Avengers: Infinity War Review

The structural gamble is the whole achievement: the Russos give the protagonist slot to Thanos, so the film has a spine rather than a shared timetable, and every hero sequence becomes a complication in somebody else's plan. Josh Brolin plays him as tired rather than vain, and the Vormir scene with Gamora is the one moment that makes the character's arithmetic feel like grief instead of a spreadsheet. Six threads run at once across four planets and the cutting keeps them legible, which is a harder trick than any of the set pieces.

Titan is the best of those, because it is a fight built on people using their powers as tools rather than trading punches. The dialogue leans on the banter register the studio had by then perfected, and it occasionally deflates a scene that wanted to be heavier. None of this works without eighteen prior films, which is either a flaw or the point. The ending is what earns the grade: a blockbuster of this size closing on total defeat, with no reassurance offered, was simply not a thing that happened.