AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

• Author: Soave, Robby
• Position: MOVIE - Movie review - Brief article

In a world with far too many superheroes for audiences to keep track of, one brave alien creature has vowed to do what is necessary to save Marvel's overstuffed Avengers franchise from itself: kill off half the cast.

Alas, not quite. While that is his plan, Thanos (Josh Brolin in a stellar computer-generated performance) has a stupider motivation: He thinks overpopulation will permanently render the universe uninhabitable and that 50 percent of all sentient life must thus be vaporized.

This Malthusian idiocy doesn't completely ruin the film, though many critics who gave it a positive appraisal nevertheless wondered why Thanos didn't consider using the infinite powers he sought for the purposes of that population culling to, um, create more...