Genre: Super-Hero
Premise: In order to fulfill his destiny of “freeing” the universe, an evil planet-hopping alien must defeat the largest group of superheroes ever assembled.
About: The most anticipated movie of the year is upon us. Avengers: Infinity War baby!
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (based on comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby) (additional characters by Joe Simon, Steve Englehart, Steve Gan, Bill Mantio, Keith Giffen, Jim Starlin, Larry Lieber, and Don Heck)
Details: 2 hours and 30 minutes
(MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!!!)
Avengers: Infinity War contains writing challenges that no other writer in the history of cinema has had to face. Watching the writers try to navigate these challenges was almost as fun as watching the show-stopping set-pieces. I want to jump right into the analysis but maybe we should do a quick breakdown of the plot first.
We’ll start with Thanos. Thanos is a big purple alien who wants to destroy half the universe in order to take care of its overpopulation problem (don’t worry, we’ll get to that). In order to achieve this, he must collect six “infinity stones” and place them in his giant infinity stone glove.
Without getting into detail, the relevant stones are located inside two of our featured superheroes. The first is Vision, aka Boring Maroon Guy, and the second is Dr. Strange, who’s got a stone tucked inside his necklace. After Thanos gets the other stones, he must face these two heroes, along with each of their mini-posses.
There’s a lot that goes on in the meantime. Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man and Peter Quill take the fight directly to Thanos on Thanos’s old planet. Captain America, Black Panther, Black Widow and David Banner (Hulk) go to Wakanda to stop Thanos’s Death Team from stealing Vision’s infinity stone. And Thor, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot go back to Thor’s home world to try and build a new hammer.
In the end, none of it matters, because Thanos succeeds! Once he’s got the stones, he snaps his fingers, and half of every being in the universe turns to dust, including crowd-favorites Spider-Man and Black Panther! But don’t these two have sequels coming out in the future? Have those sequels now been canceled? We’ll have to wait until Infinity War Part 2 to find out.
Yowzers, where do I begin with this?
The first thing that struck me was how the writers decided to unify the narrative. Like I said, no writers have been asked to keep track of this many characters before on this scale. That’s because doing so is hard. If you want to see how hard, watch any of the recent Transformers or Pirates sequels. Note how sloppy those narrative are. When bad writers are tasked with jumping around to a ton of different story threads? It becomes disaster sauce quickly.
So Markus and McFeely cleverly wrapped the narrative around Thanos’s pursuit of his goal. Which makes sense. He’s driving the action. He’s the one with the big plan. Everyone else is reacting to it. So why not make him the centerpiece of the story? That way whenever stuff gets too complicated, we can cut back to Thanos and instantly remember, “Oh yeah – this is what this is all about. The guy getting the infinity stones.” It’s almost as if Thanos is given a traditional Hero’s Journey, despite the fact that he’s not the hero. That’s a major reason why people are coming out of this movie feeling like Thanos is Marvel’s best villain ever.
What’s so surprising about this working is that Thanos’s plan, unless you’re under the age of 13, is the silliest plan ever. He wants to eliminate half of the universe because there are too many… beings in it? Uhhhh… okay.
Marvel, of course, is directly responsible for how silly this plot is. They made the fate of earth the stakes in the first Avengers. The galaxy is at stake in the second Guardians. That makes both of those stakes too small for this movie. Which is why they needed to take things all the way to the universe level.
But there’s a problem with that. If Thanos destroys the entire universe, he’s dead too. This is what necessitated this silly compromise of HALF the universe. Of course, now you have to come up with a reason why someone would only want to destroy half the universe. And the best they could come up was this idea of overpopulation, which makes absolutely zero sense.
But I’ll give it to these guys. It worked. And it worked mainly because Thanos was such a strong villain. You believed him, even if you didn’t necessarily believe what was coming out of his mouth.
Markus and McFeely weren’t bulletproof though. Getting all these characters into the places they needed to be to get the story moving took a ton of exposition – and in my humble opinion, more than what was needed. For a good hour there, it felt like every scene was a group of people in a room, talking about where they needed to go and why. Or why something from the past was relevant to what they needed to do in the present. That Guardians Thor sequence in the Guardians ship was yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap. It could’ve been cut in half.
A lot of people are praising the humor in this film. What may surprise you is that the humor wasn’t being used to entertain you. It was being used to distract you from how mind-numbingly dull these exposition scenes were.
But for the most part, the screenwriting was strong. I loved how the movie started, for example. Note how we don’t start IN THE BATTLE. We started AFTER THE BATTLE. They always say, “Come into the story as late as possible” or “Come into the scene as late as possible.” They knew that Thanos killing an army of people we didn’t know or care about would’ve been a visually exciting but emotionally vacant experience. So we enter in the aftermath. An inexperienced screenwriter would’ve botched that. “We’ve gotta show the battle first! It’s a comic book movie! We need as much action as possible!” Not if it’s unnecessary you don’t.
Markus and McFeely also knew they had to demonstrate right away that Thanos was the ultimate badass, someone even 30 superheroes would have a tough time taking down. So they have him casually beating up, of all heroes, the Hulk. Once we see that, we’re like, “Oh, okay. The Avengers are f%$#d.”
