Review: Avengers Endgame

Isn't it funny that Avengers: Endgame came out in April and three months later absolutely no one is talking about it?

Okay, that's probably because we were almost immediately hit by the Game of Thrones truck, are now in the afterglow of Stranger Things, and have our eyes on the fast-approaching The Rise of Skywalker... but still, I think it's telling that the hype for the culmination of nearly ten years worth of cinematic storytelling died out pretty quickly.

Because as a movie, Avengers: Endgame is much like all the MCU movies. A solid piece of entertainment that provides all the typical beats: lots of gags, some poignancy, fun character moments, bombastic set-pieces, a dash of romance and a villain (okay, Marvel has always been pretty weak with those last two).

As I've said in the past, I'm a casual fan of Marvel, and (unlike Game of Thrones, which snuck up on me without my realizing it) I can say that sincerely this time. General opinion is that The Winter Soldier is the best of the lot and The Dark World the worst, though to me they're of equal quality when it comes to entertainment value.

Which means it was a blessed relief to go into the movie theater and just... watch a movie. No elaborate head-canons to be crushed, no obnoxious shippers/stans screaming in agony, no dramatic disappointment in the way characters were portrayed, no devastated tears when things didn't turn out the way I had overinvested in...

There are some elements of contention: that the time-travel made no sense, that Steve ignored his own advice and lived out his life in the past, and of course Black Widow's fate - but ultimately I'm not that invested in the MCU and so could enjoy the ride without cross-examining everything.

I don't care, and MAN that feels good!

I wonder though if the quick passing of the film in collective conversation has anything to do with the increasingly hysterical "spoiler culture" that's popped up in the last few years, and which reached a crescendo with this particular movie. It stands to reason that most people were simply too afraid to talk about Endgame for fear of spoiling something to those that hadn't seen it - and of course, by the time the Russo-imposed ban on spoilers was lifted, everyone had moved on to other interests.

Furthermore, there's also been plenty of pushback against this spoilerphobic mentality, arguing that it's not only silly and stressful, but that if a story is of good quality, it shouldn't matter if a person goes in knowing what happens. (Heck, I'm gonna wait for feedback on The Rise of Skywalker before deciding whether or not I want to see it).

I mean, imagine being genuinely afraid of repercussions if you accidentally say the wrong thing about this film. In that light I can understand why so many people would think things had reached heights of true ridiculousness and simply stopped talking about it completely.

One can certainly draw a straight line between Endgame's insistence on not spoiling things and the significance Game of Thrones placed on "subverting expectations", and the negative response fandom had to both. So ultimately, I wonder if this film's legacy will be the effect it had on discussions surrounding spoilerphobic culture, which is making it more and more difficult to treat films as what they're meant to be: stories to be enjoyed.

And for what it's worth: Endgame is a decent story - though all things considered, I liked Infinity War better. It rode high on the joy of bringing all these characters together for the first time, and I think setup will almost always be more rewarding than pay-off, simply because there are fewer expectations at work.

I'm also a sucker for things going wrong for our heroes; watching them grapple and panic and flounder in the face of overwhelming odds. In comparison, Endgame is the story in which they regroup, formulate a plan, and more-or-less maintain the upper ground for the duration of the film.

So what's to say about Endgame? As most of us expected, time travel played a crucial role, though the surprise was that it wasn't utilized to change time and prevent Thanos from ever doing the Snap in the first place, but to gather the Infinity Stones from the years before the Snap, bring them to the present day, use them to restore all the Snap victims to life, and then return the stones to their original place in the time-stream.

This is necessitated by Thanos having destroyed the stones in the present day, to prevent the Avengers tracking him down and reversing the Snap that way. Another wrinkle in the plan is that in the five years since the Snap, Tony and Pepper have had a daughter, and he refuses to get involved in any time travel shenanigans that might jepardise her existence. As such, the Reverse-Snap has to take place in 2023.

So far so good: this is a solid plan stemming from a logical thought process, one which allows the Avengers to head back into their "greatest hits" of the past in order to gather the stones and return to the present.

But here come the first of several buts. Despite crafting a very careful framework in which to build a stable time-loop (get the stones, bring them forward in time, use them, put them back when/where they got them so that preordained time can run its course) the story almost immediately starts poking holes in its established rules.

