For ten years, Marvel Studios has made movie after movie after movie, ranging from great fun popcorn blockbusters, revolutionary cultural juggernauts, and a handful that are fine, but don’t leave as large of an impact as the others. So, where does Avengers: Infinity War fall on this range of quality in Marvel’s unprecedentedly successful cinematic universe? The answer is up along with the best! Avengers: Infinity War is truly fantastic in almost every sense of the word!

This gargantuan experience of a film, that will probably break all of the box office records in existence, stars a big purple bad guy and a lot (and I mean a lot) of comic book superheroes. The big purple bad guy, Thanos, is trying to get all six infinity stones, and once he gets them all he can wipe out half of the universe. The Avengers, along with Doctor Strange and the Guardians of the Galaxy, have to band together and stop him from doing so, preparing for war against the greatest threat they’ve ever faced.

This is the third Marvel outing for directors Anthony and Joe Russo, who previously directed 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier and 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Those two films are arguably some of the best in Marvel’s canon, and the same can be said for Infinity War. There are so many different aspects to this movie that could have easily gone wrong, but the Russo brothers are so talented in crafting both heart pounding, hilarious, gut-wrenching, and impressively well-balanced film that there are little to no narrative flaws.  There are over thirty different characters to give a suitable and relevant amount of screen time to, and the amount of time given to each group of characters and their side stories is perfectly balanced. Juggling this many characters in one film is an incredible achievement, and shouldn’t go unnoticed.

Quite possibly the best part of Avengers 3 is its well-written character interactions, relationships, and dynamics. Seeing certain characters that moviegoers (and especially those weird, eccentric, bearded, thirty-year-old comic book nerds) have grown to love over the course of this massive franchise interact off of one another is a ton of fun! An ego one-up battle between Iron Man and Doctor Strange for example and a unique pairing with Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy are all the embodiment of wonderful. Also, these interactions do not work as well as they do without those impressively stellar performances. All across the board, everyone does an incredible job in the acting department.

Speaking of fantastic acting and characters, let’s discuss the big bad of Infinity War, Thanos. Calling him a big purple bad guy sounds dismissive, but, in reality, he is one of the best movie villain characters in recent memory. The best kinds of villains are the villains with a backbone, and an ideology that can almost be sided with (aside from the killing of innocent people of course), and this all makes for Thanos to be an incredible character. The movie is almost Thanos’ movie entirely, and the Avengers characters could almost be viewed as the antagonists of this story. The best villains also have heart, and Thanos definitely has a heart underneath all of the scary purpleness.

If anything has been proven in the past, it is that the Russo brothers are fantastic at directing action sequences, and there are no exceptions in that regard with this movie. Not only are the action set pieces well-thought out and well-shot, they also utilize all of the characters in very clever and inventive ways. This is one of the films that showcases teamwork among the characters better than any other superhero film. The Battle of Helm’s Deep esque battle that takes place in Black Panther’s homeworld of Wakanda is delightful and epic in every conceivable way. The other smaller skirmishes are also really creative and interesting, and it’s not just mindless punching for two and a half hours. The film is also chalked full of surprises and moments that will make the audience cheer and audibly gasp out loud at what occurs in front of them.

If Avengers: Infinity War has any weak points, I would say that sometimes the CGI and green screen isn’t completely convincing, but that’s only a handful of shots that utilize the computer-generated imagery that doesn’t quite work, as opposed to last year’s Justice League which looked as if it wasn’t at all rendered, and the visual effects looked horrible. That’s really it, aside from some minor nitpicks. On first viewing, the film appeared to be maybe a tad clunky in terms of balance here and there, but upon rewatching it, everything moves so smoothly and quickly that that issue fades into the background pretty quickly.

In the end, Infinity War is, yet again, an absolute triumph in not only the Marvel Studios cinematic universe but also a triumph in the entire comic book movie genre. People will go nuts over the sheer awesomeness of everything presented here, and that’s why Infinity War is quite possibly the best film that Marvel has ever produced, and is one of the best films in the superhero genre alongside Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.