Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney
The Infinity War trailer just dropped. It’s time for fans everywhere to start wondering whether Marvel is really going to pull this off.
Avengers: Infinity War is going to be big. It will have more characters than any Marvel movie before; it has been hyping the villain since the after credits scene in the first Avengers movie in 2012. Everything in the MCU has been building towards this movie. And that’s why there’s a decent chance that Infinity War is going to be a train wreck.
Bringing so many characters into a single movie promises to be a logistical nightmare. The simple necessity of weaving so many different narrative threads together could end up taking valuable screen time away from meaningful character moments. And as it stands, it seems incredibly likely that Infinity War will be over two and a half hours long — which means that if it’s a bad movie, it’s going to be a slog.
One thing’s for sure, Infinity War has to be different. We’re at the point now where many people (myself included) are beginning to get tired of the Marvel Movie Formula™, and Marvel is definitely aware of that. There’s a higher chance now for major characters to die permanently than ever before, either in Infinity War or the as-yet untitled part two. Since many major actors aren’t guaranteed to come back for more movies after the second part, Marvel can slaughter its characters left and right without impacting the sales on its future movies.
Marvel has promised that the MCU will be a very different place after it wraps up its Phase 3 movies. Which means that on top of some major character deaths, we might be looking at some wider, lasting consequences for Earth and the rest of the universe that could form the foundation for the new chapters to come. So far, Earth has made it out of its world-ending conflicts largely unscathed. Infinity War might very well leave some lasting scars.
There’s a lot at stake for this movie to do well, and a lot of reasons why it might not. Marvel has never attempted a movie on this scale before; in many ways, it will be a unique experiment whose results may influence more than just Phase 4. If Infinity War can pull off this kind of story, then we may see even more serial franchises follow its lead.
And hey, if the movie sucks, at least it’s guaranteed to be a wild ride.
Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney
The stakes need to be higher than ever
Okay, maybe calling for higher stakes is the wrong way to put it. After all, Thanos is threatening to destroy or subjugate all of existence. But we’ve already seen that level of potential carnage in the second Guardians of the Galaxy. It seemed to work out fine for the universe then.
The problem with raising the stakes in the MCU is not that they need to be bigger, in the sense of moving from saving a city to a country to the world to the galaxy. It’s that no matter how much is at stake, we as an audience can feel relatively comfortable that there’s no chance of the city/country/world/galaxy being destroyed in the first place. That’s just how these movies work.
And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing; at their core, superhero films are about hope, inspiration, overcoming great difficulties and some sweet action sequences. The answer to the question of how to make the conflict mean something isn’t necessarily “let the bad guys win a few.” Instead, there need to be thematic and character-based questions up in the air. Dreams, beliefs, and relationships are much more fragile than the fabric of all of existence, after all.
But with so many characters in play, how can Infinity War find the time to dig into those important elements? It seems likely that most of the movie’s runtime will have to be devoted to the simple logistics of dealing with so many moving parts.
That being said, given that Infinity War is the first of a two-part experience and also the end of Phase 3, it’s entirely possible that the first movie will end with something we’ve never seen before: the villain actually winning.
Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney
The status quo must be tossed out the window
At the end of the day, you can generally walk into a Marvel movie and feel reasonably confident that the headlining hero is going to survive whatever the big bad has to throw at him. If major characters went around dropping like flies, then it would be much harder to make high-grossing franchises about them.
Not only do the characters generally have to survive to fight another day, but they have to remain recognizable and understandable to people who haven’t seen or don’t remember the previous films. Marvel has been trying to walk a line between crafting a universe which changes and grows with every new movie, and not alienating paying viewers who haven’t kept careful track of every MCU plot event.
Even when Marvel movies try to break the mold, in the end it all comes back to the status quo: Tony destroys his suits at the end of Iron Man 3, yet is back at it again within his very next appearance. The Avengers gain and lose members like valence electrons, yet ultimately the team endures. Loki dies in Thor: The Dark World — but oh, wait, no, he’s just faking it.
