Avengers Endgame (2019) | More Like: EndLame

At last, we’ve come to the big finale. After the dark and dreary cliffhanger ending in Infinity War, and the mid to crap movies that came out since then (Ant-Man & the Wasp and Captain Marvel), excitement was at its peak in anticipation for how Earth’s mightiest heroes might be able to undo what Thanos did and defeat him once and for all. What we got was a visually impressive movie with an extremely convoluted story involving…uh-oh…time-travel.

Pros

Opening 20 minutes are solid
Great acting from the cast
Impactful moments between beloved characters
Fun comic-book references
Epic action scenes

Cons

Time-travel mechanics that do not work
A weak and dull version of Thanos
Mostly meant to play off nostalgia and set up Disney+ crap
Some characters are needlessly torn down or do things they wouldn’t
Too much of the Marvel humor

Plot & Thoughts

After the events of Infinity War, the remaining members of Earth’s mightiest heroes are reunited with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) when he’s brought back to Avengers headquarters with Nebula (Karen Gillan) by Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), who just happened to conveniently be in that same area as him in the seemingly endless void of emptiness we call “outer space”. They discuss what happened in a good dramatic scene and then decide to hunt down Thanos (Josh Brolin) so they can potentially retrieve the Infinity Stones and undo what he did. Unfortunately, by the time they find him, he’s already destroyed the stones to ensure that wouldn’t happen. In an act of vengeance and rage, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) kills Thanos and walks away.

Five years pass, and most of the heroes have gone their separate ways. Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) is operating the Avengers headquarters, hoping to find out where her friend, Clint (Jeremy Renner), has gone. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is running group therapy sessions for those dealing with the ramifications of Infinity War. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has managed to come to terms with the Hulk to the point that, now, Hulk is a soyboy version of himself that resembles Mark Ruffalo more than a character anyone would like. Thor has assembled the surviving Asgardians in a small seaside community somewhere in Scandinavia, drinking his sorrows away and getting fat on a couch, playing Fortnite. Clint is globetrotting and killing mob bosses to deal with his emotional distress over the fact that his entire family disintegrated. And Tony Stark has retired to a large cabin in the woods somewhere with his wife, Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his 5-year-old daughter. The world basically ended, and all of society was thrown into disrepair, but it’s good to see that the only one still trying to do anything on the level they once were capable of is Natasha.

There is no hope for the world and our heroes after Thanos succeeded in his goals. That is, until a rat saves the universe (not kidding) and manages to press just the right button in a locked-up van to send Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) out of the Quantum realm. After reuniting with his daughter and learning of what happened to the universe during the five years he was trapped in the Quantum realm, he comes to the Avengers with a plan to use time travel to retrieve the Infinity Stones before they were destroyed, with the hopes of bringing all life in the universe that was killed by Thanos back from oblivion.

I tend to enjoy time-travel stories because they often spark some interesting discussions, even if there are paradoxes to the story and how time travel works. Usually, a lot of thought is put into developing the mechanics and the implications as to how time travel could drastically alter reality, especially if it’s central to the plot. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’s third act hinges on time-travel, and some very important rules are established as to what Harry and Hermione can and cannot do while in the past. Back to the Future’s plot hinges on how a timeline can be altered by the time-traveler, so a lot of lip service is paid to what might happen. Other movies, like The Terminator, include time travel, but the plot focuses more on the characters being hunted by a machine from the future, and less on the mechanics of how the timeline might have changed. Endgame uses time travel to solve the problem of the heroes, and does it in a way that is both completely inefficient and paradoxical to the point of confusion. There’s a scene in which Hulk “explains” the concept, but it’s a bunch of gobblety-gook that doesn’t actually make sense, nor does it establish any real rules for the Avengers to follow:

“If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, then your former present becomes the past, which can't now be changed by your new future!”

What the heck is that supposed to mean? It doesn’t make sense and is only meant to distract you from the problems that time travel creates. The only rules they establish are how many times they can travel through time and that they have to return the Infinity Stones when they’re done with them to the exact moment they’re taken, which then just raises more questions. Wouldn’t new timelines and universes be created with the slightest change to the past? The Butterfly Effect is not an obscure concept that audiences don’t know about; there were multiple crappy horror movies with it in the title. Why go back to many different points in time and potentially screw up the timeline of the universe, collecting the individual stones, when you could go back to just one moment before Thanos accomplished his goal and kill him? They could have done it right when Thor’s axe was hurtling towards his chest. They could have done it when he was incapacitated by the Guardians and the gauntlet was nearly taken from him. They could have even done it after he snapped his fingers, but before he destroyed the stones, because they have the knowledge of where he went after he accomplished his goal and when he destroyed the stones.

