When the first Avengers came out in 2012, many people remarked that they had seen it without watching any of the movies building up to it, and they could still follow along with everything. It still felt like a complete film, and every character made sense. I cannot say the same for Infinity War. The size of the cast has finally caught up with these movies, and I do think that you should see the films leading up to this in order to understand this universe.

Someone in the group of friends that I watched this with hadn't seen Thor: Ragnarok, and felt that he missed out on a lot of information. I can definitely understand where he would be confused, so I highly recommend watching that movie in order to catch up. The other movie that affected this movie a lot was Captain America: Civil War, which had far more lasting consequences than I thought. Then, finally, I would recommend Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. That one isn't quite as necessary, since they explain their backstory quite well within the movie, but they definitely also means that they're spoiling the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Black Panther isn't required viewing. If you've seen Civil War, you know enough about him for what you see in this film. I wouldn't say that his character shines much within the crowded cast, although Wakanda definitely gets its fair share of glory, which makes up for it.

Some shots from the trailers didn't make it into the final film, and I was actually surprised since those shots would have drastically changed the story, and also took a lot of rendering in order to create. I don't know if they had script changes, or if they were intentionally trying to throw off fan theories. My guess is the latter, because a lot about the trailers edits shots and quotes in ways that kinda sorts tells the story of the film, but doesn't give away how any scenes will actually play out. There were several times that I was about to quote the trailers, but then it turns out that the quote was said slightly differently than how it was first teased.

The stakes are higher and the conflict is more interesting than with the original movie. On the flip side, there's less time for team chemistry and the structure of the story isn't quite as clean-cut and simple. It's still a three-act movie though, so don't worry about it coming off like Batman v Superman.

I don't have much of a desire to watch the movie again on the big screen. However, I think that most people will, if only to hear all of the lines. If your theatre is anything like mine, people will be laughing constantly. The movie made people laugh a lot. It also received a couple of standing ovations. I'll admit that I actually started one or both of those. So due to the all of that, you probably won't hear the stuff that comes right after jokes and heroics entries.

If there's one thing really negative that I have to say about the movie, it's that whenever two characters go one-on-one, they seem to be evenly matched, no matter how much it doesn't make sense. For example, there are villains who can rip apart vibranium, and take hits from powers that can rip apart vibranium, and yet Black Widow can defeat them with nothing but super-spy martial arts. Perhaps most egregiously, Thanos gets his hand on at least a couple of infinity stones in this movie, and even with multiple infinities at his beck and call, the heroes are often able to slow him down. He's still an intimidating villain, but he really should have been able to kill everyone in the first act. It seems that the powers of the infinity stones were severely downgraded from how they were depicted in previous films.

Otherwise, I did get more satisfaction out of this movie than the original Avengers. I've been following all of the movies, and I enjoyed how many of the characters went through genuine arcs in this movie. That didn't happen in the others, so it's nice to see that a ensemble film can still fit in character arcs. One more character, though, and I think that it would have been one too many.

But if they had gone with one too many...man, the greatest ensemble of all time really missed out on its chance to include Kevin Bacon. Can you imagine?