Avengers: Infinity War (2018) - No Spoilers Review

Starting with the negatives, Infinity War has two potential flaws.

The first is that it has a huge reliance on what has come before. If you try watching Infinity War without having seen most of the other Marvel movies, then you're not going to know who's who, why they are where they are, dozens of references to events in previous movies, and half of the jokes will probably miss completely.

If you're going to cram before seeing it - which is also advisable if you only have a vague recollection of what's gone on before, this is what you should be watching:

Iron Man (you can probably skip both The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2, if you're in a hurry), Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, Avengers, Iron Man 3 (no real requirement for Thor: The Dark World), Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Ant-Man is non-essential), Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther.

So that's over a day's worth of backstory. Take it a movie a day, and you can be sure that Infinity War is still showing in cinemas (although you might find it hard to find Black Panther still playing).

The second flaw - and this is as close as I'm getting to spoilers, so you might want to blink for the rest of this paragraph if you're really sensitive - is the cosmic reset button. You'll get the idea when you see the film - I'm not saying anything more.

On the positive side, by relying on the groundwork laid by the previous films, Infinity War manages to hit the ground running. For the followers of the Marvel Universe, it's a huge pay-off in terms of jumping straight in without messy character introductions. The filmmakers assume you know these characters, assume you understand the relationships between them, and so don't waste any time.

The film is essentially one big love letter to the tradition of the comic book crossover.

For those like me who grew up reading American superhero comic books, the structure of the piece is incredibly familiar. Marvel and DC comic books broadly fell into three categories: on a monthly basis you would have the solo books (Captain America, Iron Man) and the team books (Avengers), and then on a more occasional basis (although these days it happens more and more frequently) you would get the crossover book.

These events would pull together characters from any number of comics (including some who didn't usually get a monthly outing). For DC Comic fans it probably started with the Justice League/Justice Society annual crossovers, reaching its most cosmic with the Crisis on Infinite Worlds story, which brought together DC's entire line. With Marvel you had the likes of Secret Wars and Infinity Gauntlet (from which Infinity War is partially adapted).

In these crossover stories, to deal with the large number of characters, they would split off into smaller teams to deal with a divergent tasks, all of which would eventually play back into the main story - a structure on which Infinity War heavily relies.

The other element to those stories tended to be the scope. Threats were not merely a couple of masked terrorists with a plan for world domination, these crossover events relied on godlike antagonists, threats that affected the whole universe, or the fabric of reality itself.

In that regard, Infinity War delivers. It's the largest scope of any of the Marvel movies so far. The movie looks and feels big (also long at 2 hours 40 minutes). With juggling all of the characters, we don't get enough of some them (for my money Captain America and Black Panther both get short-changed in screen time), but given the amount of people fighting for their cinematic minutes, it's impressive how many are well-served.

Tonally there's also an impressive balancing act. The Guardians of the Galaxy are consistent from their two outings, Thor feels as if he's continuing directly from Ragnarok, Captain America and the earthbound Avenger s might have stepped straight out of Civil War.

For my money, this is the best of the Avengers movies by far. Not my favourite overall in the Marvel Universe, but I can say that I enjoyed pretty much every minute of the long running time.