Avengers: Infinity War (PG-13)
Council of Geeks; Disney Movies; Disney Wiki; IMDb; Marvel; MCU Wiki; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Weta Digital; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: spoilers!

It begins with the ship of Asgardian refugees from Thor: Ragnarok being attacked by Thanos and his forces. They kill pretty much everyone on board, and Thanos obtains the Tesseract (aka the Space Stone). This was the second of six Infinity Stones, and he already had the Power Stone. (He wears a gauntlet with places in it for each of the stones.) And he spends the rest of the movie obtaining the other five stones, while various heroes try to protect them. He wants the Infinity Stones to give him the power to instantly kill half the people in the universe. (Until now he'd just been going from planet to planet, killing half their populations the old fashioned way.) Because he thinks all the worlds are overpopulated, which leads to many people suffering. (I really just wanted to tell him that at least on Earth there's plenty for everyone, but most of it gets hoarded or destroyed by the rich. But he wouldn't have listened to logic, I'm sure. He even says at one point that he kills both rich and poor people randomly.)

Honestly, so much happens in this movie on several planets, and there are so many characters, it's hard to keep it all straight. Um... Doctor Strange has the Time Stone, and manages to hold onto it for most of the movie, with help from Iron Man and Spider-Man. Meanwhile, the Guardians of the Galaxy respond to a distress signal from the refugee ship, but they arrive too late to help anyone... except Thor, who wants to go to the world where his hammer had been forged, to get the (giant) dwarfs who live there to forge a weapon to fight Thanos. But when he, Rocket, and Groot arrive, they find only one dwarf left alive, Eitri (Peter Dinklage). But before he can help Thor forge the axe he needs, the forge must be restarted, which is really complicated.

Vision and Wanda Maximoff are living in Edinburgh, and are attacked by a couple of Thanos's warriors, who want to obtain the Mind Stone that is part of what keeps Vision alive. Eventually they get help from Captain America, Black Widow, and Falcon. Later the five of them go to see James Rhodes (War Machine). And um, Bruce Banner is there, too. (I forgot to say he was on the Asgardian ship, but after Hulk got his ass kicked, Heimdall transported him to Earth, and he turned back into Bruce. He was the one who warned Iron Man and Doctor Strange about Thanos. After that, the Hulk refused to come out of Bruce for some reason, so later in the movie Bruce pilots the Hulkbuster armor, which is amusingly ironic.) Eventually, they all go to Wakanda, where Shuri tries to extract the Mind Stone without killing Vision, while the Avengers and Black Panther and War Machine and Bucky Barnes and the whole Wakandan army face off against Thanos's forces. It was pretty epic.

Um, what else? Thanos captures Gamora, who knows where the Soul Stone is. And she finally tells him where to find it, to stop him from torturing her sister, Nebula. But Nebula later escapes and contacts Mantis, saying to meet her on Titan (which is where Thanos is from). So the Guardians show up there and briefly fight with Iron Man, Strange, and Spider-Man, before they finally realize they're all enemies of Thanos. That was neat. Anyway... I don't want to say what Thanos has to do to obtain the Soul Stone (which was guarded by freaking Red Skull, of all people), but I think it was some damn bullshit. But he does get the stone, which I think was the fourth one. (He'd already gotten the Reality Stone from the Collector on Knowhere, before he captured Gamora.) Thanos eventually faces all the heroes who are on Titan at the time, which is also a cool battle, but it ends with him obtaining the Time Stone.

So finally, he goes to Earth. Wanda is forced to destroy the Mind Stone to keep it from Thanos, which resulted in Vision's death, which is really tragic since they're in love, and all. But it doesn't matter, because Thanos just used the Time stone to un-destroy the Mind Stone and take it, so... that's it. He has them all. The heroes still try to fight him, but it's freaking useless, Thanos is all-powerful now. And with a snap of his fingers... half the people in the universe begin disintegrating. Including a lot of heroes. Look, there's no point in not spoiling all this, because it was always a foregone conclusion that Thanos would win... in this movie. But there are more movies to come. And after a post-credits scene with Nick Fury and Maria Hill, in which Nick tries to contact someone (I won't say who), the movie ends with the words "Thanos will return." (I thought that was kind of neat, you know, instead of saying "The Avengers will return."

Well, I've left out a lot of details, and I'm not going to mention everyone who lives or dies, partly because I don't think it matters. I still have hope that anyone who died could be restored to life later on. We'll just have to wait and see. But really, everything that happens in this movie is pretty cool, in spite of all the losing and tragedy. There was also some humor. It was especially fun to see almost all the characters from the various movies finally coming together (even if they weren't really together, because different subgroups were on different planets, and stuff). I will say we don't see Hawkeye or Ant-Man in this movie, for reasons that I think had to do with the Sokovia Accords. Oh yeah, and early on, before all the action on Earth started, Tony and Pepper were planning to get married, but... they obviously never got around to that. And um... I don't know what else to tell you. It's all just... damn.