I liked it! My wife thought it was overstuffed, but I thought it handled its stuffing appropriately. I feel like it’s getting weirdly overhyped by reviewers, but is still good.

Things:

  1. Main flaw with the movie: The plot that was driving it didn’t make a lick of goddamn sense. You’re telling me that some rando coordinated this elaborate global scheme involving all kinds of headfakes and major operations all by himself for a strictly personal goal? No, that’s absurd. I get that the movie didn’t want to do an Ultron thing of making the main villain be both supes-badass and also semi-irrelevant, but come on.

  2. It might seem like I’m joking when I say that this was basically a character study, but it was. Really glad they gave everyone more time to breathe here. And of course it helps that they’ve all been so established in previous movies, so you get those great dynamics for free. The connected universe stuff is paying off so hard.

  3. Black Panther: A++, between the almost-certain reaction to his character in this movie and Coates’ comic, they have to be just about kicking themselves that they stupidly delayed his movie until 2018.

  4. Spiderman: B. Really liked the character, really liked how he integrated into the movie, but it doesn’t feel fresh enough to justify making Yet Another Spiderman movie. They so 100% should have done Miles Morales, it would have worked even better and made you think of T-Mc so much less. Still, I believe they can make a non-sucky Spiderman movie at least, and if they tie it in with other characters, that’ll help avoid it feeling repetitive. I’m withholding judgment, but I am 1000% more excited for Black Panther than this.

  5. As far as the Civil War stuff goes, I thought Tony’s position was hard to buy at first, but RDJ acted it well enough to make his guilt/anger thing believable. 100% sold by the actor, to the 90% that I ended up buying it. Other characters I thought ended up working pretty well, too.

  6. Thing that I didn’t buy: The fight at the end. “Hey, the bad guy is deliberately trying to set us up to fight, and he’s doing it by showing a clip where mind-controlled Bucky did something bad, which we all know is a thing that happens, and ps we just made up after foolishly fighting before.” Expected result: Everyone’s all like “um, okay dude, let’s get him!” Actual result: Weird inexplicable fight. Why? Made zero sense.

  7. I’m really glad the directors are making the next Avengers, because if they tried to slip into Avengers 4 with a different thematic tone (like how they did between Cap2 and Avengers 2), it just would not work AT ALL. They need an integrated vision in these Avengers movies.

  8. Overall, I don’t know if this is the best Avengers movie — probably not, Avengers 1 was really strong — but it’s a very good one. It’s difficult to handle that big ensemble cast, and it’s only gotten bigger (even without Thor and the Hulk), but they really made it work.