I’ve been writing about superhero movies in this magazine for going on two decades now, and I think over that time I’ve established that I am not a fanboy. I didn’t read the comics, I don’t care how closely the characters or the plots hew to the originals, and I’m pretty bored by fight scenes between supernatural beings who can’t actually kill each other and whose blows don’t even seem to injure. I feel like an umpire with no rooting interest. I call balls and strikes. I like some superhero movies; some bore me; some are terrible. And I’ve learned to go in without preconceptions; I thought the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy made it look horrifically bad and then found to my amazement that the movie itself was wonderful.

The characters from that movie have been woven into the Woodstock of superhero adventures, Avengers: Infinity War—an epic that features just about every Marvel superhero but Ant-Man (one of the more charming, actually). The Guardians learn, pretty much in an aside, that the planet they saved at the end of the first Guardians movie has just been obliterated. The obliterator is an interstellar strongman named Thanos who has decided to purify and save half the peoples of the universe by deleting the other half from existence. The movie details the efforts of the Marvel superheroes to stop him—efforts that prove shockingly unsuccessful.