Blog: The Avengers... Or Did I Dream It?

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Last night I went to see "Avengers: Infinity War". Or at least I think I did.

It's a film I've been looking forward to for ages, in that weird way what one does for these sort of films, wanting to know as much as possible about it whilst also simultaneously NOT wanting to know. This led to me being desperate to go and see it as soon as possible purely so that I could get it out of the way - usually with the big superhero films I enjoy them LOADS more on the telly, but I feel I HAVE to go and see them at The Pictures just so that I can look at the internet again without panicking about SPOILERS.

I had big plans to go and see it at the slightly grotty little Odeon on Tottenham Court Road, as that is where I have been to see the majority of superhero films over the years. It's a GRATE place to go because it's (usually) near my work, so I've been able to go to earlier screenings when it's not so busy, but ALAS my plans fell to DUST yesterday when I ended up having to sit and do WORK a bit later than usual. This was all a bit upsetting, as my next chance to go would have been next week, but then I remembered that there is a GIGANTO cinema 10 minutes from my front door, in Westfield Stratford, so booked a ticket for that (with QR code ticket on my phone! So futuristic!) and off I went.

It was, as everybody else has said, dead good, although I had to keep reminding myself that I was actually WATCHING it. Always, with these films, I find myself thinking "Wow, imagine if this was a REAL THING and there really WAS a film about The Avengers" because it is SUCH an incredible thing. It was difficult enough when the first film came out and had Iron Man AND Thor AND Captain America AND The Hulk all together, but now it is getting ridiculous. If you had told ten-year-old me - or twenty- or thirty-year-old me, for that matter - that there would one day be a film where the BIG STARS would be The Guardians Of The Galaxy I would have LARFED in your face. The idea that it would also star Black Panther and Doctor Strange, and that the absence of Ant Man (and the Scott Lang version of Ant Man too!) would be REMARKED upon would be utterly ludicrous, never mind that FACT that it's one of the biggest selling films of all time.

The daftest part of it all is that there are now SUPERHERO PROGRAMMES on telly that I don't even bother to watch. Fair enough when it's the DC shows, but there are whole SERIES of perfectly good television programmes about Daredevil, Luke Cage, The Punisher etc that I have not even got around to looking at yet, such is the DELUGE of such programmes! I guess if they had more MASSIVE TWISTS to avoid then I would!

This film had its fair share of surprises, but mainly I enjoyed it for the way it mixed up all the characters. It reminded me - A LOT - of The Wedding Of Sue And Reed in Fantastic Four Annual #3 what I wrote about a while ago for my Marvel Age Doom blog. This was the moment when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby got to REVEL in the gigantic storyworld they had created by throwing EVERYBODY into the mix (even Millie The Model!), and even, much like in "Infinitiy War", giving reasons for the lack of presence of the few missing characters. Both comic and film are JOYFUL explorations for all the different ways these characters could work together, and it's especially COOL in the film to see them simultaneously mixing together the different TONES of the different stories too, like the COMEDY of "Guardians Of The Galaxy" rubbing up against the psychedelic effects of Doctor Strange, or the politics of "Captain America".

It was, to be clear, GRATE. I can't wait for it to pop up on Amazon Prime so I can watch it all over again!

posted 2/5/2018 by MJ Hibbett

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