Haven't made a post on the forums since R&P got shut down (RIP R&P), but I snagged premiere tickets to see Avengers: Endgame just tonight, and hoo boy
The no-spoilers take on it is this: it is a breathtaking swan song for the original Avengers cast, a best-hits mixtape of every Marvel film to date, and a feat of narrative engineering that somehow manages to square the circle of being a sequel to Infinity War without completely nullifying Infinity War. In a lot of ways, Endgame is Infinity War's opposite; the yang to its yin, a perfect antithesis.
To be honest, you can't really spoil the plot because any random person's best guess of the plot is probably 90% accurate. But that's not important. The shining moments are in the characters, the way they interact with each other, and the way they show how they've changed over the past decade.
A significant portion of the first act is devoted to showing how the Avengers are all dealing with loss, and it does it in a surprisingly slow and subtle way. It manages to portray perfectly the helplessness that comes with actual grief - that feeling of being adrift, of everything moving forward but feeling profoundly hollow, as if the universe just folded over itself and swallowed someone close to you without leaving a trace and without asking your permission. It's a damn sight more effective than having everyone spend half an hour making sad faces.
Then it gets going into the meat of the film for the second act, and I can't spoil what happens but what was great about it was that every Avenger gets a moment to confront their own loss on personal terms, and to come to terms with it. (Except the Hulk, weirdly enough.)
Then in the third act, everything comes crashing back together in a way that would seem haphazard if it also didn't feel like fate. Everything just goes so well. It's like watching an avalanche paint the Mona Lisa. It should be chaos. It largely is chaos. But it's a beautiful, fractal chaos.
And the fanservice, dear God. The worst spoilers are actually just in the fanservice, rather than the plot beats. I'm just gonna move to the spoilers now, because I gotta put this in writing.
Alright! Now that's all out of my system. The (very few) bad points:
- Hulk, as I said above, strangely lacks a character arc or any character development. This is probably because he doesn't have his own fully-canon solo film for him to reference and resolve; it may also be because he got a lot of character development done in Ragnarok and Infinity War.
- Captain Marvel is largely unused as a character, for reasons that don't totally make sense in the narrative and which were probably due to the production not knowing for sure whether her solo film would be a hit or a miss whilst filming. Brie Larson's involvement in the film is basically to show up, do something that demonstrates that she's incredibly powerful, and then be hushed back into the wings so that the plot can continue focusing on the Avengers. She's glaringly absent from a highly significant portion of the film's narrative with no real explanation as to why she wasn't involved. (It feels like it would be handy to have someone who's basically a backup Thor.)
- The core conceit behind the narrative - which I can't detail because spoilers - ends up collapsing under its own weight in the third act in order to facilitate the big climactic fight scene. By the end of it, you're left with some glaring bits of fridge logic [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic].
And that's basically it. Otherwise - it is basically the perfect send-off for the first generation of Marvel super-actors, and it lays out the ground for their successors with a neatness that makes it seem like destiny. It's full of moments that exist basically just so that comic book fans like me can squee over them, and it ties together plot and character elements from a huge number of different films so elegantly that you don't even notice that it's doing it until it's done. It's also a great argument in defence of its own three-hour runtime.
If you're reading this, then you were probably gonna go see it anyway, but now you can see it knowing that it's gonna be great. 10/10, would fangasm again.
The no-spoilers take on it is this: it is a breathtaking swan song for the original Avengers cast, a best-hits mixtape of every Marvel film to date, and a feat of narrative engineering that somehow manages to square the circle of being a sequel to Infinity War without completely nullifying Infinity War. In a lot of ways, Endgame is Infinity War's opposite; the yang to its yin, a perfect antithesis.
To be honest, you can't really spoil the plot because any random person's best guess of the plot is probably 90% accurate. But that's not important. The shining moments are in the characters, the way they interact with each other, and the way they show how they've changed over the past decade.
A significant portion of the first act is devoted to showing how the Avengers are all dealing with loss, and it does it in a surprisingly slow and subtle way. It manages to portray perfectly the helplessness that comes with actual grief - that feeling of being adrift, of everything moving forward but feeling profoundly hollow, as if the universe just folded over itself and swallowed someone close to you without leaving a trace and without asking your permission. It's a damn sight more effective than having everyone spend half an hour making sad faces.
Then it gets going into the meat of the film for the second act, and I can't spoil what happens but what was great about it was that every Avenger gets a moment to confront their own loss on personal terms, and to come to terms with it. (Except the Hulk, weirdly enough.)
Then in the third act, everything comes crashing back together in a way that would seem haphazard if it also didn't feel like fate. Everything just goes so well. It's like watching an avalanche paint the Mona Lisa. It should be chaos. It largely is chaos. But it's a beautiful, fractal chaos.
And the fanservice, dear God. The worst spoilers are actually just in the fanservice, rather than the plot beats. I'm just gonna move to the spoilers now, because I gotta put this in writing.
- There's time travel, it doesn't suck, it relies on Ant-Man, and appropriately enough, it's explicitly framed as a heist. (A time heist! They actually call it that in the film.)
- Every character time-travels back to some point in a previous Marvel film to steal one of the Infinity Stones from their respective films, with the goal of taking it to the present, finger-snapping everybody back to life, and then returning them to where they were stolen from to preserve the continuity of the timeline.
- Ant-Man gives Past!Iron Man a heart attack by fiddling with his arc reactor. Past!Thor revives him by using Mjolnir as a defibrillator.
