The Marvel Cinematic Universe reached it's apex with Avengers: Infinity War, a movie that took the dark and troubled endings given to movies like The Empire Strikes Back and magnified them to the point where you feel utterly hopeless about the future of this franchise. More than the lion's share of the MCU's lineup, including Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Black Panther, and most of the Guardians of the Galaxy were wiped out when Thanos acquired all six Infinity Stones and simply snapped his fingers. The movie ended with the heroes in an almost impossible to overcome situation. Could they do it? Could Thanos's plan for saving the universe by wiping out half of all life be overturned?
I gotta be honest with you guys, I was petrified that this movie would suffer from Return of the Jedi syndrome. The first Avengers movie is a blast, Age of Ultron was a bit of a mess and Infinity War was a thrilling watch the whole way through. Marvel was setting themselves up for failure on scales that I was afraid they'd stumble blindly into in their fierce pursuit of money. Avengers: Endgame had so many things it needed to wrap up that there was just no way for them to do it all effectively and fairly. I was bracing myself for the worst.
After wrapping the movie up, I could safely say that it was not the nightmare I was expecting it to be. It has more in common with Return of the King than it does Return of the Jedi. It's messy, incoherent and stupid at points, but as a sendoff to the entire universe built up over years of work and great action packed movies, I think it did it's job fairly well. But what was this movie's strength and weaknesses? Well, let's find out...
Plot: After the utter annihilation of half of life in the entire universe and the retreat of Thanos (Josh Brolin), the Avengers and their allies are left broken. Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) is left in shock as his family dissolves into dust during a picnic and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) are left stranded in space after their ship runs out of power. Following a signal sent to her by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) rescues their stranded vessel and brings it back to Earth, where the heroes are reunited an a weakened and shell-shocked Tony Stark is reunited with his love Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). After bickering with his remaining friends in Colonel Rhodes (Don Cheadle), Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the group manages to track Thanos to a remote planet and try to face him again to make him undo his actions. But upon arriving, they find out that Thanos destroyed the Infinity Stones to prevent his work being undone and the temptation to use them again. In a fit of rage, Thor decapitates Thanos with his axe and the Avengers are unofficially dissolved as everyone leaves to live out their lives, Thor with the remaining Asgardians and survivors of Ragnarok and Tony to live with Pepper.
Five years later, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) finally escapes from the Quantum Realm and discovers what had happened. After reuniting with his daughter, Lang makes his way to the Avengers Compound and explains how he had not only evaded Thanos, but had only traversed through roughly five hours in the QR while several years took place outside. Believing this could be the key to fixing Thanos's work, the Avengers reconvene and try to convince the team to get back together, but find Tony reluctant to abandon his new family and daughter and Thor has become obese and deeply depressed since losing his family, world, friends and life over the last few years. Stark discovers a way to make the time of the Quantum Realm travel passed them instead of through them and elects to help on the condition that he is assured he wouldn't lose out on his daughter and Pepper. The Avengers ultimately split up to travel through time and space to collect the Infinity Stones. Stark, Banner, Lang and Rogers head to New York during Loki's invasion to collect the Space Stone from the Tesseract, the Mind Stone from Loki's scepter and the Time Stone from the New York Sanctum, but are ultimately forced to go further back in time after Loki manages to escape with the Tesseract after his capture to collect it in the 1970s as well as some of Hank Pym's particles when he used to work with Howard Stark. Thor and Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) travel to Asgard during the Dark Elves invasion to collect the Reality Stone from inside Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and allow Thor to reunite with his mother before her death. Romanoff and Barton head to collect the Soul Stone from where Thanos found it, resulting in Romanoff sacrificing herself to collect the Stone. While collecting the Power Stone from Xandar before the Guardians could, Rhodes and Nebula manage to succeed, but 2014 Thanos is made aware of the plans and begins to plot his reintegration of the Infinity Stones to wipe out mankind.
Their missions successful, save for the death of Romanoff, the Avengers manage to use the Infinity Stones to undo Thanos's snap, but 2014's Nebula manages to use the Time Machine to bring Thanos to the present along with his army to wipe out all life in the universe, leaving the Avengers to fight their greatest enemy once again, this time with revenge and fear of all life being annihilated as the danger.
What's Wrong?: Unfortunately, the film is not devoid of flaws. Lots of them are geared towards the entire concept of Time Travel. I have never and will never enjoy time travel plots in movies. Because it's an unmanageable concept, so few movies manage to get around the paradox of travelling through time without disrupting the timelines. I found it stupid in Dragon Ball Z, I hate it in Kingdom Hearts and I don't like it much here. The problem with Time Travel is that if you think about it too much, it will take you out of the flow of the story. And if you don't think about it all, you're left to still wonder why they didn't just go back in time to kill Thanos as a baby or something. They still take the Infinity Stones out of their positions in time, resulting in a lot of changes to the time line, starting with Loki managing to cheat death by escaping in 2012 and preventing Hydra from experimenting on the Maximoff Twins in 2014 to make them and also changing Ultron and Vision's development. They try to explain it off by pointing out that changing time would only impact the moment they leave and arrive, but again they still changed things, especially considering Loki is still alive to this moment. But I guess since the Ancient One agreed that it was the only way to fix things, she lets it go.
