Rating: 3.5 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
I saw Avengers: Endgame on opening weekend, and had managed to avoid any spoilers and even any trailers going into it. As such, I spent a fair amount of the three-hour running time in open-mouthed shock. They kill Thanos within the first 15 minutes, then we skip five years into the future into a universe that is starting to get used to the idea that half of everyone is dead and not coming back. Eventually the remaining Avengers develop a time travel scheme, in which they revisit older movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where the infinity stones had appeared to steal them from, in many cases, themselves, so they can bring the stones back to their present and use that power to return everyone to life.
Along the way, 2014 Thanos learns of their plans and piggybacks his way to the present so he can stop them from undoing his work, and maybe even go ahead and kill the rest of the universe for good measure. This all culminates in a massive battle with every MCU-protagonist fighting against Thanos’s entire army with the fate of everything that exists hanging in the balance, with the original MCU-protagonist himself, Iron Man, sacrificing himself to stop Thanos and save reality. In the aftermath, Captain America decides to use their time travel tech to go back and live out the rest of his natural life with his lost love from the 1940s, Peggy Carter. All of this being a reversal of their stated personalities in the first Avengers film, in which Iron Man was accused of being too selfish to make the “sacrifice play” and Captain America was accused of having no life outside of his hero persona.
Upon rewatching the movie, now knowing what to expect, the whole enterprise feels a bit… empty. Free of the shock and awe and audacity of it all, what was actually the entire point of most of this movie? The writers and directors, so careful and precise in their previous efforts, sprawl out a bit here, leaving plot threads loose and dangling, character motivations unexplored, and throwing any theming or subtext out the window, all in exchange for copious amounts of fan service. If I didn’t know better, I would not think they got the same creative team back for Endgame as they had for Infinity War, which, though certainly not perfect, at least gestured towards having something to say.
Best Parts:
Generally the scenes from fade-in to when Ant Man starts explaining his time travel idea to everyone are all effective. Hawkeye losing his family is terrifying. Ant Man returning from the quantum realm, thinking only a few hours have passed, only to slowly realize what happened over the last five years, before being reunited with his now teenaged daughter, is also fairly terrifying. The bickering among the Avengers after Iron Man returns and subsequent assault on Thanos’s farm works, and starts to set a tone of hopelessness, and then the initial post-time jump scenes, like Captain America leading the support group (shades of what the Falcon was doing in Winter Soldier), seal the deal.
Generally the final battle sequence is effective. There are great showcase moments and set pieces for all of the characters, and Captain America in particular really gets to shine when he starts wielding Thor’s hammer. Even knowing what’s coming, when the portals start to open up to funnel in all the resurrected cavalry, it still feels very emotional. And even though it’s a bit fan service-y and ridiculous, the “A-Force moment” of all the female heroes banding together to help deliver the gauntlet, is genuinely fun and exciting (though, quite frankly, it also feels a bit like Marvel is trying to excuse the idea that they made 20 movies before having one with a female lead by saying, “Hey look, we had lots of female heroes before Captain Marvel! Why, there’s Gamora, and Scarlet Witch, and the Wasp, and, um, Mantis, and, uh… Pepper Potts?”).
And look, this is a movie filled to the brim with talented actors, made by filmmakers who certainly know how to craft a cool moment and a funny line, and so sure, it’s entertaining along the way. Remember it looked like Captain America was going to fight people in an elevator again, but instead he said, “Hail Hydra”? Remember when Paul Rudd turned into an old man and then a baby? Remember when the rock guy played Fortnite? Good times, good times.
Worst Parts:
OK, this is going to take some time to unpack. Let’s do plot first, then character, then some nitpicks.
The plot makes no sense. Let’s start by establishing that this is a fantasy universe and anything is possible, and there are no rules except what they set. But they still have to work within the rules once they bother to set them. Like you couldn’t have Mary Jane hanging from a rope over a pit of lava and then have Spider-Man use his telekinesis to save her, because telekinesis is not one of his established magic powers. And here in Endgame they take the time to set a bunch of rules and expectations as to how time travel works and then they don’t follow through on any of it.
