Avengers: Infinity War Trailer Breakdown
The internet exploded the other day. And Marvel pretty much confirmed it by thanking everyone for making the Avengers: Infinity War trailer the most viewed trailer on YouTube. Ever.
With the trailer officially dropping, we can begin the theory-crafting and breaking down each clip.
Earlier this year at San Diego Comic Con, an Avengers: Infinity War trailer leaked out of Hall H. I’m surprised to say there were elements of that leaked trailer they decided to keep for this trailer. However, we were treated to some new stuff we hadn’t seen in the “leaked” trailer. There were also elements of the trailer we weren’t treated to that somewhat spoil Thor: Ragnarok. If you haven’t seen Thor: Ragnarok yet, be warned that there are spoilers ahead!
Avengers: Infinity War Teaser Trailer Breakdown
The trailer begins with a narration by Nick Fury about the purpose of forming the team. We get to see Iron Man amidst a destroyed landscape, holding the hand of someone who has clearly fallen in the devastation or it could be his own mangled hand. We see Thor looking at something while on board his own ship. Black Widow is sporting a new hairstyle. But these are things we’ve seen before in the SDCC 2017 trailer and on movie posters.
The trailer then goes on to show Bruce Banner apparently having crashed through the Sanctum Sanctorum in New York, with Doctor Strange and Wong puzzled as to his appearance. The next scene shows them along with Tony Stark, responding to a panic happening outside of the sanctuary. We also see Peter Parker’s Spidey-sense kick in while on a train or bus. He then looks out the window and we see this large circular device hovering in the air over New York. Whatever this thing is, it’s enough to cause a certain amount of devastation akin to the first Avengers film. And it’s enough to bring out Doctor Strange, Tony Stark, Wong, and Bruce Banner to survey the scene. It was surprising to see Iron Man in a new Hulkbuster Armor, and Spider-Man sporting the Iron-Spider costume teased in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
We then get the big reveal of Thanos, coming out from a portal. His narration is chilling, as he states that bringing balance to the universe is never supposed to be fun, yet what he is doing now brings a smile to his face. But again, we saw these scenes, unofficially, previously.
The action at this point builds as we get short shots of each of Thanos’ special crew, The Black Order, facing off against members of the Avengers team. Proxima Midnight throws a spear of some sort at a man in the shadows, which the trailer leads us to believe is Steve Rogers. In a following scene Rogers emerges from the shadows with a beard and revised costume. Black Panther orders evacuations and defenses to be strengthened, and to get Captain America a shield. What appears to be Corvus Glaive shows up in the next clip. He uses a spear to pluck out the mind gem from Vision’s forehead. Vision is clearly screaming in pain from the process.
Thanos then adds another gem to the gauntlet, the first appears to be the Power Stone (from Guardians of the Galaxy) and the other being the recently reacquired Space Stone (the Tesseract supposedly offered up by Loki). Spider-Man gets slammed by Thanos, and Iron man also falls to one of his punches, despite his new armor. Thor is doing his best against a device much like the one that appeared over New York earlier in the trailer. And it looks like he’s failing. At this point, most of what we are seeing now wasn’t in the initial “leaked” trailer, and we are officially seeing this for the first time.
The forces of Wakanda along with Captain America, Falcon, Winter Soldier and Black Panther face off against the Outriders, a brutal army under Thanos’ employ, whose purpose is to find information on the whereabouts of the Infinity Stones. The trailer then builds to an all-out war against a massive horde of Outriders with the Wakandan army and what looks like a huge team-up of avengers, with Hulk, War Machine, and Okoye joining the fray. This is all new to most of us, and we are officially hyped.
If you haven’t seen it, Thor has an eyepatch. He loses his eye in a fight against Hela, taking on a symbolic image of Odin as well as his title of ruler of Asgard. I speculated after seeing Thor: Ragnarok that maybe the “leaked” footage from SDCC2017 was fake. I believed Marvel was putting it out as a sort of hype piece, with footage we probably wouldn’t see in the movie itself. I also believed it was why they never officially wanted this footage to be released. I’m glad to report that I was wrong, because with some editing we see now that Thor is accurately depicted with that spoiler-look. I guess Marvel at SDCC2017 and D23 of this year didn’t want to spoil Thor: Ragnarok too much.
What We Didn’t See
Even though they are credited in the movie, there are a few characters missing from the trailer. For one, we don’t see Ant-Man or the Wasp for that matter. We joked that maybe they were in every shot, it’s just they were so small we didn’t notice. But usually we get a shot of them in miniature size venturing into the inner workings of a machine and taking down a device from the inside. The lack of their presence brings up some questions that maybe they haven’t finished the CGI specific to their scenes. Or they might be saving their scenes for the actual film, like they did for Captain America: Civil War.
We also don’t see Hawkeye anywhere. Clint Barton isn’t usually a character featured in trailers but it would be nice to see a more complete roster of the team at least in a two second shot. His role might be more integral to the film as a surprise to advance a major plot point, like in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. This is the Russo brothers, so they might give Jeremy Renner something important to do for the film.
In the scene of the large device hovering over New York, there’s also nothing of the Defenders. I wonder how Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones would react to another threat hitting their hometown. It would be a great tie-in with the Netflix Marvel properties. It would only be natural to have the events of Avengers: Infinity War trickle down so Harlem and Hell’s Kitchen also are affected. Heck, Avengers made the papers with “The Incident” being referenced in Daredevil. Luke Cage could only be hurt by bullets made from Chitauri tech. I’m not saying to have a trailer with these characters in it, but to have a few seconds in the actual film, with maybe Daredevil diving into a horde of Outriders. Or Luke Cage standing back to back with Iron Fist amidst a group of the alien invaders. Or Jessica Jones jumping/flying into the fray. I’m sure the movie will be good, but a nod to the Netflix viewers with these characters would just be icing to an already great cake.
Lastly, we don’t see the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Having Coulson come back would be a great tail-end to the events of the first Avengers film. Also to tie-up that part of the MCU with the film franchise would be great, maybe putting Robbie Reyes in as well, seeing Ghost Rider was so well received on the last season of that show. It’s interesting to note that the Ghost Rider also mastered a bit of the portal creation in the last episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., in the same manner of Doctor Strange and the sorcerers who tapped into the mystic arts.
An Official TEASER??
Although we are seeing this trailer, the official Marvel Entertainment channel on YouTube has titled it as a “Teaser Trailer.” That means, we have yet to see a full-on trailer for this film. It also means this is just to whet our pallets for what will come in the months ahead. We aren’t even into 2018, and the internet has been broken from just a teaser. I cannot fathom what will happen when an official full trailer eventually breaks.
Adding to that previous note, Joe Russo stated back at the beginning of November that we would have some surprise characters in the film, so we’re all holding our breath for it. Maybe they’ll pull some crazy moves over the next few months like they did with Spider-Man for that last reveal in Captain America: Civil War and the last trailer we see is someone with blue and yellow spandex popping his claws in defense of Westchester. If talks between Disney and Fox are going as they say, we can only hope that we get that kind of surprise!
Avengers: Infinity War will be out in theaters on May 4th next year.
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