For the week of August 13th, the biggest release is easily Marvel and Walt Disney Home Entertainment's Avengers: Infinity War. And let's not limit it in terms of the week: while Black Panther remains 2018's most culturally significant Marvel flick, the MCU certainly can't top Infinity War in terms of sheer size and scope. For one, it's the culmination of seven years worth of Infinity Stones-related mumbo-jumbo; they've finally graduated from mere plot devices in the likes of Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger to Infinity War's central MacGuffin, a series of elements so powerful that when joined together, they can remake the very fabric of the known universe. But let's simplify that even further - warmongering Titan Thanos (a motion-captured Josh Brolin) believes the universe's finite resources can't support its ever-ballooning population, so he seeks the Stones in order to eradicate half of all life and bring balance to the cosmos. In his way: pretty much every living MCU superhero since the first Iron Man. That's why Infinity War feels so big: besides Brolin, you have about thirty major main characters, and played by the likes of Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlet Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Tom Holland, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Wong, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Leticia Wright, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the great Dave Bautista as Drax, the MCU's perpetual MVP. How directors Anthony and Joe Russo juggle characters and pay off ten years of narrative and emotional arcs does feel more like how you'd handle this material in television, and that's mostly a good thing. Regarding the specifics of what goes down, while I can't imagine there's any who hasn't seen Infinity War by now, I don't want to be the one who spoils key plot details. If you're an MCU acolyte, you'll find it transporting and funny and exciting and sad and more self-aware than you'd expect (Star Lord tells Thanos that the purple-skinned villain has a scrotum for a chin, which is what the Internet has been saying FOR MONTHS). And as cliffhanger endings go, this one has maybe the most nerve-jangling cut-to-black since the midpoint of Star Trek: The Next Generation's Best of Both Worlds arc. That said, the film is also overstuffed to the point of incoherence and relentless and narratively incomplete. The only thing missing here (other than maybe substantive appearances from your favorite characters: Cap gets fourth-billing and little more than a fan-pleasing cameo; Black Widow has almost as much to do here as she did in Iron Man 2; and Hawkeye doesn't even pop up in the post-credits stinger) is an end title card imploring viewers to catch Infinity War: Part Two when April 2019 rolls around. Which, I mean, of course, but we've now exploded even the briefest of pretensions that Marvel makes "standalone" adventures.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film "finds a lightning pace and never relents. For as sprawling as the film may be, connecting characters and worlds and actions and interweaving story lines and bringing unlikely allies together in various pursuits to save the universe, it's surprisingly texturally rich and easy to follow. Certainly a foundational understanding of characters and continuing storylines and familiarity with the glut of past Marvel films is helpful, but not entirely essential. The film stands on its own as a dramatic powerhouse and an action extravaganza, with both presenting in equal proportion in terms of screen time and screen merit. It's rare to find a film of so much flash and so much substance, the latter coming in the ways of seriously consequential galaxy-spanning events, the strains on intimate bonds shared between characters, and the very real possibility of failure. Themes of love, sacrifice, fate, friendship, and shared goals interweave throughout the film as The Avengers' battles against Thanos appear increasingly hopeless across each of the several battlefields upon which the 'Infinity War' is fought."
I tell you what's easier to rank: the previous MCU adventures The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, which are getting 4K reissues to commemorate Infinity War's big release. Given some potential indiscretions of late, it's easy to resent writer-director Joss Whedon. Still, credit where credit's due: with these two features, he helped solidify the idea of what these big-screen superhero team-ups could be. At their best, you get something like The Avengers, which might be the MCU's most sheerly enjoyable outing. Cinematically, it has the boxy, flat aesthetics/staging of a television series (I'd actually argue that any given episode of Game of Thrones looks more lavish that this Avengers), and it leans hard on the MCU's safest narrative tropes: fan-favorite villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) wants to rule Earth, and only the titular heroes (Samuel L. Jackson, Downey, Hemsworth, Evans, Johansson, an underused Jeremy Renner, and Ruffalo) can stop him. Yet Whedon quietly galvanizes the material. Even six years later, it challenges Thor: Ragnarok for the distinction of Funniest Marvel Movie - Whedon gives all the dialogue the whiplash snap of a great screwball comedy. And if he can't innovate in terms of plot, he does wonders for the team itself. Downey and Ruffalo were practically born for Whedon-Speak (they make such a great comic duo here), and Johansson, who entered the MCU as a sexy prop in Iron Man 2, emerges as the heart of The Avengers. You can tell Whedon took a long look at what made the titular character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer so great and said, "Right - let's do that with Black Widow." Points, too, in Whedon's thrilling handling of the final battle, which remains Marvel's high-water action mark in terms of how elegantly it blends chaos and character. Every other Marvel movie suffers a little by comparison, and that includes Whedon's Avengers follow-up. The biggest problem to befall Age of Ultron is hindsight - viewed in the context of the other movies, it feels a little inessential, with Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War doing a better job of covering the exact same material (basically, how Tony Stark's insecurities and maturation lead to a rift among the Avengers). It also suffers from sequel-bloat (the whole South Korea sequence should have been cut/condensed; Paul Bettany's Vision feels like an afterthought when he should get his own movie-length introduction), and James Spader proves surprisingly underwhelming as Ultron. But Whedon's gift for dialogue remains aces (that whole Avengers party sequence is one of my favorite things in the MCU), and he isn't afraid of pushing these characters into emotional territory that most of these movies ignore. In many ways, Marvel owes its continued existence to these two films.
