Late on this one as I was out of the country for almost all of last week, though of course I was always going to watch this. This is a highly anticipated film even to me and I still own the original Infinity Gauntlet comics. Still I kept my expectations to realistic levels and on the whole found this to be solid superhero film and about a good a capstone to the MCU as one could hope for though it isn’t exactly transformative.

Immediately following the events of Thor: Ragnarok, Thanos’ ship intercepts the fleeing Asgardians and summarily defeats all present, gaining the Space stone from Loki. Heimdall sends Bruce Banner to Earth to warn the heroes and he arrives at Dr. Strange’s sanctum. Thanos’ underlings are sent to Earth to retrieve the stones held by Dr. Strange and the Vision. Captain America brings his team to Wakanda to attempt to safely extract the Mind stone from the Vision. Dr. Strange, Iron Man and Spider Man end up in space, deciding to try to bring the fight to Titan. Meanwhile the Guardians of the Galaxy rescue Thor and then split up with one team heading to Knowhere and the other to a place where Thor wants to forge a new weapon. But through it all Thanos strides forward barely impeded by the heroes’ efforts and it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that he succeeds in completing his collection of all six gems to horrific effect.

The coolest part of this film is that it allows Thanos to be the protagonist from the beginning to the end. With so many established characters crammed into one film, the Russo brothers correctly judged that there was no more need to give them character development moments so pretty much every scene with heroes is either in service of action or humor. Instead the film spends its time bringing the previously shadowy figure of Thanos to life, detailing his backstory, his motivations and even his relationship with Gamora. His grand dream of killing half of all life in the universe doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny but its suitably epic and I suppose it’s not for nothing that he is called the Mad Titan. I especially liked Gamora’s interactions with him with the scene in which she disbelievingly coming to realize his intentions and immediately attempts to kill herself. It was a rare moment of genuine dramatic weight in an MCU movie.

I would consider the action scenes to be competently made and surprisingly legible considering how busy the film is. However no scene stood out for me even if I did like the visual references to original comics, such like the Hulk crashing through the Dr. Strange’s window in lieu of the Silver Surfer and how Thanos uses the reality gem to disable Mantis and Drax. As for the humor, while I did like quite a few of the jokes I also felt that there were too many light moments that somewhat undermined the seriousness of the threat. In general one weakness of this film is that with such a large cast of characters, it has become a superhero drama omitting the impact of Thanos’ actions on ordinary actions all over the universe.

Infinity War was obviously designed from the ground up to be the culmination of a series and hence doesn’t work at all as a standalone film. As such I think that it achieves exactly what it aims for, a fantastic, entertaining spectacle that feels immensely satisfying to finally get to. However it would be going too far to say that this is a great film and it isn’t even close to being my favorite of the MCU films.