In the history of movies no other film has had an 18 movie build up like Avengers: Infinity War. Anyone reading my film pieces before would know that I’m a big fan of what Marvel have been up to in recent years. Even their misfires like Iron Man 2 and Thor 2, have actually been pretty damn good if you didn’t compare them to their higher quality brethren. The Marvel Universe has managed to thread all of these films together masterfully. So, although you might be watching one film about Thor you always know that this is part of a bigger universe. The scale of what they’ve achieved in the build up is immense and it could have all so easily fallen flat on its face - much like DC have done so far with their pretty drab attempts at replicating the success. (So far only Wonder Woman has come anywhere close). The scale is akin to the pyramids but in movie form. On paper it looks like it could so easily just be a complete mess on a grand scale. There’s about a million main characters in it with each getting hardly any screen time. But because the build up has been so good, it actually works. Apparently Captain America is only on the screen for about six minutes which is a really short amount of screen time for one of the original Avengers. Each character doesn’t really need introducing as they’ve all been introduced so intelligently in the previous movies. There’s even room for humour as at some points the jokes seem to be flying at you at such speed that you might as well be watching Deadpool. But although it shouldn’t work, it actually does. And this is actually due to the darkness of the film that is definitely not shied away from and the fact that most people didn’t know it was the first of a two-parter with the story being resolved next year. It’s already being described as the Empire Strikes Back of the Marvel Universe. At the time of writing this the film has been striding across the box office like a colossus breaking records all over the place. And whilst we’re waiting for this storyline to get resolved in May next year we’ve got two very different Marvel movies to get our teeth into - Ant-Man and The Wasp released in August and Captain Marvel in March 2019. Go Marvel!