Ultimately, the MCU superheroes are required by their very concept to continue doing the same things over and over, because those are the things that people go to see a Marvel movie for. Though personally, I would love to see Marvel look beyond making action blockbusters and start weaving other genres, as it seems it might be attempting with New Mutants. How about a spy thriller featuring Natasha Romanoff? A rom-com with Sam Wilson? A Scarlet Witch horror movie? When you leave behind the action formula, there’s much greater potential to take things in a different direction.
Infinity War has the potential to be a game changer. It proclaims to be the gateway to Phase 4 of Marvel’s evil plan, which suggests that it plans on introducing some real and lasting changes. Having Infinity War seriously shake up the lasting MCU status quo could set the stage for Phase 4 to be much less formula-driven. If Marvel proves they’re willing to start destroying their own status quo, then the stakes in Phase 4 will automatically feel higher.
Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney
The plot must hinge on more than just winning or losing
If we as an audience are reasonably sure that the bad guy isn’t going to have his way, the plot needs to become relevant to us because it’s relevant to the world. Like all media, comics have always reflected the social and political anxieties of the times they were created in. Tying the thematic arcs of the MCU movies into the existing problems we face in the world is an important way to make an otherwise formulaic plot mean something.
The last two Captain America movies handled this well. Both movies are very concerned with the idea of oversight: The Winter Soldier was in many ways a discussion of privacy and a critique of computerized warfare. Civil War drew parallels between the Avengers and the US’s interference in the affairs of other nations.
It’s weaving relevant themes into the action and the fun, which makes superhero movies really mean something. And in a movie whose very concept suggests too many plotlines and characters, that’s going to be especially important in Infinity War.
There’s one line from the trailer which gives me hope, and it’s spoken by Thanos himself:
"In time, you will know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail all the same."
This sentiment feels very relevant to the current times, where every new social or political battle feels like (and may very well be) the difference between the world ending. If Infinity War can successfully weave a thematic narrative that says something important about where we are now as a society, it will make the story mean something even if the plot is an overcomplicated tangle.
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.
Still from Avengers: Infinity War trailer (2018). Image via Marvel/Disney
The supersized cast can’t drag the movie down
This one is incredibly obvious, but it’s also the biggest hurdle for Infinity War to overcome. The directors have stated that this installment will feature 67 characters. Which, you have to admit, is kind of mind-blowing.
While it will undoubtedly be cool to get to see all the MCU characters packed into one movie, I have a hard time imagining that it will be anything more than a novelty at best, and an obnoxious slog of did-you-get-that-references at worst.
In many ways, the massive cast guarantees that Infinity War will be a unique experiment, even if it sucks. A movie with such a huge cast is a rare thing to begin with, and this movie will be banking on the brand recognition of many of its superheroes. What might become a problem is when that brand recognition becomes the entire basis of those characters in the story.
To conceptualize how Infinity War might handle so many characters, it might help to look to Marvel’s largely successful experiment with a larger than usual cast: Civil War.
Of course, Civil War is by no means a perfect movie. At best the plot is far-fetched, and at worst it is deeply convoluted. But the film succeeds in spite of that by the graces of its humor, its wit, and its solid foundation of character-driven momentum that makes its action sequences actually mean something.
However, Infinity War’s success won’t be as simple as copying Civil War’s formula. With five times as many characters in play and the stakes driven galactically higher, Infinity War is a bigger movie on every level. But obviously, bigger isn’t always better. After a relentless onslaught of world-ending films over the past decade, the threat of Earth’s destruction is hardly enough to warrant a second look.
Next: Check out Twitter's reactions to the new Infinity War trailer
Do we really need every single MCU character in one movie? What is it accomplishing, other than for the sake of a bunch of cameos? Is it actually possible to utilize that many characters in a way that justifies their presence in the story, when you only have a two and a half hour movie block to do so? I honestly don’t know. But I look forward to see how Infinity War attempts to answer those questions.