Avengers: Infinity WarSave

Cold open. No Marvel logo. A distress call plays over a black screen: "This is the Asgardian refugee vessel Statesman. We are under assault. I repeat, we are under assault. The engines are dead, life support failing. Requesting aid from any vessel within range. Our crew is made up of Asgardian families. We have very few soldiers here. This is not a warcraft. I repeat, this is not a warcraft." When the picture cuts in, the Statesman — the Asgardian lifeboat we last saw at the end of Thor: Ragnarok (2017) — is broken in half and floating in deep space. Thanos's flagship is parked next to it. Half the Asgardians are already dead on the floor. Thanos walks through the bodies. He's holding the Power Stone in his fist — already collected it off Xandar, off-screen, which is one of the most efficient bits of world-building the MCU has ever pulled. He hands Thor over to his children — Ebony Maw, Cull Obsidian, Proxima Midnight, Corvus Glaive — and demands the Tesseract.

Loki, the trickster, finally chooses a side. He tries the dagger trick — "the sun will shine on us again" — and Thanos closes his fist around Loki's throat. Hulk goes feral and gets one good rage in before Thanos puts him through a bulkhead with his bare hand and beats him unconscious in the kind of one-sided fight Hulk doesn't lose. Heimdall, dying, uses the last of his dark-energy reserve to summon the Bifrost and send Hulk to Earth. Thanos kills him. Loki, last Asgardian standing, hands over the Tesseract, watches Thanos crush it and pocket the Space Stone, and then makes his move — and Thanos kills him too, slow, in front of Thor. "You will never be a god." The ship blows. The opening title card hits in absolute silence. No music. No fanfare. Just the words AVENGERS INFINITY WAR on a black screen and the sound of every audience in 2018 realizing this movie was not going to play fair.

Earth. Greenwich Village. Bruce Banner falls out of the sky and crashes through the roof of the Sanctum Sanctorum. He's been gone two years and the first thing out of his mouth to Doctor Strange is "Thanos is coming. He's coming." Strange and Wong go get Tony Stark. Tony and Pepper are walking in Central Park talking about a child they don't have yet when Strange opens a portal in the path and yanks them into the Sanctum. The four of them are mid-briefing when a giant donut-shaped spacecraft parks itself over Washington Square and Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian step onto the asphalt to collect the Time Stone from around Strange's neck. Peter Parker is on a field trip to MoMA and the hair on the back of his neck stands up. He's swinging through the windows in two minutes flat.

The New York fight is everything the Russos do well in three minutes. Strange does sling-ring acrobatics, Tony fits a new nanotech Iron Man suit out of a chest housing he's been waiting to deploy since Civil War (2016), Peter takes a punch from Cull Obsidian and lands on a building badly. Maw — gaunt, soft-voiced, telekinetic — wraps Strange in floating shards of pavement and pulls him into the donut ship. Tony tells Peter to go home. Peter does not go home. He webs onto the underside of the ship as it accelerates into low orbit and at exactly the wrong moment looks down and realizes he's outside the atmosphere. "I should have stayed on the bus." Tony, halfway to space himself in the iron suit, deploys an Iron Spider rescue suit off his own chassis to wrap Peter in life support. "Underoos, kid, you're an Avenger now." The donut ship jumps to warp.

Scotland. Edinburgh in the rain. Vision and Wanda are off the grid in a cheap hotel room, in love, when Proxima Midnight puts a spear through Vision's stomach in a train station and tries to cut the Mind Stone out of his forehead. Wanda fights her, Vision crashes through three buildings, and just as Corvus Glaive is about to finish him off, Cap — beard, hair down, no costume — walks out of a shadow in slow motion and catches the glaive in his hand. Sam Wilson drops in from above. Natasha Romanoff arrives. The original SHIELD team, fugitives ever since Civil War, are back together for one last set. They drive Vision to the Avengers compound. The Black Order retreats.

Meanwhile, deep space. The Guardians of the Galaxy — Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Mantis, Rocket, Groot — pick up the Statesman's distress call and warp in. They find Thor floating unconscious through a debris field and bonk him face-first into the windshield. Thor wakes up, immediately starts flirting with Mantis, drinks a beer, and announces he needs a weapon big enough to kill Thanos because his hammer is gone. He, Rocket, and a teenage Groot peel off to Nidavellir — the dying dwarven forge — to make one. The rest of the Guardians head to Knowhere, where Thanos is already collecting the Reality Stone from the Collector. Gamora has begged Star-Lord to put a bullet in her head if Thanos ever catches her. He agrees, on her terms, because he loves her.

Wakanda gets the call from Bruce. T'Challa opens his borders to the entire surviving Avengers roster. Cap, Bucky (woken from cryo for the first time since the end of Civil War), Sam, Wanda, Vision, Natasha, Bruce, Rhodey, Okoye, Shuri, M'Baku of the Jabari, and the entire Wakandan army assemble on the savanna outside the Golden City. Shuri scans Vision and tells him she can extract the Mind Stone without killing him — but it'll take time. Vision offers to let Wanda destroy it herself. Cap refuses. "We don't trade lives, Vision." They commit to the long extraction.

