Okay guys, breaking my dissertation exile to add commentary here. Several of y'all have noted the same things I have, and I get the impression that we seem to be generally viewing the film the same way.
Endgame was good, almost great. It is a fair, if not a perfect, ending of this amazing project. I did not love it the way I did Infinity War, but this film, admittedly, had a harder job to do than even its predecessor, an incredibly hard job. There is no more after this. This is the end. There will be more movies, more individual stories, and maybe Marvel will even try to manufacture another miracle and create another interwoven, overarching, franchise-spanning saga, but this movie is, unquestionably, the end of the journey that began over a decade ago. To create a satisfying ending to twenty plus films and a decade of storytelling and universe-building is a very tough job indeed.
It did that job pretty well, and with a comprehensiveness that was impressive and awe-inspiring. But it does have significant flaws, both on the plot and the thematic level. It is by turns touching, heart-rending, inspiring, and beautiful. Unfortunately, it is also occasionally stupidly silly and in a few (though too many for a project like this) moments it undercuts its own emotional impact for a cheap joke. Still, on the whole, it succeeds on the emotional level quite magnificently.
On the plot level, it is often creative and surprising, but it is also downright sloppy to a degree that is rather astonishing given the importance of the film and the accomplishment of its creators. However, given the nature and complexity of the story being told, such sloppiness is neither entirely surprising nor as damaging as it might be in other contexts.
I suppose the great question for a film like this, though its like has never actually existed before, is 'does it create a satisfying conclusion?' The answer is, yes, emotionally. It does, and it does so in wonderful ways, with tragedy and triumph. It provides the hopeful, inspiring experience that a comicbook film should, while still feeling weighty and significant. I walked out of the theater feeling somberly elated. Intellectually, the conclusion is less satisfying for a number of reasons I'll outline below. Despite that failing, I walked away happy, if not perfectly so.
So, go see it. It is worth seeing solely on the merits of the uniqueness of its cultural import, in recognition of the grand experiment that it concludes, but it is also worth seeing AS that conclusion, and on its own merits as a very good adventure film full of wonder, hope, and redemption.
Alright. In no particular order, here are my spoilery thoughts. Criticisms first so we can end on a good note.
So, essentially, I loved this movie except for every scene with Thor in it. Or, more accurately, the fat, drunken buffoon carrying Thor's hammer and axe, because the god of thunder was completely absent from this movie. Unfortunately and inexplicably, the Russo Brothers, despite making the right decision at almost every other moment in all of their films, chose to continue the horrible, massively out of character-characterization of Thor from Ragnarok. He's portrayed as a fat, drunken slob, constantly blubbering and completely broken by his experiences whose almost sole purpose is for comedy.
Now, a Thor broken by the loss of almost everything he's known and loved...that could have been a story worth telling. We saw a glimpse of that in Infinity War, and it was good. But, just like Ragnarok, they undercut EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT. of any emotional weight in his scenes in Endgame for a stupid, cheap joke. Thor gets a reunion with his lost mother, which could really have been beautiful and powerful. Instead, it's just another excuse for fat jokes. The same is true when he reclaims Mjolnir. That SHOULD have been a powerful moment of Thor's arc, the culmination of him putting himself back together and climbing out of his despair. Instead, it has zero weight because nothing about his portrayal changes. Folks are complaining that they make Thor's entirely reasonable PTSD into nothing more than fodder for jokes, and that's a fair assessment.
In a film and a franchise that is 90% about connections to the wider universe and mythos that they have created, this is massively jarring and frustrating. You can't have a character just suddenly perform a 180 degree about-face in personality. It defies the entire purpose of having a shared universe and robs everything touching that character of the accumulated narrative power that comes to bear at every other moment of the film.
It's particularly egregious because of how good everything else is. The scenes with the 'Big Thorbowski' are a gaping wound in the film, a glaring flaw that mars an otherwise shinning surface, an element as far out of step of the universe as everything else is bound in harmony. I found myself legitimately angry whenever he was on screen, not just for what they were doing to one of my favorite characters, but also because he was taking away from the rest of the film by his discordant presence.