A lot of my initial theatrical experience with this movie was very tense, because they spent most of the time heist majorly screwing things up and changing the timeline, and I was concerned about the consequences and how this would all be resolved. It turns out I needn’t have worried, because none of it truly meant anything. If we’re going to get into time travel, there are really only a few ways it can work:
- If you change the past, you butterfly-effect the future, and when you get back, everything will be different.
- If you change the past, it creates an alternate timeline, but your original timeline still exists.
- You can’t change the past, because you going back in time is what already happened, and you’ll eventually discover that you were always the mysterious stranger who saved your grandpa from being hit by that truck or whatever.
Avengers: Endgame follows none of these. They state explicitly that they’re not doing the first one, and then the Ancient One suggests that they’re doing the second one, when she tells the Hulk that removing an infinity stone will cause an alternate timeline, and what’s more that timeline will be doomed because it’s missing an infinity stone, which is vital for the universe to exist, and time only even happens because of infinity stones (or something). This speech is given before we see the Avengers really start changing things, like telling the Hydra agents that Captain America is one of them, telling 2012 Cap that Bucky is alive, and letting Loki escape with the Tesseract. So it seems like, uh oh, we’ve got alternate timelines galore happening now.
So now we know, or think we know, that it’s definitely not Option 3, because these things are clearly not what always happened and we just didn’t know it. When we get to the Guardians of the Galaxy portion of the heist, it’s doubly confirmed that yes, they’re changing things. So they keep going around, screwing things up, and changing things left and right, but still somehow with the idea that as long as they put the infinity stones back, everything will be all right, but it’s not clear if those are still divergent timelines, or if they are somehow supposed to automagically converge back into the original reality.
But they definitely can’t converge back, right? Because even if Loki returns with the Tesseract to shortly after he left, gets recaptured, and sent back to Asgard, Thanos and Nebula and that entire army are all dead in the future, so that 2014 timeline is irrevocably changed. With that being the case, what does it really matter if they return the stones? With the stones returned, and assuming they created more than one alternate timeline, other Thanos’s will gather them up and kill everyone, and then other Avengers will go back in time to undo it, create more timelines, etc. etc. The only “safe” timelines are the 2014 timeline without a Thanos and the current “real” timeline.
And yes the Ancient One said without the stones the timelines they’re taken from will wither and die, but that 100% cannot be true, because the current “real” timeline doesn’t have any stones. Thanos destroyed them. And we know Marvel is planning a lot more movies and Disney+ TV shows, so it sure doesn’t seem like the timeline is about to end. So who cares? Why return them at all? Just so the Thanos from that timeline can start the whole process up again? I mean I guess 2012 needs the time stone back to stop Dormammu, but the rest of the stones have never done anything good for anyone.
And finally, and I just mean finally with plot issues, what’s up with Captain America being an old man now? That doesn’t fit in with anything we’ve been doing up to this point. Cinematically, it’s presented as if he returned the infinity stones (and what does returning the soul stone, which was acquired in an “eternal exchange” for Black Widow’s life, even mean?), then went back in time to the 1940s, lived out his life, and waited nearby on a bench for his younger self to leave, which contradicts all previously established rules of time travel, shaky as they are. This whole scene is so confusing that the directors have given interviews saying that he lived in an alternate timeline then used their time travel tech to return to his original timeline at the end of his life, and the screenwriters have given interviews saying he simply aged up to present day, and was always intended to be the Peggy Carter’s unseen husband from Winter Soldier. Maybe they should have, like, talked about this before filming it and releasing it? Also, both answers are ridiculous.
