Release Date: April 27, 2018

Director: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo

Starring: Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (The Hulk), Chris Evans (Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Don Cheadle (War Machine), Benedict Cucumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Josh Brolin (Thanos)

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Our Rating: A

Gabriella Torna

Some movies are art movies and only appeal to people who like art movies. Other movies are pumped out by studios for money. Some movies are a conglomerated mess of every genre, and still manage to be good. The newest installment of the Avengers franchise, “Infinity War,” fits into exactly that category.

Almost every scene changes the entire tone of the movie. The very first scene goes right ahead and shows that this movie REALLY does not mess around when it comes to making permanent changes in the franchise. Afterward, the film flips over to a funny crossover moment—which is expected in this kind of movie—but then it rapidly switches back and forth between the classic standard action-comedy style Avengers film and a more serious style that is highly uncharacteristic of a movie like this. Of course, this seriousness is attributable to the villain, Thanos.

Of all the movie villains throughout history, very few actually seemed evil. Some were little more than greedy businessmen, as with the “Ocean’s 11” franchise, and some were just deeply disturbed people who tried to blow stuff up, as with the first “Captain America” movie. But in “Infinity War,” the story isn’t about superheroes trying to stop a villain, but rather about a villain trying to explain why he feels that he isn’t a villain. The movie is organized as a series of snippets each telling a different yet connected story—the single connecting thread being the attempt to stop Thanos. Despite this, the focus is mainly on Thanos himself, revealing his intentions and motivations for what he is doing,

“Thanos played a much bigger role than I thought he would in the movie, and the ending just blew me away,” sophomore Christopher Brazda said.

While Thanos never loses sight of his end goal, viewers of this movie can sympathize with him to some degree. As the audience, we can clearly see the emotional toll he puts on himself, which leads to people asking themselves why is it that he is so firm in his convictions? Unlike other villains, there is no underlying to provide some kind of backstabbing plan, comic relief or suggestion to end the villainy. Instead, Thanos’ underlings fall into two categories: feral demon aliens straight out of DOOM, and crazed worshippers of Thanos that oftentimes seem more like the usual villain than Thanos does.

By making Thanos’ followers seem inherently evil (as well as looking like they just finished a full-immersion D&D campaign), Thanos is further humanized and is just pushed away from the edge of pure awfulness. This allows Thanos to become a protagonist in his own way, where he is seen as someone who simply wants to save the universe (by any means necessary) because he genuinely cares about it; Thanos expresses no intention of ruling the universe afterwards, and instead only claims that he wants to watch the sunrise on a universe at peace.

This can be seen once one overlooks the genocide of about half of the population that is needed for his plan to be fulfilled, but the new and refreshing take on a superhero movie was long overdue—making “Infinity War” the first very good movie in the franchise and in recent years. “Black Panther” was decent, the “Iron Man” films were funny, but besides the new adding of humor to the old beat-em-up and save the world superhero movie formula, nothing really stood out about the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). DC movies and the more recent movies coming out of the non-MCU part of Marvel (with the exception of the “Dark Knight” trilogy, “Logan” and “Deadpool”) have sharply declined in quality, with hopeful catch up movies like “Wonder Woman,” “Batman vs Superman” and the most recent “Fantastic 4” movie being absolute jokes in comparison to anything else that was out at the same time.

“Infinity War was pretty good, but it was weird how many stories they crammed into it,” freshman Justin Vazquez said.

Overall, “Avengers: Infinity War” was a unique movie in that it told the story of a villain while making him seem like less of a villain with every passing scene. Additionally, it juggled the plots of what amount to several other mini-movies—each intertwined but telling the stories of the different groups of heroes. The movie is a fantastically refreshing take on an old and dry theme, making the most out of its nearly three hours long runtime to not only break box office records but also to prove again that superhero movies don’t have to stick to the same, repetitive plot with every movie.