are spectacular are satisfyingly effective. But to what purpose, to what effect? One can say that everything that has happened in the films over the last decade have led up to this moment, which I think is the problem; Infinity War cannot stand on its own, it cannot excite without the fan boy's obsession with the smallest bits of detail and information from random Marvel efforts. And it switches from one part of the earth to a sector of the Universe, another planet, a dimension, from Villain headquarters to intergalactic weapons foundry, constantly, disconcertingly. 

That is to say that the editing is such that the movie finally does not add up to anything you find quotable, revealing of grim intentions under the professed declarations. Thanos, the villain, does announce his intentions and fulfills his purpose by Movie's end, and the effect is, admittedly shocking and effectively deployed, but it's little more than a sequence of competent magic tricks by a competent trickster who has one amazing effect for his finale. After you go wow, spend some time yammering about what comes next, you realize there was only one spectacular effect that made the grade, and that it wasn't enough to bring the wild twines that form this movie's unsporting narrative together in a way that made more it more than quips and clashes. Mind you, I did like the movie. Very entertaining as a distraction, but like Marvell's Black Panther, epic-ally overrated as masterpieces of cinema. But standards Marvel helped established, they are mere, merely okay. 

Finally, it its race to tie up a decades worth of plot lines and themes from fifteen or so amazingly profitable movies, watching this film was not unlike watching cable TV with a meth-addled tweaker who had the remote control, unable to make up its mind whether to sit, shit, stand, watch the news, jerk off, take apart a bicycle or simply die. Even after all this time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe cannot transcend its self-created cliches. So what comes next? At this point, does it matter? Doubtless, they'll continue to show their technical mastery, but for narratives, ideas, surprises? That rut only gets deeper.