Jokes are fine, and, in fact, necessary, in a film like this. And Endgame has lots of great, funny moments that fit its theme and tone and arise naturally from the interplay of personalities. One of my favorite moments is when Warmachine just straight-up coldcocks "Stupid Indiana Jones," Starlord. That's a great comedy beat, and it totally works as a release from the building tension of that act. In contrast, though there are some legitimately funny moments with Thor, the overall effect is wildly at odds with both the character and the context.
So, that was my biggest complaint, and it is, in my eyes, a very serious one. However, there were also some pretty major plot holes. I'm sure everyone who has thought about the film for more than five minutes has recognized them, but let's go ahead and give them a quick overview.
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Random note, I was disappointed by Tony and Cap's reunion. It didn't quite work for me. They eventually got there, but they never had the reconciliation I really wanted to see.
Captain Marvel was cool, but her powerlevel is plot-breakingly high. She is as problematic for a universe as Silver Age, planet-juggling Superman. She was also sort of bland in this, probably because she didn't get much narrative space.
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This is a time-travel movie. That means it's going to have plot holes and logic problems. You really just about can't do a time-travel tale without screwing up your own plot, at least a little. However, Avengers is surprisingly bad, even for the genre. In Back to the Future, the logic doesn't always make sense, but they set out the rules of their setting, and then they pretty much stick to them. In Endgame, they establish their rules...and then they almost immediately break them.
They say that you can travel in time, but you can't change anything because you'll create alternate time-lines instead of actually changing the future (Back to the Future rules, but with more inflexibility of time). So, they can only do this if they pluck the Infinity Stones from the past and then return them to the exact moment they came from, so that they were effectively never gone. Then, they immediately bork their own history by accidentally freeing Loki right after Avengers I and letting him get his hands on the Cosmic Cube/Tesseract/Space Stone.
Ohh, and Cap tells his past self that Bucky was still alive several years early. Great.
Okay, I thought, now we'll see them have to repair the timeline, chase after Loki, and put things to rights. Nope, they immediately jump further back in time, and just leave Loki free to play merry havoc with he timeline, and this is NEVER ADDRESSED AGAIN! Really?! Really!? No-one thought to give us a single line of dialog about how this didn't matter because Tony had planned X, or how he fixed it in the snap, or any of a hundred other ways around it? Nope, we are told, explicitly, that they cannot change history.....and then they do...and NOTHING HAPPENS.
We can handwave Cap's gaff, because they have a line about the scepter erasing minds, though that isn't really how we saw it work in Avengers I. Still, we can say he blanked his past self's memory. Okay, but Loki is still out there with an Infinity Stone instead of in prison in Asgard, which throws everything after Avengers I out the window.
And, that's not even considering Cap's ending. I'll discuss this on a narrative level later on, but on a plot level, let's think about it for a moment. He jumps back in time, returns the stones, then just keeps going back to 1946. So, he's absolutely changing the future, getting married, changing Peggy's life, and just flagrantly disregarding the rules we've seen established, as well as basic common sense. This is also a major problem, logically, because there's no way that Captain Freaking America is going to just quietly sit out, say, the Korean War, Vietnam, or Hydra taking over S.H.I.E.L.D. He knows a ton of what the future holds, and as we've already exhaustively established, he's not the type of person who can sit quietly on the sidelines while something bad is going on.
That's not even touching on how Peter and everyone he knows are conveniently still the same age, despite the five year gap, or how EVERYTHING goes out the window when Thanos invades the future and he, plus all of his time-displaced minions, are wiped from existence.
So, why couldn't they go back in time and kill baby Thanos again? Seemed to work out just fine killing past-Thanos in the future.
Some such shenanigans are to be expected in a time-travel movie...but for a film that is so carefully and wonderfully made and which is, in all other ways tremendously self-aware, to be so sloppy is just mind-boggling.
