With Infinity War, the various creative problem-solvers behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe transformed Thanos into a universally recognised force of movie malevolence, a pop-culture presence on the level of Darth Vader or Don Corleone. Thanos was a great character, but his entire saga was deep nerd shit. Starlin had conjured a space-opera nihilist in love with the physical manifestation of Death. A couple of decades earlier, the villain had been the psychedelic vision of bugged-out Marvel weirdo Jim Starlin. There are a lot of great things about Avengers: Infinity War, the second-highest earner at the 2018 box office, but the greatest is Thanos. Thanos is too much for the Marvel superheroes to handle, and by the time the dust settles at the end of Infinity War, he’s the winner. That moment establishes Thanos as a character who exists on a scale beyond anything in any previous Marvel film. He stabs Heimdall to death, casually gorilla press slams the Hulk, and breaks Loki’s neck, looking vaguely bored the whole time. In the opening scene of Infinity War, Thanos becomes inescapably present. Thanos had existed on screen, in some form or another, since the end-credits stinger scene of 2012’s The Avengers, but he’d mostly worked as a vague and shadowy threat, an undefined promise of a future adventure. More than a year before the release of Infinity War, Kevin Feige, the producer who somehow turned the vast and ridiculous Marvel Universe into a globally dominant box-office force, described Thanos as the film’s “main character.” In a mega-budget crossover film with dozens of movie stars, Thanos is the character with the most screen time, and he’s also the animating force behind every action. That’s the point of Infinity War, a cosmic-scale hymn to helplessness.
In Infinity War, the Avengers learn what it’s like to lose.
In the opening scene of Infinity War, after his minion Ebony Maw gives a flowery speech about what an honour it is to be killed by this glorious messianic figure, Josh Brolin’s Thanos looks on a flaming wreckage of a spaceship full of Asgardian deities and rumbles, “I know what it’s like to lose - to feel so desperately that you’re right, but to fail nevertheless.” Two hours later, Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord, whose crucial act of crunch-time idiocy has doomed trillions of sentient beings, looks around wildly and asks, “Did we just lose?” He did. "What about cows? Did Thanos make cows disappear?" This was a hell of a thing to describe to two kids while getting them ready for school in the morning. Characters who’d been Halloween costumes and Lego sets and elementary-school backpacks just dissolved into ash. Instead, Infinity War ended with the numbing, near-silent spectacle of half the universe crumbling into dust.