Another unfortunate casualty of the MCU changing the timelines is Thanos himself. Whereas the Thanos from Infinity War that we all understood and generally empathized with is replaced with generic bad guy who wants to wipe out all life in the universe and start anew. When the big villain of the entire story is killed off and a pre-2018 version of him is nothing like the villain we had come to respect and even tolerate, you have a major problem. It's nothing to say of Josh Brolin, who is again superb as Thanos. It's just that, like with Captain Marvel, they didn't know how to properly make Thanos an antagonist without reverting him back to what we expected him to be before 2018.
What's Good?: Considering this movie is a giant sendoff to both Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr.'s roles in the MCU, I think one of the strongest points of this movie is it's characterizations of these roles. The primary three Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man and Thor) are easily the driving forces of this movie from an emotional standpoint. All three give some of the best performances in these movies, particularly RDJ and Chris Hemsworth. RDJ proves just how phenomenal of an actor he is with his scenes for Tony, including his scenes with his daughter Morgan. He shows just how wonderful of a man and father Tony has become since 2008 and his ending is still an emotionally heartfelt ending considering all he goes through in these movies. Evans is also solid as Steve Rogers, with both he and Tony getting the endings they've always wanted for their characters (Tony fighting to protect what he loves and Steve getting to go back to the time he loves). As for Hemsworth, who still has a few more movie roles lined up after this one in the MCU (I believe he'll be in Guardians 3 as well as Thor 4), but it's nice to see him get to wrap up some unfinished plotline for Thor and to become his own man for once.
The movie takes it's time with the characters, which is something I really enjoyed. Even with the smaller scale characters like Nebula, Scott Lang and Hawkeye getting some tender emotional moments. Whereas Infinity War was a full scale spectacle of action, this one is more of a character driven piece and I enjoy those infinitely more than the dumb action scenes of some of these MCU movies. Some characters don't get particularly satisfying endings to me, like Banner seems to willingly embrace being the Hulk full time now a bit too easily for me and the utter uselessness of Captain Marvel was something bizarre to me. She doesn't really do much in this movie apart from saving Tony and Nebula at the beginning and pile driving some ships during the climax. Apart from that, she doesn't have her real moment of going one on one with Thanos or any of his henchmen and she is more or less relegated to being a side character and letting others like Scarlet Witch, Valkyrie and others have the spotlight.
We get to see characters have their emotional payoffs in this movie. After successfully fixing Thanos's snap, we get to see Tony reunited with Peter Parker, his prodigal son figure. We get to see Tony get some kind of payoff to his relationship with his father, Steve's love for Peggy Carter and my favorite scene of Thor getting to spend time with his mother in Asgard. And of course the fight scene to protect one another between Romanoff and Barton is sweet considering their lengthy backstory of friendship and comradery.
The comedy in this movie is also toned down, but it's knockout punches in humor are still great. My favorite scene in particular is Starlord's reunion with the 2014 Gamora. She not only completely disregards him, but actually looks down on him, showing Quill he had a long way to go to get her back to loving him. I also enjoyed some of the Time Travel shenanigans, like with Lang turning into a baby and Chris Hemsworth's performance on the whole was incredibly comedic, reminiscent of Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. But the movie really has a lack of one liner jokes, which I find appropriate considering the subject material. It didn't need the quippy one liners out the wahzoo. This movie has an appropriate amount of drama, emotion, comedy and action.
Overall: I'm done with the MCU. Not from a lack of interest, mind you. I'm just done with it. I don't need to see anymore. I've seen some of both Wanda/Vision and Loki to know it's still going strong and fairly well enough. And I do intend on seeing Thor 4, if not just to support Taika Waititi's career. But I don't need to see anymore. I've watched enough of Spider-Man: Far From Home to know that aside from a few good things, I won't like it. I have heard nothing but bad things about Black Widow and mixed reactions for both Shang Chi and The Eternals (even though my man crush Richard Madden is in it). I don't need to see another Marvel Movie from this point on. Avengers: Endgame is a satisfying conclusion for the MCU to me. All of my questions have been answered and I'm content to let it ride out it's slow and painful death without me. The story began with the likes of Thor, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers and it gave all three of them satisfying conclusions. Nothing else to see for me.
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