When Thor returns to the events of The Dark World, he takes Mjolnir back to the future with him, thus depriving his past self of the weapon. Then Loki from 2012 escapes captivity with the Tesseract, meaning that the events of The Dark World and Ragnarok couldn't possibly have happened as we originally saw them, since Loki wasn't there to get involved.

It just multiplies from there, until past!Thanos from the first Guardians of the Galaxy film brings himself forward in time, Nebula shoots and kills her past self, and Steve opts to go live out his life in the past with Peggy.

If memory serves, the discussion between the Ancient One and Bruce in New York delves into some of this, bringing up the possibility of alternative universes and broken time streams, but honestly - at this point you just go with it or go mad trying to hold it all together. Suffice to say that they break the rules of stable time travel.

On the one hand that's a shame, as some of the most poignant and (more importantly) satisfying time travel adventures follow the rules of "whatever you go back to do in the past already happened the first time around". Think of the hippogriff rescue in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or Hodor's tragic fate in Game of Thrones, or Demona's self-imposed tragedy in Gargoyles when she tries to manipulate her younger self using the Phoenix Gate.

Also consider the beauty of Tom's Midnight Garden by Phillipa Pearce, and the dark comedy of Black Maria by Diana Wynne Jones (hmm, children's books seem to do this so much better than adult fiction).

But nope, this veers into Doctor Who/Back to the Future/Days of Future Past timey-wimey tangles, where you have to shut your brain off for it to work.

Apart from breaking the rules of time-travel, there are some other points of contention, from Stucky shippers writhing in the throes of overwrought disappointment, to irritation from profoundly different corners of the internet over the infamous girl power scene.

For the record, I liked that Steve went back in time to reconnect with Peggy: there was always the lingering thread of that long-awaited dance, and it was a neat way of removing Chris Evans from the franchise, given that he (like Robert Downey Jr) was clearly ready to say goodbye.

But I can see why there would be disappointment: a lot of Steve's arc has been about letting go of the past (which was directly contradicted here), his farewell to Bucky was definitely shortchanged (and I say that as someone who didn't give two shits about their relationship) and much of Agent Carter has been rendered obsolete (unless it all now takes place in an alternative universe). That's not even getting into the logistics of Steve heading back in time and NOT dealing with the Winter Soldier and the infiltration of Shield by Hydra.

I would have been happy with him heading back into the past JUST to have that long-promised dance with Peggy before returning to his life and leaving her to hers - but like I said, this mainly existed to provide Chris Evans with an exit. (And it did tie in nicely with his decision to take a page from Tony's book and find domestic happiness).

As for the girl power scene, in which all the warrior-women of the MCU (minus Nakia, Sif, Sharon Carter and Black Widow) gather around Peter Parker on the battlefield in order to escort the Infinity Stones to safety... well, it's one of those times when your head says: "nah" and your heart goes: "yah!"

I grasp the unlikelihood of all those characters ending up in the exact same place at the same time, and as a feminist statement it's about as weak as the blink-and-you'll-miss-it gay representation at Steve's therapy group given that barely any of these women have had any meaningful interaction with each other, or character development of their own.

And yet, I'll never forget how I felt seeing it at the movie theater. It was in the second that Pepper appeared that I realized what was happening, and I grabbed my own chest as more and more of the women kept appearing. And you know, just for a second - a stunning, white-hot, heart-stopping second - I believed that the Russo Brothers were going to hand the victory over Thanos to the women. THEY were the ones that were gonna take him down.

And of course, it didn't happen. Like so many female characters before them, they have to make do with providing supplementary aid before receding into the background. Daenerys can't be queen, Astrid can't be chief, Captain Marvel can't defeat Thanos - I mean, there's a limit to how powerful women are allowed to be, guys! Let's not forget who the protagonists really are!

Honestly, I'm not as bitter as I sound, because OBVIOUSLY Steve and Tony had to get the decisive moves against Thanos (Steve lifting Mjolnir and Tony doing the Snap). But just for a second there, something truly revolutionary had the possibility of happening... and even just the possibility of it is enough for now.

Finally, I do have to bring up one more thing, and you all know what it is. Black Widow.

