SPOILERS AHEAD

What else can I say about Avengers: Infinity War that hasn’t already been said? Truly, it’s one of the year’s first triumphs, and in my loving and critical eyes, an early candidate for Best Motion Picture of the Year – pick your ceremony.

The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been in this film; Thanos (Josh Brolin, True Grit) has brought planets to their knees in the name of finding the Infinity Stones, and we open with his massacre of the Asgardian survivors (last seen in Thor: Ragnarok). Thor (Chris Hemsworth, Rush) is left for dead, but Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, Begin Again) manages to escape. Sheer luck lands him in the New York sanctum in front of Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, Parade’s End) and Wong (Benedict Wong, Marco Polo). With all hell about to break loose, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., The Judge) is called in to help, but his won’t be enough – scattered, The Avengers must reteam after their Civil War and ally with the Guardians of the Galaxy to fight a war that will determine the fate of existence.

The heroes of this equation are at their best – Spider-Man (Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z) continues to prove his worth as an Avenger and is no longer the annoying Jamie Bell clone he once was in Captain America: Civil War. What’s more, Stark is well-written this time around (and it only took two writers!), and is once again a character I care about. Returning to the films is, at last, Captain America (Chris Evans, Puncture), now bearded, pissed off and ready for round two with an alien menace. Unexpected standouts include Vision (Paul Bettany, A Knight’s Tale) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen, Kodachrome), the star-crossed lovers of the MCU, facing their hardest test yet – remember, Vision holds the Mind Stone in his head. The lynchpins, however, to this film are Star-Lord (Chris Pratt, The Magnificent Seven) and Gamora (Zoë Saldana, Star Trek Beyond), who hold the key to survival or death of all they love — Saldana especially is at her best as Thanos’ adopted warprize, seeking vengeance and then some.

Again, this is the ballsiest film in the history of comic book movies; more daring than Watchmen or even The Avengers, if for nothing more than this is a saddening film. True, there are jokes in this film, but not in the Justice League sense; they bring some levity to the film, but by and large, this is a David and Goliath story where Goliath wins — mercilessly. The emotion is sold to the audience by both the sincerity of its heroes as well as its villain — Brolin is at the top of his game as the sadistic titan, obsessed with balancing life in the universe through xenocide. He brings to a 2D drawing the drive and mania of a terrorist mastermind sight unseen since the late Heath Ledger’s Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight — exuding menace and filling the IMAX screen the movie was designed for, but all you can do is wonder what his next move will be.

Speaking of, if you live within the vicinity of an IMAX theater, cough up the $20 and see it in the way it was shot — this is the first major motion picture to be filmed entirely in IMAX; to see it in a lesser format is a waste of money. All this innovative story and tech is thanks to three people — Kevin Feige, erstwhile producer and president of Marvel Studios, and Joe & Anthony Russo, directors and favorite sons of Cleveland, Ohio. These men dare to dream big for characters they so love and aren’t afraid to both let us have fun and make us cry. Grounded in fantastic realism, we believe in the morals of these heroes, and when they fall, we mourn for them, but heroes rise again — they always get the last word, and you haven’t heard the last of The Avengers yet.

Rating: 5/5