Knowhere. The Guardians arrive too late. Thanos already has the Reality Stone. Worse: the Reality Stone has let him stage the entire location as an illusion — Star-Lord shoots at him and the bullets become bubbles, Drax becomes a stack of bricks, Mantis becomes ribbons. Thanos drags Gamora off-world and parks his ship over Vormir, where Red Skull — exiled to be the Soul Stone's keeper since 1945, his face still a leather skull — tells him the Soul Stone demands a sacrifice. "A soul, for a soul." Thanos breaks. Genuinely breaks. He cries. He picks Gamora up. He throws her off the cliff. He wakes up the next morning on the wet floor of his ship clutching the Soul Stone in his fist. The whole movie pivots on that scene because for the first time you understand what kind of monster this purple farmer actually is — one who loved his daughter exactly enough to murder her.

Titan. Strange, Tony, and Peter crash-land the donut ship into a dead planet that turns out to be Thanos's homeworld — abandoned, sand-blown, gravity inverted in patches. They run into the surviving Guardians who came looking for Gamora. After a five-minute scene of Tony and Star-Lord measuring genitals — "I'm gonna ask you this one time, where is Gamora?" "I'll do you one better — WHO is Gamora?" "I'll do you one better — WHY is Gamora?" — they form an alliance. Strange goes into a trance and uses the Time Stone to look at 14,000,605 possible futures. He comes back wrecked. Tony asks how many they win. Strange says "one." The plan: bait Thanos to the surface and pull the gauntlet off his hand. He arrives. Mantis sleeps him. Drax pins his legs. Spider-Man and Iron Man wrestle the glove down his fingers. It's almost off. Star-Lord finds out from Nebula's transmission that Thanos killed Gamora on Vormir. He loses it. He sucker-punches Thanos in the face. The trance breaks. Thanos catches the glove back. He puts on the Reality Stone and turns Mantis into colored ribbons.

Thanos and Tony go one-on-one for two minutes and it's the best Iron Man fight in the entire MCU — every nanotech tool, every shoulder cannon, every breath-control beam. Thanos catches the shield piece, breaks it, drives it into Tony's ribs. He raises the gauntlet to take Tony's head off. Strange flies in from above and says "stop. Spare his life and I will give you the stone." He hands over the Time Stone. Thanos snaps it into the glove and warps out. Tony stares at Strange and says "why would you do that." Strange, dying, says "there was no other way."

Wakanda. The outriders are pouring across the plains in waves. The Wakandan army holds the dome shield while Shuri works on Vision's head. Bruce can't get Hulk to come out — every time he hulks-up in the suit, Hulk hulks-back-down — so he climbs into a Hulkbuster Mark II and runs the line. Cap, Natasha, Bucky, Sam, T'Challa, Okoye, Wanda, Falcon, M'Baku — they all fight on the ground. Outriders breach the dome on one flank and start tearing through the Dora Milaje. The fight is going badly. And then a Bifrost beam carves a crater in the ground next to them, and Thor steps out of it carrying Stormbreaker, the storm-axe Eitri forged on Nidavellir using the heart of a dying star and Thor's own body to channel the heat. Rocket and Groot land beside him. "BRING ME THANOS."

Thanos, with five stones in the glove, opens a portal and steps onto the Wakandan battlefield. Wanda makes the call. She blasts Vision's forehead with her own energy and shatters the Mind Stone in his head while simultaneously holding off Thanos with her other hand — both at once, the most heroic moment of her arc. The stone breaks. Vision dies in her arms. Thanos walks up, places his hand on the broken stone, activates the Time Stone, and reverses Vision's death just enough to make the Mind Stone whole again. He pulls it out of the corpse's forehead and snaps it into the glove. Six stones. Thor charges. Stormbreaker hits Thanos in the chest and buries to the haft. Thanos, bleeding, looks Thor in the eye and says "you should have gone for the head." He snaps his fingers.

There's a soft popping sound. Then Bucky, walking toward Steve through dust, looks down at his hand. "Steve." He turns to ash. He's gone. T'Challa, kneeling next to Okoye, says "up, general, this is no place to —" he's gone. Sam Wilson is gone. Groot, on his feet next to Rocket, says "I am Groot," plaintive and small, and turns to dust onto Rocket's chest. Wanda is gone. On Titan, Mantis is gone. Drax is gone. Quill is gone. Strange looks at Tony and says "Tony, there was no other way," and turns to dust standing up. Peter Parker stumbles. He clutches Tony's collar. He doesn't understand what's happening. "Mr. Stark? I don't feel so good. I don't know what's happening, I don't know — I don't want to go, please, I don't want to go, sir, please, I don't want to go, I'm sorry." He falls into Tony's arms and turns to ash on Tony's hands.

Wakanda. Thanos, bleeding from Stormbreaker still buried in his chest, opens a portal and steps off the field. Steve, alone in the grass, kneels next to where Bucky used to be and picks up a handful of dust. Across the world, pilots disintegrate at the controls of jumbo jets that fall out of the sky. People disintegrate behind steering wheels. Half of everyone, everywhere, gone in twelve seconds. Thanos, wounded but smiling, sits down on a stone porch outside a small farmhouse on a planet he picked years ago for his retirement. He looks up at a binary sunrise. He breathes out. He has done what he set out to do.

Post-credits. New York. Nick Fury and Maria Hill are driving through midtown when a Bell helicopter crashes into a building because the pilot just ashed mid-flight. Civilians are turning to dust in the street. Hill goes. Fury fishes a 1995-era pager out of his coat — banged-up, Skrull-green emergency light — and types in an emergency code. He turns to dust mid-keystroke. The pager hits the pavement and beeps. The screen displays a red-and-blue eight-pointed star. The audience in 2018 doesn't know what the star is yet — that's Captain Marvel (2019)'s job, ten months later — but Marvel just told you in seven seconds who's going to fix this. Cut to black. "Thanos will return."