It’s hard not to be wowed by this movie. It was made to be a spectacle. The action set pieces, the special effects, the star power. It’s all epic. Which makes it difficult to assess. You have to step back from it a little bit, let those warm fuzzies you get (from watching a big movie in a big theater) dissipate. This is, famously, the culmination of the past 10 years of Marvel movies. After 18 films, they’ve pretty much figured out what works. But this is a whole different animal. They’ve never had this many big characters in one movie. They’ve never taken the risks that they took in this movie. And they’ve never had a bad guy like this.

There are things you can complain about. It jumps right into the action, without any kind of expositional buffer or character set up (but really, if you’re complaining about that kind of thing at this point, you’re kind of missing the point). It’s pretty long, which can cause you to have a very physical reaction…if you happen to eat too much popcorn and drink too much of the liter-a-cola size cups they have at movie theaters (seriously, I thought I was going to have some kind of medical emergency at one point, but I couldn’t leave and miss something!). But it needed to be long in order to fit in all the people they wanted to, and to let the plot and action sequences play out in a natural, satisfying way.

Look, this is a movie that you could hate if you really wanted to. You could say that it’s made purely for dollars. For dominating the box office and breaking records, and all that. And certainly that is a major reason these movies get made. And they succeed at all of those things. But I think Infinity War also shows that Kevin Feige, and the other people in charge of this intellectual property, actually care about it as a story. And that benefits the film, and the whole series, in a big way.

This was a whole hell of a lot of fun to watch, and had surprising emotional weight too. I still feel like I’ll need some time to contemplate it in relation to the other movies in this series. But I think when all is said and done, this movie will loom large in the pantheon of not only Marvel movies, but movies in general. There’s something to be said about that. It’s hard to succeed at such a high level. Infinity War does.

And I can’t wait to see what happens next.

4 out of 5 stars