Oh, and one of the reasons Thanos comes out of this such a star? Is that they do something I constantly tell writers to do with their villains. They go AGAINST THE OBVIOUS. Thanos isn’t some over-the-top asshole who enjoys killing people because HE’S A VILLAIN and THAT’S WHAT VILLAINS LOVE TO DO. He’s quiet. He’s rational. He’s almost sad. It goes against every stereotype you think of when you think of a movie villain. Which is exactly why he stands out.
Then there were very specific things I liked. One of the most frustrating things about screenwriting is the troubleshooting. You’re constantly running up against annoying problems you have to solve. Take, for example, the Hulk. Clearly, they’re saving Hulk for Part 2. They knew that if Hulk is running around beating up bad guys willy-nilly in this, he loses his luster in the second half of the 2-film arc. The problem with that is, without the Hulk, Bruce Banner is useless. So the writers were saddled with either figuring out how to make him NOT USELESS, or throwing him up in one of those ubiquitous control rooms and having him say things like, “We’ve got incoming in Vector A!”
The idea to put him in Iron’s Man’s “Hulk Buster” suit was a really clever solution to this. This way, you get Bruce Banner out on the battlefield fighting with the others where he’s still kind of able to be the Hulk.
Okay, enough screenwriting. It’s time to be a geek and get into my raw thoughts, starting with Loki. THAAAAAAANNNNNNNK YOUUUUUUUUUU. What a lame character. Maybe my least favorite character in all of Marvel. I’ve never seen a franchise try and push a character so much who clearly wasn’t working. NOTHING about this character worked. The costume and make-up were off. The hair was a major fail. The overtly manufactured broken relationship with his brother was a fail. His motivation was never clear. Just an awful character all around. Thank you for killing him, Marvel. May he never resurface.
I thought the Nebulus Bebulus guy who looked like a character out of Harry Potter was AWESOME. That early fight with him against Iron Man and Dr. Strange was badass. I loved how he just stood there, unmoving, while cars split in half around him.
I was surprised by what they did with Dr. Strange. First of all, I didn’t know he was so powerful. I thought he was only able to do a few time-slowing Matrix moves. But he’s full-on badass here. I mean, at times, I thought he might be the most powerful Avenger of all.
I love Spider-Man. They nailed that casting with Tom Holland. It almost makes it obvious how badly they botched the casting the last time around. I loved the new suit Iron Man gave him. I love how he’s basically mini-Iron Man. I love how he calls Iron Man, “Mr. Stark.” Their chemistry is amazing. It made me want them to have their own movie together.
And I was pissed there weren’t more surprises. I thought that’s what comics were known for – these big shock moments. I was hoping to see Silver Surfer or Captain Marvel. Instead the big surprise was… Red Skull?? First of all, I don’t even know who Red Skull is. But he’s lame as shit. There was lots of murmuring in my crowd when he arrived, but my groan cut through all of it. What a dumb ass character. They should’ve given us someone actually cool. Very disappointed on the cameo front.
Speaking of disappointment, I didn’t love the ending. Not just because of the obvious things (oh yeah, right, Black Panther is dead, sure). But because it was confusing. I thought this whole “destroy half the universe” thing was going to result in, you know, DESTROYING HALF OF THE UNIVERSE! When people started fading into dust, my first thought was, “Oh, they’re being transported to another dimension or something.” It didn’t occur to me that THIS was how half of the universe was destroyed. Major lack of clarity there. Big screenwriting mistake. Because think about it. Everyone knows Spider-Man has a movie coming out next year. He’s not dead. So of course I’m going to think he was being transported somewhere. But I guess, according to these writers, that means he’s “dead.” I don’t know. It was stupid. And I get why they did it. They needed some big suspenseful conclusion to make you want to come back for part 2. But we needed a visual with more FORCE and way more CLARITY. This was a big movie fail.
Okay, finally, for no reason other than why not. Here are my favorite Avengers characters ranked from best to worst!
1) Iron Man (RDJ owns this character as well as Harrison Ford owns Indy)
2) Spider-Man (brilliant casting)
3) Ant-Man (furious he wasn’t in this)
4) Thor (what a comeback for this character from his first films)
5) Starlord (funniest of everyone but Thor giving him a run for his money)
6) Groot (shortchanged here but still awesome)
7) Dr. Strange (moved up the ladder of awesomeness with this film)
8) Bruce Banner (the Hulk still rocks)
9) Captain America (slightly annoying, but still a badass)
10) Rocket Raccoon (also known as “rabbit”)
11) Drax (hilarious)
12) Black Panther (I still think this guy’s boring but his suit makes up for it)
13) Scarlet Witch (dropping the accent pulled her up from being the worst Avenger ever)
14) Black Widow (I mean, I guess)
15) War Machine (still not really sure why this character exists)
16) Falcon (forgettable but at least he’s not annoying)
17) Hawkeye (I can shoot arrows!)
18) Bucky (a guy whose power is an arm. Sure, why not)
19) Gamora (so glad she died. What a lame character)
20) Vision (most boring superhero ever possibly?)
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is the first time I think I’ve ever seen a villain be given the Hero’s Journey. I definitely didn’t think you could do that. I’m still trying to figure out if this is something that only works inside this unique situational universe or if it could be used in other genres. That would be a neat new screenwriting power to play with if that were the case.