Shifting to character, is this actually a happy ending for our beloved Captain America? Throughout all of these films, him being mentally stuck in the past has been presented as something he needs to overcome. In this film explicitly, he’s both shown to have changed a lot over the past few years (now he swears, and he’s annoyed with his younger self saying, “I can do this all day”), and states outright that his biggest obstacle to growth is an inability to “move on”. And so instead of moving on, he goes back in time and completely reverts. While this has the superficial appearance of a happy ending, it directly goes against everything they’ve been building up for his character.
The other person with an explicit personal growth problem is Black Widow, who also has issues with moving on. Having had a taste of the hero life, she’s now has an obsessive hero complex, even trying to figure out how to fight an underwater earthquake (can she jump up onto its shoulders and flip it?). And then, like Captain America, instead of growing past this, she gives into it, heroically sacrificing herself to get the soul stone, ensuring she can die forever a hero and a martyr without having to ever do the hard work of developing any kind of internalized sense of self-worth.
She dies to save Hawkeye, by the way, known by millions as “that one Avenger I don’t like”, who has become some kind of globetrotting version of The Punisher. We spend a few minutes with the other heroes being disturbed and disgusted by what he’s become, and then it’s completely glossed over and never brought up again, and he doesn’t have kind of redemption arc or come to Jesus moment.
Speaking of glossed over and never brought up again: Nebula. She should probably be the main character of this movie, right? I mean, she’s the character who has changed the most over the course of these films, but she barely ends up doing anything or being all that important to the overall story. There’s a great sense of a relationship between her and Tony Stark from the three weeks they spent together slowly dying in space, and then after that scene they literally never interact again for the rest of the film. Unable to convince her younger self that change and growth is possible, she just kills her (further solidifying that you can’t go back and time and just live up to present day, because the timelines are separate). And that’s basically the last we see of Nebula. Is she traumatized by this murder-suicide?
Also, why do the Avengers win this time? Does it mean anything that they win? In Infinity War, there was a clear theme: the Avengers are not willing to sacrifice the one for the many, and Thanos is, and he wins. They do not return to this theme in any way in Endgame. There is no longer anything like a war of perspectives between the two factions. The Avengers win because there are a lot of them, and they are better at fighting than most of Thanos’s army, and because Tony Stark designed the new gauntlet, and so he can make it swap the stones onto his hand. It’s just being good at fighting and a little bit of luck. There are no grand ideas at play here.
OK, so let’s get into nitpicks I guess.
The idea that the infinity gauntlet makes you so powerful that you can wipe out half the universe with a snap of your fingers is a figure of speech. It’s like “wow, it’s so easy, I can do it in a snap”. Somehow they made this the on-switch for the infinity gauntlet, where the only way it works is to physically snap your fingers. It’s tremendously stupid.
Also, the infinity gauntlet makes you, essentially, God. So being able to only resurrect the people who are “kinda gone” and not the people who are “really gone” is tremendously stupid. You can literally end the universe and start a new one, apparently, but you can’t bring back Frigga? Sure.
The weird “predestination” element with Doctor Strange knowing the one way they win, and then even showing his finger to Tony Stark, like “Hey this is the one way, you have to use the gauntlet and kill all the bad guys,” is something I really don’t enjoy. If there was still any sense that the decisions the heroes make actually matter, this removes that. How does this “one way to win” thing benefit the story at all? Are we supposed to think Tony Stark wouldn’t have made the “sacrifice play” if Doctor Strange hadn’t held up his finger?
Spider-Man, even fighting aliens, would never activate “instant kill mode”.
Pepper Potts’s Rescue armor is called “Rescue” for a reason, and shouldn’t have any weapons.
The Asgardians of the Galaxy scene at the end goes on for maybe two minutes too long. I’m starting to get worried that I’m sick of those characters and the very specific way they always banter.
It would’ve been nice if Captain Marvel had given a more precise reason to why she leaves the movie after the time jump. Just naming a planet or alien species from the comics and saying they’re having trouble would’ve done the trick. As it is, it feels like she’s basically saying, “Well I gotta go. I’m too powerful and wouldn’t make sense for the rest of the plot. Page me when you need someone to fly through a giant spaceship.”
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