The Unit of Caring

This is a review of Infinity War, with spoilers. I am really glad that I saw Infinity War without spoilers, and these are not minor spoilers.

There’s a movie genre that doesn’t really exist, which is fine, except that lots of movies come close enough to it to make me aware of what I’m missing. I want to call it something like ‘high-stakes competence porn’ - movies where everything is at stake and the heroes actually thought about what they’d do in those circumstances, and had training and plans and contingency plans and had already asked themselves, and answered for themselves, the hard questions about what tradeoffs they’d be willing to make, and they spend the movie not fucking up, and succeeding because they were incredibly overprepared and incredibly able to make hard choices where necessary and because they did not fuck up, even under circumstances where everyone fucks up.

Stories like this are nearly impossible to write. They also have a very limited audience, because the best high-stakes competence porn story has characters operating at the edges of the competence of the audience, so we can understand what they’re doing and relate to the extraordinary effort it would take to pull it off. And people vary a lot in what kind of competencies they have, and so no story can really be high-stakes competence porn for more than a tiny fraction of its audience. I suspect that some military sci-fi is this thing, for an audience that knows more about tanks and bombers than I do, but it doesn’t do it for me. 

Marvel doesn’t tell stories like this. Marvel tells stories about having heart. Our heroes are good people - they really are, that’s one of the things that makes these movies work, the heroes really honestly actually are deeply good - but they’re not great at ethical reasoning. They don’t take the stakes seriously enough. They don’t communicate well enough, they don’t prepare well enough, they’re normal relatable people and normal relatable people, with the fate of the world in their hands, screw up.

And that’s how Infinity War manages to be a genre I didn’t even realize I wanted. It’s a movie about being good and smart and capable and not good enough or smart enough or capable enough. It’d be a kind of mediocre superhero movie if it pulled its punches. It will be a kind of mediocre superhero movie when it gets retconned next year into having retroactively pulled its punches.

But that’s a year from now and right now it stands on its own as a story where we have heart but we don’t have enough ethical reasoning skills, impulse control, advance planning and coordination, and so trillions of people are dead. It’s a story where we lose. It’s a story where we lose because we weren’t good enough. It’s a story where we could have won if we’d had our act together, and a story where no amount of eleventh-hour heroism can let you evade trolley problems and save everyone (or at least everyone with a name).

And that’s a story that’s really important to me, and that I’m going to carry very close to my heart right up ‘till it gets retconned next spring. 

• 1 May 2018
• #infinity war spoilers
• 142