I've been thinking about anxiety and depression and the unfortunate way that they've affected my life, and how, even though everybody bloody has them, apparently no organization is set up to deal with it. However, as I am a) aware that there are others who have dealt with that at much greater length lately (see also Wil Wheaton), and b) that it's kind of dull, I am therefore going to c) talk about Avengers: Infinity War. Be warned, for them as care, here there be spoilers, although I do not intend to sum up the plot nor give any background beyond that which is necessary for a reasonably coherent paragraph or two. Will this be particularly insightful? Will reading this improve your viewing experience? Will you pay three installments of $19.95 each for this amazing TV offer? 

Enh, probably not. 

So. Here we've got a big ol' massive event with oodles and boodles of characters, a special effects budget bigger than some cheaper military hardware, and Tobias Funke in a supporting role. Seriously. He's in there. I saw this thing. I had a good time with it. I'd recommend that people see it. 

And yet, the complaints of several people I've heard, I agree with. They're totally valid.

You have to have seen a bunch of previous movies to get this. There's no way around it - you have to have seen Doctor Strange, Iron Man, Iron Man: Civil War (little joke there), Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Thor: Ragnarok at a minimum to know what the hell to make of this thing. Add Iron Man III, Captain America: Winter Soldier and Thor if you want to be thorough. So that's kind of putting up a barrier to newcomers to the series, although based on the box office, that's not doing too much harm right now. 

What it is doing is making this, literally, an event. Not a movie. You can go back and watch, say, Empire Strikes Back, and at least to a certain extent, you can enjoy it, even without watching A New Hope. The cast is small, you can deduce a lot of the backstory just by watching things happen, it makes a certain amount of sense. 

This, on the other hand - I am, like, totally not sure that this will be watchable in five years' time. (Did the accent come through there?) Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark will still be a classic character, sure (although let's face it, two of the three Iron Man movies were ... not great) but will people remember Doctor Strange and Civil War and whatnot enough to get the plot? 

Plus, as an added bonus to my skepticism, I remember what happened with Watchmen. Watchmen was a twelve month comic book limited series to begin with - which is important to remember these days because you can't go into a bookstore without tripping over the Watchmen book and the Absolute Watchmen deluxe book and the Watchmen box set complete with Rorschach mask and the Amazing Garden Weasel. 

I didn't have many people to talk comics with back then, but amongst those I could, we talked Watchmen for hours, every issue. We examined every page for clues: I remember I was convinced - as I'm sure I was meant to be - that Hooded Justice had thrown the Comedian out the window, due to the similarity of hand positions between one frame of the Comedian as a young man being beaten up and another frame of the elder Comedian getting beaten up, just prior to the aforementioned being-thrown-out-the-window. That was so much a part of the Watchmen experience that rereading it today feels like a pale, wan, boring imitation of the original 

Anticipation was a major part of the Watchmen event, just as it was back in 1841 when issues containing the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop caused riots on the docks of New York City (spoiler alert: Little Nell? Dead.) Anticipation is a major - albeit mostly unexamined part - of the impact of any cultural artifact that spreads itself across time. There's a reason James Bond movies used to end with the words "James Bond will return" in some form - in point of fact, as I mentioned the last post I made, Ian Fleming was a master in using anticipation in spackling over the problems in his stories, by putting little interlocking cliffhangers that dragged you ever onwards - and it's the same reason we got so excited when Sam Jackson said those words at the end of Iron Man.

Being told about something and then being told that you can't have it yet makes it all the more exciting, for the same reason that being told about a scary monster is scarier than being shown a scary monster. Once you see it, it's concrete. As Stephen King said in Danse Macabre, the monster may be twenty feet tall, but "at least it's not a hundred." The big Crisis Crossover may be twenty characters big, but, dangit, it's not a hundred characters. 

Not every experience is improved by anticipation, but many are. And this? This is one of them. Every one in the theatre had our own hypothetical movie that we'd be watching in our heads before the lights went down. We always do. (I had a much different movie in my head especially before Green Lantern, but we will talk about that on another day when I have had my lithium.)

So ... this is a firefly in a jar, caught on a summer's night. It will only last so long, and when it's gone, it's gone. 

How is it as a firefly, then?

Well, it's all right. I enjoyed myself.

But you know what movie I went back to last night?

Rampage.

Because it's exhausting. It's damn near three hours long once trailers are included. Stuff gets thrown at you fast enough that you genuinely don't give a crap about a lot of it - and for those who disagree, here's a little test: Name Thanos's henchmen. And if you can, did you know them before the movie? If you get more than one, you're a better man than I am. Honestly, I can't even tell two of them apart - there's the big guy who knocked around Manhattan at the beginning of the movie, and I'm almost positive he was also in Wakanda near the end, with the big dome and the Vision and like that. 

