Avengers infinity war movie free how to#

On top of that, the narrative ends up splitting to put a wide selection of characters in different places, chasing goals in ways that don’t always convey urgency. The most purely comic-relief characters barely get out a few dark, barbed chuckle lines along the way, and many of the action scenes are brief and abortive. Endgame’s tone is mostly deeply somber - even when the protagonists formulate a plan and start taking steps, they’re grim and angry.

Avengers infinity war movie free how to#

The crowded cast means that no one character gets much time to fully examine their feelings, but directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely make it clear that they’re all thinking about individual people who died in Infinity War, and how to navigate a future without them.Įndgame spends so much time on these thoughts that it winds up turning into an extended superhero take on Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s excellently weird HBO series The Leftovers, about survivors navigating the wake of a mass worldwide disappearance. Avengers: Endgame puts the brakes on that by finally taking its own sweet time in exploring how heroes might deal with grief, loss, survivors’ guilt, and the pervasive feeling of failure.

Hero movies have a longstanding bad habit of faking a character’s tragic death for a few seconds of pathos, then immediately taking it back - and Marvel’s parent company, Disney, has a particularly bad track record with this trope, going all the way back to 1937. Photo: Film Frame / Marvel Studiosīut nothing so far has broken the Marvel formula quite like Avengers: Endgame, which follows Infinity War by diving deep into the previous film’s feeling of emotional loss and helplessness, exploring it at length, and then expanding into something that isn’t so much a Marvel story as a series of calculated payoffs for a decade of Marvel stories. Avengers: Infinity War let the heroes lose, and lose big - even killing off many of the series’ flagship characters at the end. Thor: Ragnarok placed its story in the hands of Taika Waititi, a comedian with a distinctively deadpan sensibility, and introduced indie-style emotional improv to the superhero world. Spider-Man: Homecoming followed up on the international hero-on-hero warfare of Captain America: Civil War with a personal little neighborhood story that dialed the MCU stakes way back and reset expectations for the franchise. The MCU films have set off a mania for interconnected multi-platform franchises and multi-film arcs, not to mention a still-growing tide of superhero stories in every possible medium.īut while Marvel has expressly laid out a number of formulas that its competitors have struggled to imitate - from its highly specific mix of action and fast-paced snippy humor to its frequent, unapologetic visual and narrative nods to the most obsessive fans in its midst - it’s also beginning to break those formulas. After 10 years, 21 films, nearly a dozen television shows, countless tie-in comics and games and merchandising options and viral videos, and billions upon billions of dollars in earnings, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the Holy Grail that every major studio is questing after, usually with little success.

It’s been just over a decade since Marvel Studios launched its flagship franchise of interconnected comics-inspired movies with 2008’s Iron Man, and even now it’s difficult to begin to evaluate how much that franchise has changed the face of filmmaking. Spoiler notice: this review expressly doesn’t spoil any specific plot points in Avengers: Endgame whatsoever, but does discuss general themes, ideas, and cast members.