@ VA ‘Infinity War’ manages the impossible: Cohesiveness > A spoiler-free ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ review Greg Waldock Staff Writer kek hen the Marvel Cinematic Universe began in 2008 with Iron Man, comic book movies were a joke. Outside of Nolan’s Batman and Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogies, there were almost no good superhero movies available. This perception has changed radically over the past 10 years. The first part of the culmination of this colossal, genre-spanning, industry- defining endeavour was released April 26, and Infinity War did not disappoint. Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron are structurally different from so many other films, a trend which Infinity War continues. The films need to be able to introduce pre-existing characters and a unifying thread, show the heroes unite after some light fighting, and resolve the internal and external conflicts while maintaining a screen time balance for all the characters to set them up for their next movies. This makes the films massively unwieldly to write, and Age of Ultron is famously a bit of a clustered mess. Infinity War cleans itself up by focusing ona single “protagonist” with all the superheroes desperately fighting around him—Thanos, the villain of the entire MCU up to this point, is the closest thing toa lead character in this movie. Infinity War takes this villain-protagonist cue directly from Jim Starlin’s original Infinity Gauntlet comic book run, which is told largely from Thanos’ perspective as he collects the Stones and brutally murders waves of superheroes in an attempt to woo the Marvel Universe's personification of death. The second- most influential comic series is Jonathan Hickman’s Infinity saga, which introduces the Black Order and the focus y INFINITY WAR on Wakanda. This latest Avengers film blends these two plots almost seamlessly and ties in iconic elements from the legendary Walter Simonson Mighty Thor run and many other comics across Marvel’s long history, plus adds a few incredibly creative twists of its own. This movie had more expectations on it than any other movie in the MCU. It needed to be a culmination of the last 10 years of Marvel movies, it needed to be a respectful interpretation of one of the most influential comic runs of all time, and it needed to set up the next decade of the MCU—all while being a good standalone film and setup for its sequel. It succeeds enormously in every arena and still manages to fit in its own ideas and iconography. It is not just an adaptation of Marvel characters and story, it’s a daring and meticulously well-constructed movie that knows when to pay homage to the source material and when to do something totally new. Infinity War is a new standard for universe-building and comic book adaptations as a whole. @eri 27 “Avengers: Infinity War’ movie poster Have an idea for a story? Marts@theotherpress.ca q & Broadway in your backyard Narratives abound in latest Amelia Douglas Gallery exhibit (¥ Local author releases long-awaited debut novel And more! Reversal, revolution, and retribution > ‘The Power’ novel review Ethan Gibson Contributor kek eminist classics like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale have received new attention in recent years—especially in the wake of a certain election in America. In 2016, a potential successor to The Handmaid’s Tale emerged: The Power by Naomi Alderman. Part dystopian thriller, part thought experiment, The Power explores a world in which the gender-power dynamic as we know it is totally reversed. The Power depicts the changes that occur in a world similar to ours when women around the globe suddenly gain the ability to conduct electricity through their fingertips. Suddenly, women rise to more positions of political power, escape from human traffickers, and take back their rights by force. Saudi Arabia and other nations are overthrown by women. Religions are reshaped to be female-centred. However, Alderman’s novel is at its most chilling when the corrupting nature of power resurfaces. The positive achievements made after the power-reversal are quickly eclipsed by the emergence of a female- dominated world as fraught with cruelty as our male-dominated world currently is. The outcome is not equality, but rather a world in which the structure of unequal power between sexes has been reversed. Just as women in our society regularly fear for their safety, men in The Power come to experience that fear as they never have before. The systemic oppression of women, which we ourselves are only beginning to rectify, is dramatically mirrored in Alderman’s speculative nightmare. The bold hypothesis of the novel is that if the present power- disparity between men and women was reversed, society would fail to progress. It is the power difference itself which engenders oppression. Men and women who NAOMI ALDERMAN read this novel will likely come away from it with a renewed horror at the state of our own world, because the novel flips the patriarchy on its head and thereby assists readers in imagining the worst cruelties suffered by women today. One of The Power’s most poignant sucker-punches is its framing as a manuscript written by aman ina future female-dominated society. Neil, the fictional author of The Power, asks a fictional version of Naomi Alderman for advice, and she replies: “I think I’d rather enjoy this ‘world run by men’ you've been talking about. Surely a kinder, more caring, and—dare I say it?—more sexy world than the one we live in.” At the end of the novel, the frame-narrative between Neil and Alderman concludes with her asking whether he has “considered publishing [his] book under a woman’s name.” Needless to say, this mirrors the male-dominated literary world, which is only now beginning to change. By directly reversing and mirroring the power structures of our world, Alderman has achieved a nuanced, disturbing, and compelling study of gender, power, and human behaviour. “Electrifying! Shocking! Will knock your socks offf Then you'll think twice, about everything’ Cover of ‘The Power’