Does Infinity War even need a plot?

[SPOILERS for the Infinity War trailer if you were hoping to go in completely spoiler free.]

Okay, okay, okay, I know this is going to be the big pay off to the whole Infinity Stone business that has been underpinning the Marvel Cinematic Universe for years now. The thing is a friend and I were talking about how Marvel are going to cram in so many characters and still be able to have a solid plot to the whole thing.

And I think we need to be prepared for the fact they might not be able to and that it might even be the right decision.

Love it as I do, Avengers Assemble did not have much of a plot. They get brought together, they fall apart, they get back together again and then there's a big long fight that's just set piece after set piece for most of the rest of the film. The joy of the first Avengers movie is seeing how all these characters you'd been looking forward to bumping into each other play off one another.

And that was totally the right way to go.

Now Age Of Ultron is not a film I am not even half as fond of. Mostly that's because it just tries to do the same plot as the first film with robots instead of aliens. There are scenes that I adored, mainly the ones during and after the big party in Stark Tower but the main plot left me rather cold.

With Infinity War, of course, there are all these new characters meeting for the first time or at least for the first extended period outside the fight scene in Civil War. Case in point: the clip from the most recent trailer with Starlord being a condescending prick to Stark or Peter Parker thinking Doctor Strange's name is made up.

I'm not going to lie, that is much more the sort of thing I'm going to this movie to see than the exact mechanics of if and how purple Stone Cold manages to collect all the McGuffins. Obviously there has to be a plot but I wonder if it should be kept to a minimum and have the actors' interactions carry the film in character scene after character scene until the big old fight.

Sort of like The Five Doctors, actually, a story where the author happily admits that he just gave up on plot in the face of a laundry list of characters, monsters and callbacks he was expected to weave into it.