Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War feels like a Marvel movie on steroids. Trying to describe any part of it alone will make you sound like you’ve lost your mind; trying to describe it all kind of makes it sound like it’s lost its mind. And it’s all the more confounding for how closely it mirrors its decade of movie predecessors only to end up shattering that mirror: Infinity War moves, sounds, and acts like a typical Marvel movie, but then unmasks itself as a creature distinctly its own.

Directed by the Russo brothers, the architects behind Captain America: Civil War and Captain America: Winter Soldier. It’s a testament to Marvel and the Russos’ daring that villain Thanos is actually one of the less surprising things about Infinity War. For the past six years, we’ve been told that he’s on a collision course with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, setting us up for the chaos that ensues in this long-heralded culmination. What I didn’t fully realize is just what that chaos would look like, and that Marvel had the guts to, mostly, pull it off.

The most difficult task Infinity War is faced with is addressing all of the characters, motivations, subplots, and relationships that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has built up over the years without making it feel like an expository avalanche careening down a mountain to bury the audience below. For example: Gamora and Nebula are adopted daughters of Thanos, the villain of Infinity War and the big bad lurking in the shadows of Marvel’s movies since 2012’s Avengers. Gamora and Nebula hate each other and hate Thanos, who tortured them by pitting them against each other; he also killed the family of Gamora’s Guardians of the Galaxy teammate Drax. Gamora, Drax, and the other Guardians aren’t technically Avengers, but that’s just because they operate in Marvel’s cosmic universe, which we found out in Thor: Ragnarok is connected to Thor’s Asgard, a recently destroyed world populated by Norse gods and goddesses. That intricate web of characters and motivations barely scratches the surface of four of Marvel’s recent movies; there are 18 total, not including Infinity War. The Russo brothers’ solution to this dilemma is to turn a movie nominally about the Avengers into a movie about Thanos, played by Brolin decked out in lumpy mounds of purple CGI.

Most of the Marvel superheroes appearing in Infinity War, particularly Black Panther and Captain America, are compressed, concentrated versions of themselves. T’Challa is given five or so lines to be majestic in his defense of Wakanda; Captain America gets a few more minutes to be noble and inspiring. Spider-Man (Tom Holland) is around to remind us that he’s young. Scarlet Witch and Vision have scenes together to tell you they’re in love. Characters like Drax, Mantis, Falcon, Bucky Barnes, Shuri, Okoye, Rocket, Black Widow, and, of course, Groot have a few one-liners. Instead of showing us why these characters are so beloved, the Russo brothers employ a Marvel shorthand of sorts, relying on past movies to do most of the work. And that’s not an unreasonable instinct: Captain America’s first onscreen return in Civil War is awe-inspiring in large part because he’s the Captain America who’s lived in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the past seven years. The same kind of chills happen when the Wakanda theme plays in Infinity War — a testament to the power of Ryan Coogler’s massive film.

Not all of the film’s heroes are underutilized, though. Tony Stark’s fear of a galactic threat, established over the past few films featuring him, is fully realised in Thanos, and Downey sinks his teeth into Stark’s vulnerability and apprehension. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor are apt counters to Stark. Cumberbatch’s Strange is coolly stubborn, calculating in ways that Stark isn’t. And Hemsworth, after flexing his knack for comedy in Ragnarok, taps into that same humor but laces it with jagged grief and anger informed by having seen Thanos’s wrath firsthand. It would have been stellar to see all of Marvel’s superheroes allowed these little pockets of storytelling in between the Thanos action, but there’s not enough room in Infinity War’s two hours and 40 minutes. I’m not convinced that giving us a Thanos origin story and relying on that Marvel superhero shorthand to fill in the gaps was the most efficient way.

Midway through, I lost count of the planets and galaxies visited, each one terrifyingly beautiful in its own way. There’s a breath-stopping visit to a deserted ghost city of a planet, so evocative you can almost smell the sulfur in the air and feel the temperature drop when it comes on the screen. The problem with flexing this sort of expansive world building is that it requires so much jumping around the universe that the film feels like it’s spinning plates. That results in the compression I mentioned earlier, the feeling that some characters are around simply to remind you they exist. But it also, frustratingly, kneecaps what should be the MCU’s grandest fight scene, Infinity War’s invasion of Wakanda. It’s the largest-scale onscreen fight I can recall since the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Our heroes, in a valiant last stand, are the only thing that stands between Thanos and universal destruction. And his generals have unleashed thousands of intergalactic hounds upon Wakanda. Unfortunately, though, because there are multiple storylines going on at one time, we jump from Wakanda to outer space and another faction of Avengers doing their part to save the universe, or get thrust into Thor’s side quest to find a weapon strong enough to kill Thanos.

