Throughout the years, Marvel has excelled in the superhero business. This year was particularly eventful, with releases such as Deadpool 2, Black Panther, and of course, Avengers: Infinity War. Marvel had been building up to a climactic battle over the infinity stones ever since the first Thor movie was released.

The infinity stones are six immensely powerful gems in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), controlling space, power, time, mind, soul and reality. At the end of Thor, the tesseract, a vessel holding the space stone, was first revealed. Many years later Marvel revealed Thanos, a destroyer of worlds and immensely powerful, giant and purple man, is collecting the infinity stones in order to bring balance to the universe. However, his take on balance is the death half of the universe’s population.

Thanos justifies this monumental slaughter with a twisted sense of humanitarianism. He says that since the universe is suffering from overpopulation and people are fighting over diminishing resources, the death of half of the population of the universe will solve those issues. Marvel’s use of real-world problems makes the struggle to find a solution more relatable than if Thanos were some psychotic lunatic bent on meaningless destruction. Their ability to make Thanos feel emotions, through death and sacrifice, make the character believable and well-rounded.

Naturally, the Earth’s mightiest heroes come to stop Thanos and his reign of destruction. This is the highlight and selling point of the movie: superheroes spanning across a decade of work and 18 movies meeting up to put down the most powerful villain of MCU history. The action packed, quickly paced storytelling allows the movie to accomplish a lot in the realm of storytelling. However, converging the storylines of eight different standalone series is no easy task. Packing the plot into two hours and forty minutes left some fans in a daze. The main complaint of Avengers: Infinity War is that the plot was too rushed and ramshackle, with little room to breathe.

“I think it’s a good idea . . . trying to save the general population of the universe but also creating more resources or somewhere to sustain a larger population could also be a solution instead,” Sophomore Henry Wicklund said.

Either way, plenty of fans are excited for the second act of the mega blockbuster coming in May of 2019.