The first Avengers: Infinity War trailer has dropped, and it’s a doozy. Though I like to think of myself as an appreciator of spare, artistic movies—sometimes in foreign languages—I’ve always been a sucker for superhero movies. Even the bad ones. And that goes double for trailers. So follow me on a way-too-intense dive into this most excellent and exciting of trailers, for the first part of the last arc of the Avengers series...
The Characters
This trailer is stacked. A lot of superhero movies these days are plagued by the critical complaint that there are just too many characters for anyone to be fully developed, and that the favorites never get enough screen time. Infinity War doesn’t care. Here are the many who appear:
Scarlet Witch
Tony Stark / Iron Man
Bruce Banner / The Hulk
Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow
T'Challa / Black Panther
Okoye (an elite bodyguard for the Black Panther)
Steve Rogers / Captain America
Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier
Peter Parker / Spiderman
Vision / Human Version of Vision
Loki
Thor
Sam Wilson / Falcon
Dr. (Stephen) Strange
Thanos
More to be named further down
The Music
We start out with slow, sparse piano notes over a forlorn Tony Stark monologue, which is comic-movie trailer code for “we’re approaching the end, and one or more main characters are going down for good.” After that it’s pretty standard building orchestral drama.
The Narrative
It checks off all the necessary disbelief-suspending boxes, including but not limited to:
Dire monologuing
Explosions
Heavy machinery
The best fight choreography money can buy
Dramatic entrances (sometimes through portals)
Brief moments of desperate tenderness
Infinity stones being plucked out of heads
Armies running toward things
MacGuffins (the movie basically revolves around a series of these)
The Hair-raising, Platitudinous Villain Speech
Josh Brolin’s got a menacing voiceover as interplanetary arch-villain Thanos, who, up to this point in the series, has looked more cartoonish than menacing, perhaps because he’s spent the entirety of the MCU’s run surreptitiously collecting the infinity stones in post-credit scenes. He appears to portal onto Earth at 1:12, which is badass, and the following monologue is expertly cross-cut with a scene of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker’s arm hair raising. We know that’s his spidey sense tingling, but still, great trailering:
“In time, you will know what it’s like to lose—to feel, so desperately, that you’re right, but to fail all the same.” - Thanos
The Post-Title Card Scene
Yes there is one, and after approximately 14 hours of the title card just sitting there, we see Thor, confused, confronting...the goddamn Guardians of the Galaxy.
This is where I cartwheel off stage, giddy and delighted.
