8 Reasons Not To Get Excited For Avengers: Infinity War
4. The Difference In Scale Will Be Too Big To Work
Slowly and steadily the scale of the action in the Marvel movies has risen and risen and risen. In Iron Man 1 the film ended with two men fighting before a reactor explodes, which is frankly quaint these days. In the first Avengers movie, a demigod opened a portal to another realm and a New York was invaded. Bigger, but still manageable. In Age of Ultron, a Killer Robot created a supreme being to destroy Earth but instead raised a big city to crash into the planet. The scale increases again, but everyone still just about comprehends what's at stake. In Infinity War, the entire universe is going to be wiped out by a God who can shape reality using a variety of complicated magical powers in order to woo the physical embodiment of the Goddess of Death. Ok, too far. An audience can only invest in so much. There comes a point where the human imagination gets tired and all the higher and higher stake blur together. Simple emotional stakes work best. The ending of Skyfall for example is so better than the endings of nearly all of the Marvel movies. It's pared down in terms of character and location, allowing tension to build. The audience knows who everyone is and what everyone wants. They're fighting with guns and bombs, and everyone understands how they work and what damage they can do. The more cosmic and VAST the Marvel movies get, the more it just becomes noise and colours. The audience will only feel loss, triumph, fear and excitement if it can empathise with the circumstances on screen. The more operatic and reality-shifting it gets, the less you're likely to care. Speaking of really weird space-operas...
