I still do like to critique, but I began to think less in terms of what the movie is and more in terms of what the movie represents. My critiques grew past the confines of the movie itself and expanded into the movie's context, the place the movie has in the world and the effect it has on our culture. When I talk about "good" movies now I don't mean technically competent movies so much as movies that do good. A movie is good if it's a good thing the movie exists.
So this is not exactly a review of Avengers: Infinity War but rather a review of Hollywood and movies in general. There are of course many things to say in a conventional review about the movie, all about how the movie made us feel and how we laughed at these moments and cried at these moments and liked certain characters or didn't like certain characters, but that's all been said and it's not what I want to say. I'd rather talk about what the movie teaches us, either consciously or subconsciously.
When it comes to a movie or really any kind of story, it's important to ask what it's about. What is the meaning behind it? What is it trying to say? What is the message? The moral? Does it have one? Does it even have a point at all? Sometimes it seems like writers skip that part, or decide the movie needs to say something so they draw a meaning out of a hat. That's how movies end up being about really safe things like the importance of friendship and working together, themes that don't really challenge our preconceived notions at all. A movie like Infinity War specifically needed to appeal to as many people as possible to sell as many tickets as possible on a global scale so it couldn't afford to take ideological risks. Is it just an emotional action adventure movie about witty likable characters or does it have some meaning beyond that?
I love Lord of the Rings. I don't think there's a single movie that can top how many times I've seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And seeing how it's based on a classic work of literature, I've spent many years trying to extract some kind of meaning from it. Some people say it's about the rise of technology and industry threatening a more peaceful and humble and natural way of living, but most examinations reveal it to just be a fun fantasy adventure with little or no point beyond that. Then I heard about a Lord of the Rings spin-off where Sauron was a freedom fighter and it made a lot of sense to me, and I started seeing Lord of the Rings in a different light when I watched the movies.
Sauron was forced to live in the crappiest place in the world. Everyone else got green pastures and blue skies, but the orcs were walled into this ghetto and were killed whenever they tried to leave. In the movies we see the forces of Mordor portrayed as the warmongers, always slaughtering innocents, but isn't that what you'd expect to see if history is written by the victors? We see men and elves and dwarves portrayed as brave heroes and they often refer to Mordor as just "the enemy." Isn't that nationalistic pro-war language? Grima and Denethor suggested that the heroes shouldn't be fighting, and they're portrayed as slimy traitors. Can you perhaps imagine a real-life equivalent of Lord of the Rings happening a totally different way in reality but then being presented in the media and the history books as something more like the Peter Jackson films?
I know this little tangent sounds awfully silly to someone who hasn't thought along those lines before, but that's part of my point. We've been watching movies like this all our lives only seeing them one way, oblivious to the effects they may be having on our psyches: the subconscious sources of all of our opinions on everything. There is no part of me that believes Peter Jackson actually intended Lord of the Rings as pro-war propaganda, but that's also part of my point. When a filmmaker isn't entirely sure what they want to say with a movie their subconscious biases derived from the status quo and their own lifetime of movie-going creep into the movie they're making, and then get transferred to the subconscious minds of the audience. I don't believe Joss Whedon intended Firefly as support for the Civil War Confederacy and I don't believe its fans interpret it that way, but there it is.
If you don't think movies are really affecting your entire worldview on a deeply subconscious level, ask yourself this. Do you think in terms of good and evil? Do you think there is such a thing as good and evil or good guys and bad guys? Do you think there are villains out there that brave heroes need to defeat? Do you think violence is necessary to achieve peace? Is peace even your goal? Is violence ever necessary?
These aren't incredibly outlandish ideas, and I'm not saying any given answer to any of those questions is necessarily wrong. My point is that it's largely movies that are informing our answers to those questions, and they're mostly doing it without you being aware of it and without the movies themselves even trying to. The idea that there is such a thing as a bad guy is a deeply ingrained part of both our psyches and our culture and there are real-life consequences when it comes to how willing a nation is to dehumanize other nations and go to war. Before we can think differently about that we first need to realize that another way of thinking even exists. We need to imagine what we might be thinking if we never saw any of these movies or read any of these books and had instead read books and watched movies where there weren't any villains and the conflicts were internal.