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On to more positive things. This movie, for the most part, provided good endings for these great characters. What I wanted from it was something I was never going to get, to see everyone ride into the sunset and live happily ever after, because I'm a big softie. Obviously, they were going to tell a story with some sacrifice, and there is a traditional story logic that would demand that for an epic tale of such scale and stakes. However, it is also a comic book movie, and comics are all about hope out of tragedy and finding the third way. It was never going to happen, but I wish ti would have. People would have complained that it was unrealistic, but realism isn't really your primary concern in a world of talking trees and thunder gods. Still, the Russo brothers displayed admirable restraint in the bodycount, and the sacrifices that were made were well done.
The Hawkeye / Black Widow scene, though very predictable, was beautiful and heart-rending. She was the rational choice, but it was still hard. It was a fair ending for her arc, though not the one I would have chosen.
Iron Man's snap of sacrifice: Wow. So, it's a wonderful moment, and a great climax...and it was always going to happen. We know RDJ wanted out, definitively, and he wanted to go out as the biggest hero of heroes. (Gosh, he really is Tony Stark) They really played this hard, with the daughter, the idyllic life, and the whole setup. He might as well have said he was five days from retirement. Still, it all worked, and the scene and its aftermath made a fitting end for the character and a fitting reflection on the end of the journey which had, after all, really begun with him. I knew it was coming, but still I wish we could have seen him ride into the sunset instead.
Cap's ending: So, despite the many significant problems this scene creates, I love it. I love it immensely, and despite its very real flaws. This is EXACTLY the ending I hoped they'd give him, because it was the only way out for the character other than death. He is my favorite character, and I was very happy to see him get to be happy. Fortunately, the problems with the scene are all in execution, not in conception. If he had gotten lost in time, instead of choosing it, and if they had shaped their rules a little differently, it could have fit more easily. Despite the issues it creates, it was wonderful to see him finally get that dance so long deferred. It made me all but cheer.
His giving the shield to Sam, as the new Cap, was just perfect. I saw it coming and got so excited I practically jumped out of my seat. It's a wonderful, fitting move, and it also gives us a Black Captain America, which is just awesome on a cultural level. I find myself fairly cold about the future of Marvel movies, but if they put out a new Captain America movie staring Falcon/Cap, I will be there with bells on!
THIS is how you add diversity to your franchise, by organic growth that honors the source material and enriches everything around it.
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Random thoughts:
It was great seeing Pepper come in and stand with Tony. That was a wonderful little moment and a fitting end to their arc. It was one of many great little thrills of recognition and excitement in that massive scene.
In general, the final battle is wonderful, and it creates a thousand great moments that you would have to see the movie several times to properly enjoy.
Tony's embrace of Peter, his surrogate son, was wonderful and touching.
I liked seeing Rocket in his comic costume. That was a fun little touch.
Okay, the whole 'femme force' moment was a little cool and a lot cheesy. There's something neat about Marvel showing off all these great, strong female characters. Okay, I'm onboard with that. However, they created that moment just for that purpose, with not the slightest shred of plot reason for them to be together at that moment, and it was just jarring and pulled me out of the film. Do SOMETHING to set that up. Show them all battling in the vicinity or something, or give us a line of dialog. Sheesh.
Now, I loved a lot of this movie. There are a ton of great bits, but my favorite moment, hands down, was during the final battle where Cap finally wields Mjolnir, because OF COURSE he's worthy! Ohh, I cannot express how much I loved that, and to see Cap taking it to Thanos with the hammer was just fantastic. The movie was worth the price of admission for me just for that moment.
So, that's it. It's a flawed but worthwhile film, and it has some really wonderful gems in its three hour runtime.
Steve Aging: Yeah, I think it's clear he aged slower than normal. From the car, he seemed to have gone back to the 40s, which means he would have lived through 70+ years.
So yes, the several of y'all who made predictions about my reactions were correct.