Another week; another run of Scream Factory steelboxes. This time, we're getting ones for the idiosyncratic horror thrills of Joe Dante's The Howling, Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, and Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness. Before films Gremlins and Matinee established director Joe Dante as a pop anarchist ā la Mad Magazine or Looney Tunes, he made this sly werewolf chiller, which - alongside John Landis' An American Werewolf in London - helped inject new energy into screen lycanthropes. Ostensibly the story of a self-help commune populated entirely by werewolves, The Howling acts as a platform for Dante to let loose with a plethora of cinematic gags. Besides the then-timely jabs at the psychiatric community (The Howling debuted in 1981), Dante overstuffs the film with movie references both subtle and obvious; he names characters after Island of Lost Souls director Erle Kenton and The Wolf Man director George Waggner, and he has veteran character actor Dick Miller reprise his A Bucket of Blood role as Walter Paisley). Best of all are Rob Bottin's still-revolutionary practical effects, which show-off the human-to-werewolf transformation in grisly, bone-crunching details (see the video below for the film's most iconic FX showcase). Lifeforce, on the other hand, is far more unwieldy, though it's still a great deal of fun. The movie represents the nexus between three very different filmmakers: director Tobe Hooper (the horror auteur who'd just scored big with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist), screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (the hard sci-fi buff partially responsible for creating the Alien franchise), and John Dykstra (the Academy Award-winning special-effects guru who supervised the FX work done on Star Wars and Star Trek: The Motion Picture). If that combination sounds too improbable to work, then you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. You can feel the different creative energies colliding against one another, and none of it comes together in a conventionally satisfying way. However, what Lifeforce has in spades is manic invention; it might be the only vampire/zombie/end-of-the-world/philosophical-space-opera/softcore-porn/astral-romance hybrid ever made, and that unlikely jumble keeps Lifeforce from becoming boring or predictable. Best of all might be Army of Darkness, though. Raimi's first two Evil Dead movies maintained a pretense of frightening terror (although Raimi was already starting to dilute the menace with his Three Stooges-infused Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn), this third entry makes almost no attempt to be scary. And that's fine! Raimi throws us into a kind of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court riff, with his idiot protagonist Ash (the wonderful Bruce Campbell) temporally dislocated and stuck in the Middle Ages, where he bungles a transportation spell so badly that he unwittingly creates an evil doppelgänger (also Campbell) and jumpstarts the apocalypse. It's a bold choice, and one that pays comic dividends throughout - Campbell's smugly moronic hero plays like the action-movie antecedent to Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy character. The end result is a sprightly comic adventure that never stops generating gags and stunts.
But the best film this week is Brian De Palma's underloved Vietnam drama Casualties of War. Back in 1989, audiences (and most critics) didn't know what to make of this one. If De Palma's previous film - the Academy Award-winning The Untouchables - is one of his biggest crowd-pleasers, Casualties of War might be De Palma's bleakest, most despairing picture. Working with the great playwright David Rabe from a controversial Daniel Lang New Yorker piece, De Palma constructs a morality play about the ethics of war, and how they break down after a shell-shocked American platoon (including Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, and Don Harvey) kidnaps and violates a young Vietnamese girl (the heartbreaking Thuy Thu Le). What bothered viewers back in '89 was the disconnect between the brutal subject matter and De Palma's florid style. You might expect De Palma to temper his iconic style into something more austere, and you would be wrong. The director conveys the unbearable depravity with his signature virtuosity, throwing in fluid cinematography (by his regular DP Stephen Burum), split-screen effects, kinetic action sequences, and the most gut-wrenching use of a split-diopter shot that he's ever used. I'm reminded of the backlash that Quentin Tarantino faced with his similarly beautiful/brutal The Hateful Eight, especially given the commercial toll both films took on their directors (De Palma wouldn't fully rebound until 1996's Mission: Impossible). But time has revealed Casualties of War as maybe De Palma's finest film. For all its visual wizardry, the picture uses them subjectively. We can't distance ourselves from the proceedings because De Palma locks us into his characters' POVs. Furthermore, the movie never loses its fine-grained sense of empathy. As Eriksson, the one soldier who won't participate in Thu Le's ritual dehumanization, Michael J. Fox finds the perfect vehicle for his natural decency. A lot of critics at the time were quick to brand his performance another lightweight turn in a darker drama designed to net Fox serious acclaim (Light Of Day, Bright Lights, Big City), but we need Fox's quick revulsion and moral outrage if we're to endure the proceedings. On the other end of the spectrum is Penn's Sergeant Meserve, who orchestrates the kidnapping and subsequent rape. He's monstrous but not a monster: for all of the character's horrific misdeeds, Penn lets us see flashes of the scared kid inside. And then there's Thu Le. She's both this film's heart and its ghost, haunting over the proceedings, and holding everyone - even us - accountable for our reaction. One of the best films of the 1980s.