It’s frustrating that it’s so difficult to fully appreciate the fantastic work that went into orchestrating these massive spectacles when we’re constantly being jostled from place to place. Midway through, all these different settings and all these jumps begin to feel exhausting.

But still, Infinity War boasts the most breathtaking, audacious moment in superhero movie history, one that rocketed through my brain an heart. For the first time in a while, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

A Quiet Place

The horror is tricky to get right and modern horror films have developed a new set of rules for the genre. They tend to be sub-par, a parody of its own genre, pandering to the lowest common denominator with copious and unnecessary amounts of gore and cheap, poorly filmed jump-scares. Sad as that may be, there is a silver lining; namely, in a genre saturated with bad films, whenever there is a decent one, it gets the appropriate attention and praise it deserves. Last year the exception to the rule was Get Out – a different, unique horror film that audiences and critics alike adored, partly due to its strength and partly because it stood out among the slew of films released at the same time. And now this year, we have A Quiet Place, comparable to Get Out in how it has made a splash in Hollywood, bringing in a large audience and receiving universal praise and adoration. Personally, I haven’t seen suspense like this in a film since Berlin Syndrome at the 2017 Glasgow Film Festival.  

Cinema may be an audiovisual medium, but silence is one of the most effective tools a film-maker has at their disposal. When used well, the absence of any and all noise can draw an audience into a moment like nothing else, instantly ramping up the tension as they tentatively wait to see what might be behind the sudden need for quiet. It's a very primal reaction that films have been taking advantage of for decades now, and it's one that A Quiet Place uses to great effect, making well-established techniques feel incredibly fresh in the process.

I mean, it's kind of genius really. By setting a horror movie in a world where making any kind of noise is likely to get you killed by a lightning fast and virtually invulnerable alien predator, A Quiet Place finds an in-universe excuse to never allow its audience the release of tension that something as simple as a conversation or the hustle and bustle of normal life often provides. Most of the time, a dead silence in a horror film indicates that something is about to jump out and scare you - here, it's indicative of nothing in particular, offering no clues about if the characters we follow throughout (the Abbott family) are in immediate danger or not, and that can't help but imbue every single scene with a staggering amount of suspense that the film itself doesn't even need to work that hard to maintain. Even the most ordinary of day-to-day tasks take on extra significance when the smallest of slip ups will have deadly consequences, and that's something that A Quiet Place takes great pleasure in playing with.

A Quiet Place is really intelligently written - not that it's thematically deep or scientifically accurate or asking big philosophical questions of its audience, but simply because it has a really solid understanding of how to get the most out of its premise. The film never abandons its smart suspense building techniques in favour of the kind of exciting but dumb chase sequences you could easily imagine it falling back on. Everything logically stems from the thing that preceded it, resulting in a film that feels less like a monster movie and more like watching a carefully constructed Rube Goldberg machine operate without fault. A sound attracts the aliens; the Abbotts do something to draw the aliens away; now they must deal with the consequences of what they did to draw the aliens away. It's nothing groundbreaking by any means but it gives a sense of internal consistency, a sense of consequence that is vital to its success.

It helps, of course, that director/co-writer/star John Krasinski seems just as at home behind the camera as he does in front of it. The amount of visual storytelling required of this kind of film means it could've easily collapsed under its own weight with a less capable director at the helm - fortunately, Krasinski instead makes it all seem quite easy, ensuring throughout that the audience have all the information they need at any given moment to fully understand the stakes of the situation at hand.

None of this is to say that A Quiet Place is flawless, of course. I wish the ending had been reworked but having said that, the poor ending did very little to detract from what A Quiet Place ultimately is - a ridiculously tense and really well put together monster movie that at just 90 minutes long knows what it is and doesn't feel like wasting your time. It's smart, measured, well thought out and imbued with the kind of suspense that I really wish we saw more of in modern cinema.