So like a lot of viewers, I immediately began to get twitchy when it was decided that Clint and Natasha would be sent to Vormir during the Time Heist. I mean, you send the two non-powered humans to a faraway planet that contains god-knows-what instead of the super-soldier, the armoured genius, the thunder-god or one of the two other characters with experience in space? Mmkay.

It's obvious in hindsight that given the rules surrounding the retrieval of the Soul Stone that the Russos knew only Clint and Natasha would qualify as Avengers that truly loved each other enough to make the sacrifice an actual sacrifice. You have to give up something that you love in order to be granted the stone.

(Actually, Red Skull's exact words were that you had to give up the thing you loved MOST, which certainly makes Clint's love for his wife and children a little questionable if Nat's death granted him possession of the stone).

In any case, on hearing this clause, Clint and Natasha talk it over and eventually fight each other over who gets to make the suicidal leap. Natasha "wins" this fight and plummets to her death, after which we're treated to an extremely sexualized shot of her dead body on the floor of the crevasse.

Just like Gamora's in fact! Thanks for that!

It makes me laugh (in an extremely bitter way) because you just KNOW that the Russo Brothers thought they were making a profound contrast between how Gamora is thrown kicking and screaming to her death, while Natasha willingly throws herself to her doom, ignoring the fact that they wrote two consecutive films involving a beloved female character dying in the exact same place, in the exact same way, with the exact same shot to finish up her arc.

Obviously, there is a fundamental difference between Gamora getting murdered and Natasha choosing to sacrifice herself. And heck, it's not even the worst example of a female character getting fridged in order to make a man feel sad (unlike Gamora or Frigga or the Ancient One, at least Nat helps save the world while she's at it).

But despite feeling fairly unperturbed about it at the time, I've since had to sit through Game of Thrones and the final stretch of its active misogyny, which in hindsight makes Natasha's treatment all the more grating. The tendency for male writers to kill off female characters in very specific ways is all the more apparent when you look at these massive franchises: men die as heroes, fighting one-on-one with their enemies, women die as beautiful victims, in considerably more passive and "romantic" ways.

Like, I've heard people say that this was a fitting end for Nat considering it provided closure on her life-long attempts to make up for the red in her ledger... though this completely ignores the fact that Clint spent five years brutally murdering Mexican and Chinese criminals for having the audacity to live after his family died.

And again I laugh, because I know - I JUST KNOW - that it never for a moment occurred to the Russos that Clint is just as culpable as Nat and so might be required to make amends for all the bloodshed he caused in those five years. Because men who go on psychotic rampages after their family's deaths... well, that's just what men DO. It's as natural as the sun rises! Nothing to be concerned about, or something that requires redemption, punishment, or even reflection in any way.

Not like Natasha's crimes, which all happened entirely off-screen, and which were committed after a childhood of intense Soviet brainwashing. I PROMISE you that this double-standard never even crossed the Russos' minds.

Another nasty bit of subtext is the idea that Clint deserved to live because he had a wife and kids, while one of the key bits of Natasha's characterization was that the Avengers were her only family (let's not forget her woeful assumption that she's "a monster" for being sterilized).

And yet I think that Clint making the final sacrifice FOR his family, dying so that they could live again, would have been much more powerful than Natasha's. Imagine if that moment he hears his daughter's voice during the test-run of the time travel, in which he comes within just a few seconds of seeing her, was the last time he interacts with a member of his family.

Now imagine Natasha making the call to Laura in the immediate aftermath of the time heist, then approaching her at the farmhouse to tell her and the kids what happened to Clint... tell me this wouldn't have worked just as well, if not better, than Natasha making the jump.

Clint dying for his wife and children, as a response to his crimes committed in the five-year gap, after missing his daughter by just a few seconds, would have been exceptionally poignant and fitting.

Heck, if they wanted to be REALLY clever, they could have done something that created a loophole that could have brought original-flavour Gamora back. Like if they tampered with the "sacrifice a life to get the stone" set-up long BEFORE Thanos got there, and so made Gamora's death a fake-out in some way. Like... I dunno, if the two of them jumped off the cliff together, they could have created some credit that would have brought another life back...?

That probably makes more sense in my head, but ah well. At least we're getting that Black Widow solo film, several years after everyone has ceased to care about it, and which will almost certainly be a prequel to a character that's already completed her swan-song.