There's whole sequences in the movie that I would pay big money to lose, just to reduce the narrative load a little - and, I'm sorry, but they pretty much all revolve around the Vision and Paul Bettany. When he puts some goddamn life into his voice, he's a good actor. When he's playing The Messiah 2.0, he's not just a snoozer, he's actively annoying ... and it's not helped by the fact that the Scarlet Witch and everyone near her is a moron. Unstoppable bad guy who wants to kill untold quintillions of intelligent life across the universe on his way? Fuck it, get out the ice cream scoop and get that gem off that there forehead. Yes, I know, from a narrative sense, it helps. It plays into the whole "sacrifice your loved one for a greater good" theme/question of the movie, but fuck, it was artificial (in a bad way), it didn't feel organic to the movie, and it let them bring Ms. Plot Device Herself back into the movie - I like the actress who plays T'challa's sister a lot, but she's what The Smart Guy usually is in these stories, which is a way to get yourself out of or into a problem - she's not a character, she's the author saying "Well, Thanos is just going to bloody well show up with this here gem still in the forehead, deal with it" and flipping the audience off. 

I really would have liked more from other sequences, too: Thor's trip to the forgeworld would have been an awesome movie that nobody except me and the other three people who liked Thor: The Dark World would have gone to. I'd have liked more information about Titan - which, thank the Maker, is no longer the moon in orbit around Saturn - and so on.

So it's not the movie I had in my head in that respect: I really hate Q - style characters who Provide The Gear or Solve The Problem but have no other personal arcs or involvement in the story, and Paul Bettany playing Jesus bores me silly. Fine. No worries there. You can agree or disagree on those, and I'll be fine.

I'm sad about two other characters though - one a mischaracterization, and one a wasted opportunity.

Mischaracterization first: Zoe Saldana can play badass. I've seen her. Hell, she was in a movie with three (I think) other actors who're in this movie with her where she was the scariest one (The Losers, if you're interested. I like it, the snuke(sic) aside. Your mileage may vary.)  In Marvel canon, Gamorra is described as the baddest-ass woman this side of Lynda Carter. What does she do here? Whimper and beg the Man in Her Life to shoot her. And as soon as he doesn't, she rolls over pretty much instantly to give Thanos what he wants. This is not badass. Okay, sure, she does a bit of stabbing, but it's vanishingly brief in comparison to the whimpering and the rolling. What the hell, Marvel?

Wasted opportunity second: Captain America: The First Avenger is my favorite Marvel movie. The lead actor plays Cap with a sense of humor. He's got opinions. He's got attitude. He's got a personality. In this? And Winter Soldier? And Civil War? Cap is a stoic, glum character to whom things happen. I know, it's hard writing a genuinely decent character, but Cap (here and in a LOT of recent comics with him) is a total stiff with no personality. The actor (sorry, I know he's a Chris, but I can't remember the last name and I'm not gonna look it up right now. He's not Hemsworth or Pine, but I'm blanking on what he is) is genuinely funny as hell. He was the best part of the Fantastic Four movies, he was the best one in The Losers because he was funny, he has serious comic chops ... and he's asked to play a role that could have been played by Tor Johnson. 

So, after all this, you may be asking "why do you like it, then?"

Well, Zoe Saldana and Paul Bettany and Chris (*mumble*) aside, the actors all do a damn good job. Marvel's got a big group of actors who can steal a scene,  ham it up when needed, and crank it down when needed. Cumberbatch and Downey have good chemistry together, Rocket and Thor play off each other well (although Rocket drops out of focus a bit early in their sequence. He needed more "Whee! Weapons!") 

As a set of character pieces, the movie generally works, Vision aside. They're fun little micro-movies that are well worth watching. 

And then there's Josh Brolin, who totally nails it here. I'm sorry, Andy Serkis, but if there's any justice in the world, you aren't going to be the first guy to win an Oscar for a CG performance, it's Brolin. He makes Thanos believable - it really is Jim Starlin's Thanos up there, but it takes some heavy lifting to make him work, and Brolin does. There's some minor continuity issues between Thanos's appearances, but in general, for once, Marvel has a villain who's not forgettable and wimpy. Seriously; Brolin pulls off a performance that, while perhaps not written as well as, I dunno, Passage to India or something, makes Grimace's butch brother actually have gravitas.

So - this isn't a movie. It's an event. It won't make sense in five years. But it's still worth it to watch the actors work.