- Thor steals past!Mjolnir from past!Thor, comes back to the present, and dual-wields Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.
- Nerd Hulk is canon now.
- In a fantastic scene that feels like it was written to take the piss out of his own comic [https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2017/06/26/villains/26-evil-captain-america.w700.h467.jpg], Captain America cons a bunch of Hydra!Shield agents out of the Mind Stone by whispering "Hail Hydra."
- This piece of gorgeous fan art actually happens. [https://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Iron-Man-Infinity-Gauntlet-Avengers-4-Fan-Art.jpg]
- Captain America fights his past self from 2012, wins, and then compliments his own ass by saying "that's America's ass."
- Hawkeye becomes a motherfucking badass.
- Past!Thanos figures out what the Avengers are doing while they're doing it, deduces that he succeeds in the future and that they're trying to undo that with time travel, and then successfully cons the Avengers into time-travelling his armada and army (shrunk with Pym Particles like a tiny Battlestar) back into the present, at which point he re-invades Earth.
- Captain America, Thor and Iron Man all take on Thanos in what is probably one of the most impressive three-on-ones ever lifted out of professional wrestling and onto the silver screen.
- Doctor Strange teleports in literally every character from every Marvel film to fight in the final battle.
- Rescue [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/d5/32/f2d53224f122ac5e41436dd2ea529a9d.jpg] is canon now.
And this is the key moment that - I am not exaggerating - made me actually faint, as in I literally lost consciousness in the theatre:
- Captain America wields Mjolnir and beats up Thanos.
They just didn't give a shit in the best possible way! Every crazy bit of insane fanservice that you could think of actually ended up being filmed!
Writing it all out like this makes it seem like these are all jokes that I made up! But they aren't! They aren't and SOMEHOW THEY WORK AAAAAAAAAAAAH
- Every character time-travels back to some point in a previous Marvel film to steal one of the Infinity Stones from their respective films, with the goal of taking it to the present, finger-snapping everybody back to life, and then returning them to where they were stolen from to preserve the continuity of the timeline.
- Ant-Man gives Past!Iron Man a heart attack by fiddling with his arc reactor. Past!Thor revives him by using Mjolnir as a defibrillator.
- Thor steals past!Mjolnir from past!Thor, comes back to the present, and dual-wields Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.
- Nerd Hulk is canon now.
- In a fantastic scene that feels like it was written to take the piss out of his own comic [https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2017/06/26/villains/26-evil-captain-america.w700.h467.jpg], Captain America cons a bunch of Hydra!Shield agents out of the Mind Stone by whispering "Hail Hydra."
- This piece of gorgeous fan art actually happens. [https://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Iron-Man-Infinity-Gauntlet-Avengers-4-Fan-Art.jpg]
- Captain America fights his past self from 2012, wins, and then compliments his own ass by saying "that's America's ass."
- Hawkeye becomes a motherfucking badass.
- Past!Thanos figures out what the Avengers are doing while they're doing it, deduces that he succeeds in the future and that they're trying to undo that with time travel, and then successfully cons the Avengers into time-travelling his armada and army (shrunk with Pym Particles like a tiny Battlestar) back into the present, at which point he re-invades Earth.
- Captain America, Thor and Iron Man all take on Thanos in what is probably one of the most impressive three-on-ones ever lifted out of professional wrestling and onto the silver screen.
- Doctor Strange teleports in literally every character from every Marvel film to fight in the final battle.
- Rescue [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/d5/32/f2d53224f122ac5e41436dd2ea529a9d.jpg] is canon now.
And this is the key moment that - I am not exaggerating - made me actually faint, as in I literally lost consciousness in the theatre:
- Captain America wields Mjolnir and beats up Thanos.
They just didn't give a shit in the best possible way! Every crazy bit of insane fanservice that you could think of actually ended up being filmed!
Writing it all out like this makes it seem like these are all jokes that I made up! But they aren't! They aren't and SOMEHOW THEY WORK AAAAAAAAAAAAH
Alright! Now that's all out of my system. The (very few) bad points:
- Hulk, as I said above, strangely lacks a character arc or any character development. This is probably because he doesn't have his own fully-canon solo film for him to reference and resolve; it may also be because he got a lot of character development done in Ragnarok and Infinity War.
- Captain Marvel is largely unused as a character, for reasons that don't totally make sense in the narrative and which were probably due to the production not knowing for sure whether her solo film would be a hit or a miss whilst filming. Brie Larson's involvement in the film is basically to show up, do something that demonstrates that she's incredibly powerful, and then be hushed back into the wings so that the plot can continue focusing on the Avengers. She's glaringly absent from a highly significant portion of the film's narrative with no real explanation as to why she wasn't involved. (It feels like it would be handy to have someone who's basically a backup Thor.)
- The core conceit behind the narrative - which I can't detail because spoilers - ends up collapsing under its own weight in the third act in order to facilitate the big climactic fight scene. By the end of it, you're left with some glaring bits of fridge logic [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic].
And that's basically it. Otherwise - it is basically the perfect send-off for the first generation of Marvel super-actors, and it lays out the ground for their successors with a neatness that makes it seem like destiny. It's full of moments that exist basically just so that comic book fans like me can squee over them, and it ties together plot and character elements from a huge number of different films so elegantly that you don't even notice that it's doing it until it's done. It's also a great argument in defence of its own three-hour runtime.
If you're reading this, then you were probably gonna go see it anyway, but now you can see it knowing that it's gonna be great. 10/10, would fangasm again.