You might be skeptical of Hollywood's capacity to make movies that don't have villains. Indeed, Aristotle seemed to think of antagonists as a necessity. Inside Out comes to mind as a movie where all the conflict is internal if you'll forgive my double-meaning. But again, I digress.
Infinity War is an incredibly popular movie. There was a local 18-screen theater that was playing it on 12 screens. When I went to a second-weekend matinee, the theater was packed. It made a billion dollars in the first 11 days.
What is Infinity War about? Well it's a Marvel movie, so you can expect plenty of violence. Somehow we don't think of these movies as movies about violence. We think of all the heroics and kind of forget the violence, and that's kind of my point. When we talk about becoming desensitized to violence, maybe it's more than just the toughening of our guts so we aren't horrified by torture and don't faint anymore when we see blood. Maybe it's that violence is so normalized and expected that we don't even think of it as violence anymore. It's just what the heroes gotta do to win.
Thanos is what I call a complex villain, and when I explain what I mean by this I always use Babylon 5 as an example. The Shadows are a boring villain because they're defined as just pure evil and there's really no motivation to their actions beyond that. The Centauri on the other hand should know better. That's why the Shadows are a basic villain and the Centauri are a complex villain.
Thanos has a heart. He believes he's doing the right thing to save everyone, and not once does anyone ever try to reason or negotiate with him. Our heroes, the people the audience is being told are the good guys, immediately resort to violence and never even try anything else. They punch and stab and shoot and when that doesn't work they punch and stab and shoot some more. Even Doctor Strange, the unconventional fighter who defeated evil using his wits in his own movie, contributes by hurling fireballs. Avengers: Infinity War is the story of the greatest doom the Marvel universe has ever faced, but why is it so dire? Why is everyone so doomed? Because, as is continuously proven to us again and again over the span of a few hours, Thanos is too powerful to be defeated by brute force. That's why we're all doomed.
"But wait!" you say. "Surely violence is needed in real life when faced with violent enemies." Well maybe, but is it the solution every time? Is it really plausible that violence is needed so often that we should just assume there's no other way in every situation? Is the trope of there being no alternative to violence in movie after movie really an accurate reflection of reality?
"But wait!" you say. "Our heroes knew intuitively that Thanos couldn't be reasoned with so they didn't want to waste precious time." Why, because he's a big bad villain? Thanos wanted balance, so why not ask him if having all the power in the universe really seems like balance? Why not appeal to his desire to end suffering when trying to get him to stop torturing people? If I were reasoning with Thanos, I'd ask him to use his time stone to look into the future he was making and see if it was really what he wanted. I saw a post on Facebook making Thanos look like an idiot for using his unlimited power to reduce the number of people rather than just increasing the number of resources. And to be clear, I'm not saying any of this would work. But when a movie is full of people we're calling heroes who have powers that are all about winning fights and battles and wars, and these heroes shoot first and ask questions later, that means something.
Consider Star Trek: The Next Generation. The crew of the Enterprise encounters god-beings that they're no match for, but is all hope lost? Of course not, because when faced with a seemingly impossible situation where a hostile omnipotent enemy gives you an ultimatum there's no way out of, the Enterprise crew members put their heads together and come up with some kind of intelligent peaceful solution. Compare that with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Those heroes faced off with a god and rectified the situation by blowing it up.
I know Infinity War is just a popcorn movie made to sell tickets and let the audience have a good movie-going experience. It would be fair to say that I'm reading too much into it if my claim were that the filmmakers intended all these effects. But again, what I'm saying is that the filmmakers don't intend these messages any more than the audience interprets them, but they're there all the same. It's just a matter of thinking a little harder about what a movie represents and what it's saying whether it means to say that or not.