Miscellaneous Observations:

All things considered, it was a fun film. I enjoyed it with exactly the same measure and consistency with which I enjoyed all the other Marvel films.

Thor's weight gain was a big surprise, one I was totally unspoiled for. There's debate over whether or not it was comedy or fat-shaming, but... I was okay with it? I mean, it's obvious that he was depressed, and it's clear that he's still worthy of lifting Mjolnir. And they didn't have him beef up again before the last battle: he was still a formidable fighter despite his weight. I'll leave it for others to debate the rest.

And it appears he's now heading off with the Guardians? Does this mean Chris Hemsworth is going to be in Guardians 3? Because I don't doubt that will be entertaining, but I'm already sick of the Quill/Thor dick-measuring.

Still, this movie gave me what Aquaman and How to Train Your Dragon and Game of Thrones didn’t: a powerful man giving up leadership to the more qualified woman standing next to him. Amazing!

Hulk has always been the least interesting character to me, so Professor Hulk was just... there. It's an odd way to resolve the conflict set up in Infinity War though: that he couldn't summon Hulk when required. Glad to see that got sorted out... entirely off-screen.

Scott's reunion with Cassie was a lovely moment, though I'm sad we've lost the younger actress. She was adorable, and very good at what she did. Along with Nebula and that random rat, Scott ended up the movie's surprise MVP.

I was almost stunned at Nebula's importance and screentime - though I shouldn't be. Given her close proximity to Thanos it was only natural that she would be key... I guess I'm just used to the Trinity Syndrome being in effect. Her interactions with Tony at the start of the film were fantastic - I'm sorry that dynamic ended once they returned to earth. And silently taking hands with Rocket! Beautiful.

It now makes sense that Sam got dusted instead of Rhodey at the end of Infinity War. I initially thought that was an odd call to make, but it makes sense that a) Tony would get to keep his inner circle largely intact, and b) set up for return of the "on your left" line.

Of all the surprise cameos, it was Jarvis, Frigga, Harley and the Ancient One that really caught me off-guard. Jarvis in particular marks the first time that a television character has made the leap to a film (unless there's some obscure person in Agents of Shield that I don't know about).

I was moved by the Ancient One's incredible leap of faith when she hears that Strange gave up the Time Stone, realizing that he must have a greater plan in place. And this is before she had even MET the guy.

Frigga figured out Thor was from the future because “I was raised by witches.” Okay, STOP. How can I find out more about this? The comics? A spin-off? Because that was the most random yet tantalizing bit of dialogue I’ve ever heard.

This is about what I expected from Captain Marvel: she was the new girl, and the focus had to be on the old guard. Still, she got some good moments and it's obvious she'll be central going forward.

Who'd have thought that The Dark World would end up being this important?

The film chooses not to explore the massive ramifications of bringing billions of people back to life after a five-year absence, and it's not like I blame them exactly, but it does lead to some pretty mind-boggling hypotheticals. What if you come back and find your home is either derelict or has someone else living in it? What about pets that have been abandoned and gone feral? People that successfully moved on, remarried and had children? What about jail-time? If you were serving three years, would you have to complete your sentence if you got snapped halfway through? What about children or infants that were left orphaned and adopted out to new parents? Would they stay in those homes, or go back to their biological parents?

Perhaps Spiderman: Far From Home dealt with some of these issues; I haven't seen it yet. It's best not to think about it too much.

Finally, who can doubt the spine-tingling potency of all the portals opening when all hope seems lost? The Wakandan army, the monks of Kamar-Taj, the rest of the Asgardians, the Reavers, and of course all the assorted Avengers. What a moment! That it took so long to get them all assembled is a testiment to just how vast this cinematic universe has become. Eleven years and twenty-two films - the pay-off was all there in this sequence.

I'm thankful that I could just sit back and enjoy myself despite some of the film's obvious flaws. At the end of the day, I was in genuine tears over what Game of Thrones did to Daenerys, but just vaguely irritated at Black Widow's fate (though I understand that for many, that reaction might be totally reversed) and able to switch my brain off.

Game of Thrones got under my skin despite me trying to stay detached, but the MCU has always been high-gloss, candy-coated fluff. Ah, the joys of only being moderately invested!