It all just raises a lot of weird questions I wouldn’t think I’d need to ask. Since they sucked the Reality Stone goop out of Dr. Jane Foster (plot point of Thor: The Dark World), does that mean they have to go back to the point in time and inject it back into her? If you need Pym particles to travel through time, and it doesn’t destroy the timeline to steal them, why not steal more and increase your chances? Don’t think about it, or your head might explode.

In Endgame, there is seemingly no consequence for them to have unwittingly let Loki run off with the Tesseract, or Captain America fighting himself and now being considered by the members of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a member of Hydra, or Tony and the others stealing the Tesseract and Pym particles from S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, or Quill getting knocked out before he retrieved the Power stone and set off the plot of Guardians of the Galaxy. Saying, “Back to the Future is bullsh*t” doesn’t make your time-travel mechanics suddenly make more sense, nor does it make me think that you are not drastically changing the future when you alter the past.

The time-travel plot of Endgame creates more questions and issues than answers; it’s messy and poorly thought out. So, why did they make it central to the plot of the finale of the Infinity Saga? Nostalgia, of course. The middle act is just a bunch of ‘member berries for people to recall the various locales and scenes of previous films. As I mentioned in my Alien: Romulus review, these sorts of callbacks are all part of the same strategy to distract you from the cracks in the story, so the dopamine that pulses through your brain about the things you liked previously blinds you from the clearly stupid crap that is happening on the screen.

It’s not all stupid, as there are some good scenes and moments that are meaningful and well-acted, especially with Clint and Natasha. And the action is satisfying if you don’t think logically about battle strategy and fight choreography. Seeing Captain America pick up Mjolnir is a great hero moment that we’ve been waiting for since Age of Ultron. However, there are certain choices or actions (big and small) that some characters make that are extremely inconsistent with who they are. Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man all come away from Endgame looking much worse as characters than they did when the movie started.

I don’t believe Thor would have just gotten fat from being too depressed about his failure to kill Thanos before the snap, after all the character growth he had in the Infinity War and his last three movies, and how he has soldiered on through tragedy. It’s not like he hasn’t dealt with failure before, so why would this be the breaking point?

I don’t believe that Captain America would stay in the past with Peggy because that would go against the selfless values that have been established about him in the previous movies. It suggests that he is willing to give up on the duties that he believes he has to the present and future, and that he did nothing to prevent the various disasters he knew would happen (i.e., 9/11). It ignores the character growth he had in Captain America: Civil War, in which he had finally let Peggy go, and there was a potential romantic interest with her niece, who had been helping him in his past two movies. Steve Rogers is not so naive that he would think that now that Thanos is gone, there are no more existential threats to worry about. I also don’t think he would pass the shield to Sam Wilson instead of Bucky, who actually has a story arc to complete that would be worthy of making him the new Captain America—something that happened in the comics.

The motivations of Tony Stark being willing to “save the world” while keeping his family as his first priority run counter to what he’s always been about in previous movies. In Infinity War, he leaves Pepper behind on Earth while he tries to save Dr. Strange. I understand his desire to keep his family safe, but he uses it as an excuse at times to avoid doing what would ultimately be the right thing, which is inconsistent with who the character has been. All of these changes to the core three Avengers shows a disinterest in their legacy as characters and a laziness in trying to set up the next phase of the MCU…which they didn’t have any plan in place for anyway, so it’s just a waste.

There are just so many ways this movie is a disappointing mess. The Thanos who was more nuanced and interesting in Infinity War is replaced by a one-note version of the character from the past. The way that he even becomes a threat in this movie relies on characters making dumb decisions, and the fact that he even gets close to snapping his fingers again is because the heroes are stupid when they have the upper hand. The final battle has many details that either don’t look good or don’t make sense. Never mind all the problems the heroes cause by how they “undo” what Thanos did, but I’ll discuss that more in the review of the last movie of the Infinity Saga. I could list all the instances in which something happened that I didn’t like, but that would make this review go on far longer than it already is, and plenty of influencers have done some deep dives into it already.

TL;DR

Avengers: Endgame is a disappointing end to the Infinity Stone storyline that was built up to incredible heights by the point of Infinity War. Endgame is a shining example of how easy it is to trick audiences into liking something with the “jangly keys” method because it is a beloved sequel, despite being extremely flawed and making characters very inconsistent with who they were in the past. You cannot have a scrutinous eye or critical perspective on this movie without noticing all the issues, especially with how time travel screws up everything. I know that a lot of the time-travel schenanigans that change the timeline were supposed to set up the Multiverse saga that comes after this, but Marvel’s drastic decline shows that they didn’t really have a plan in place. Maybe you should focus on making a good movie that is able to succeed on its own instead of being concerned about some dumb shows on your streaming service, Disney.

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