By Thanos the hands of fate, this is a lot of movie. I can still remember being excited about recognizing twenty-five names among the cast of Mars Attacks! In time, the Lord of the Rings trilogy put that number to shame, but I was severely underprepared to recognize over forty talk show headliners from the cast of Avengers: Endgame. And cast is just a portion of what makes this three hour film larger-than-life. Make no mistake: if you have seen the previous twenty Marvel films all the way to their post-credit teasers hoping for some fantastic conclusion where everything comes together and you can sleep easier at night knowing knowing the fictional world of superheroes is infinity stone-ly better the non-fiction one we live in, then this is the exact film you have waited for.
No, it’s not perfect; what time-travel film is? But while I discuss my own quibbles below, please keep in mind that Avengers: Endgame is as successful as it is ambitious.
When we last left the Infinity War, the golem-like Thanos had managed to erase –arbitrarily, mind you- 50% of all living beings in the entire universe. Frankly, I think Endgame downplayed the damage to which immediately erasing four billion humans would have – think about it: in every armed country, there are specific people who exist as failsafes in case of an emergency – people who know how to shut down nuclear reactors and perhaps know the difference between “there’s a fly on the radar” and “our country is at war.” If you take away half of those folks at random, how do stop WWIII from breaking out? “Oh, it’s ok. It’s just Thanos, an all-powerful Godlike being deciding that nature would be balanced if he instantaneously eliminated half of all beings in the universe.” Yeah, just see how that explanation plays in the White House, the Kremlin, or pretty much any government looking for answers.
So first, we do some harm. The remaining Avengers: Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Rocket (voice of either Bradley Cooper or some other Chris), Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson), and Don Cheadle all get off their duffs to conclude Thanos (Josh Brolin). Well, that was sure fun, and made a really short film, too. Huh. Oh, yeah, the whole 50% thing; we didn’t solve that. See, Thanos destroyed the life-crippling collection of infinity stones immediately after bumming out the universe, so whatever joy there was to be had is short lived by knowing nothing can be undone; Sam Jackson has said his last “Mutherf***er.”
Five years later, yes, five years later, Ant-man (Paul Rudd) returns magically from his little ant world where he’s only been away five hours. Uh oh, I sense a time travel movie coming on. Yup, that’s what we got – the remaining Avengers are gonna go back in time to collect the infinity stones before Thanos gets to them.
You realize, of course, this is still the plot of Doogal, right?
Endgame tried the gambit that just by telling us about the paradoxes of time travel, it would avoid them. That’s a fun perspective, huh? It’s kinda like Trump repeating that he didn’t obstruct justice or that he and his team didn’t commit crimes – just because you voice it aloud doesn’t mean your reality is reality. Having never time-traveled, I cannot say for sure, but I think that if you go back in time and make a major adjustment (like stealing an infinity stone), the time you return to no longer exists the way you remember it. You cannot invent a Schrödinger universe in which our heroes both have the infinity stones and don’t have the infinity stones, can you? For a film that chided Back to the Future, this one has just as many problems, and to just as large an extent, as McFly World.
What’s that? You have limited time portal usage?! Why don’t you just use the little you have to go collect the time travel particles when there was a greater supply of them? Oh, is that the time travel equivalent of “wishing for more wishes?”
Here, however, is where Avengers: Endgame is a huge step above Infinty War. Instead of war and battle and light shows and fisticuffs, the film took the remaining, digestible number of Avengers and gave them each specific tasks: Black Widow and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) go to planet Greyskull or whatever to get the green stone, I think. Thor and Rocket go to the pre-destroyed set of Asgard for the Game Cube. Blue Karen Gillan and Don Cheadle invade the opening to Guardians of the Galaxy. Meanwhile, Hulk, Captain America, Ant- and Iron- Man go to 2012 NYC where three stones are available. You know, while you’re there collecting stones, if something were to happen so that Donald Trump decides never to run for President in 2016 … hey, I’m just sayin’.
I can’t express enough how much better this makes the Avengers epic – yeah, you can have your superpower war for the fate of the universe later on, for now, give us little adventures; they can be violent, but mostly, they can explore plot and character. Avengers: Endgame is the most humorous dire film in years because it allowed itself to examine several smaller pictures instead of one big one. For example, as Asgard has been reduced to a fishing village, Thor has completely let himself go to seed in five years; the CGI pot-bellied body on the God of Thunder is absolutely hilarious … and pretty spot-on, I think.
Another way this film triumphed over its predecessor was the development of Tony Stark, who uses the five year interim to become husband and father. There are over forty :names: in Endgame, but this is a movie about Tony Stark, from his Blair Witch video opening, to his inspiration for time travel, to his reluctance to use such for it undermines his own understanding of fatherhood. His is the one life that truly flourished in the wake of the 50% loss, and now the world asks of him to erase that timeline. Would you?
BTW, I wonder if any Avenger was ever thinking: “Boy, Superman sure would come in handy right about now, huh?” Sorry, is the S-Man taboo around these parts?
After pure saga and a feeling that this film is indeed the climax we’ve waited years for, what strikes me most about Endgame is how politically neutral this film is, which is darn near impossible given the plot and our current climate where every.single.thing from wardrobe to dialogue is suddenly a political weapon. On the one hand, liberals will certainly recognize the depiction of the villain, Thanos – here’s a callous, all-powerful megalomaniac who treats life as negligible. Spurred on by sycophants and toadies, he and he alone knows what’s best for every species and has no qualms about adjusting everything to his liking … and in true Trumpian fashion, all of his “successes” in making lives better have had exactly the opposite effect, including his own. On the other hand for conservatives, there are the heroes, the Avengers. This is a group that collectively yearns for a roll back of clock; people who remember a better time when things made sense to them and sorrow wasn’t infused into every memory. If we could just get back to that moment … wouldn’t everything be great again? Oh, I sure as Hell can remember an America I’d rather return to. Perhaps it is not yours, per se, but I can certainly sympathize with MAGA people on at least one level.
It should be lost on no one that the counter-surge of the film’s climactic battle is 100% female characters in the Marvel world, and there are quite a few, it seems. Yes, I’m going to be a jerk and not name all of them. Suffice to say, while I love Gwyneth Paltrow in an Iron suit, I still think the powers of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) are pretty darn amorphous.
Now if you haven’t seen Infinity War or the twenty other Marvel films preceding this one, well, hey, sorry about the spoilers and I sure hope you’re not bored silly for three hours. Endgame is a wonderful contextual film; it’s Marvel-ous if you are well aware of the players and their foibles, but as stand-alone epics go, it’s no Lord of the Rings.
The biggest problem with the past two Avengers films is simple: Where do you go from here? The Endgame has been Avenged; the Galaxy has been Guarded. No Avengers adventure will be or should be bigger than this one. But we know there will be more Avenging adventures, so what for me will they take that won’t seem 100% anti-climactic? In lieu of a poem or parodied song, here are some suggestions:
Avenger Babies
Muppet Avengers
Muppet Baby Avengers
Avengers: Superpower Swap
The Avengers Bachelor/Bachelorette
Avenger Idol
The Amazing Avenger Race
Avengers Forum
Late Night with the Avengers
Celebrity Avenger Death Match
Avenge This! The Avengers respond to fan mail
Microvengers
The Animal Avengers
The Office Supply Avengers
Ok, I’ve clearly run out of ideas. Point is, I know you guys haven’t, but everything from this point forward is gonna seem like a letdown … and it ought to.
Rated PG-13, 181 Minutes
Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Writer: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Genre: Larger than life
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Marvel-ites
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who haven’t enjoyed a new film since the century turned
