5 things standing between Avengers: Infinity War and total failure

Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney

The villain has to be more than an evil cardboard cutout 

If you’re familiar with the comics, you know that the Infinity Gauntlet is major bad news; but what will make Thanos stand out as a villain beyond a potentially high body count? From the trailer, the most notable thing about Thanos is how tiny his face is compared with the rest of his head.

Many of Marvel’s villains have functioned merely as plot devices. It’s a rare thing to find a villain who is a character as well as a bad guy; normally the only screen time they’re likely to get is to show them doing something evil so we as an audience feel confident they need to be destroyed. But that kind of cursory characterization leads to mediocre villains, and Infinity War will need to do better if it wants to make Thanos stand out.

After watching the first trailer, I have yet to discover a compelling argument about why Thanos is anything more than another entry in the long line of Marvel villains with their eyes set on domination. If Infinity War follows the plot of Thanos’s jaunt with the Infinity Gauntlet from the comics, there’s the potential for Thanos to wipe out a good part of the MCU — and the potential for that catastrophe to be quickly reversed.

After literally six years of hype from his after-credits scene at the end of the first Avengers, Thanos as a villain needs to pack more of a wallop than just death and destruction. I for one am getting tired of villains who want to destroy or rule the world for hand-wavy reasons. I want a villain whose motivations are more than just a way of holding up the plot — I want an actual character, not the big-chinned embodiment of pure evil. But with so much already going on in Infinity War, having time to actually develop the villain into anything more than a stock character with bells and whistles seems unlikely.