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‘Avengers: Endgame’ Was a Bad Movie. Change My Mind.
Endgame was released about ten years ago (er, in April), but I didn’t watch it until this week. I don’t really see movies in theaters anymore, partly because the nearest theater is a 45-minute drive from my house. Also, it’s so damn expensive for tickets, and I can’t pause the big screen when I need to go to the bathroom. Anyway, I don’t think it was that great of a movie.
Obviously, this post is going to have some spoilers in it, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet, then tough. I mean, it did come out like ten years ago.
OK, so, there was time travel. Time travel is stupid. It never makes sense. The screenwriters tried to get around this by making jokes about Back to the Future. All that did was confuse things even more. I thought that Smart Hulk said you can’t change the past because you’re already your past self’s future. But then the Ancient One told Bruce Banner that if he changed the past it would create alternate realities. So Bruce’s brilliant plan was to return the stones back to the exact moments they’d been taken out of the timeline so that the timeline would stay the same. But then 2012-Loki stole the Space Stone (the “Tesseract”) due to 2023 Tony Stark losing hold of it when Angry Hulk knocked him over. And that definitely didn’t happen in the old timeline, obviously.
So then Tony and Captain America time-jumped from 2012 to 1970 (by the way, without any explanation of how they could do that without the platform thing that they used in 2023 to enter the quantum realm), and stole the Tesseract from Tony’s father Howard (and maybe Loki was sitting on a bench in the background when Tony hugged Howard). So that created a third reality, right? Or no? Because Cap returned the Tesseract to 1970 later. But there’s still the 2012 divergence when Loki escapes.
Speaking of Steve Rogers, after returning the stones throughout time (and space) he goes and marries Peggy Carter in what looks like the 1950s or early ’60s. So that really is a third reality, since in the original timeline Peggy married someone else and had children, believing that Steve was dead. (In one of the scenes from an earlier movie when Cap visits Peggy in a nursing home, she has a picture on her bedside table of a family.)
So, anyway, the time travel stuff is a mess. Oh, yeah, 2023-Nebula kills 2014-Nebula. How does that work? There’s a fourth reality. Oh! And Iron Man dusts 2014-Thanos along with his entire army. So there’s a fifth reality (a good one; Thanos never dusts half of all living beings in that timeline). Oh, I forgot that 2023-Cap fought 2012-Cap and told him that Bucky was still alive. That had to have opened up a sixth reality.
But enough about the time travel. Here are some of my other gripes:
What happened to 2014-Gamora? She switches sides with the help of 2023-Nebula, Starlord kisses her, and she kicks him in the nuts. That’s it. We don’t see her again. She’s out there, somewhere, in 2023, having time jumped past her own death. (A seventh reality/timeline, by the way — 2018-Gamora is killed by Thanos in order to get the Soul Stone.) She’s not present with the other Guardians at Tony’s funeral.
Speaking of Tony’s funeral, who was that random guy standing by himself?
OK: Captain Marvel. Uh. Dud. I did not see that movie, but boy does Brie Larson suck the energy out of every scene she’s in. She has anti-charisma. She’s the anti-Robert Downey Jr. Anyway, apparently she’s superpowered and whatnot. She can fly and travel between planets in outer space without a spaceship. So, you know, she might be useful to take along on the time-travel mission. Nah. Let’s not even bother to contact her before we risk the very fabric of reality. It’s not like there was any great pressing need to go now. They’d already killed Thanos. They could have waited for her to come back to Earth.
In fact, she did show up, totally out of the blue, for the final battle. And, if you follow the timeline, you’ll realize that the final battle in 2023 is like, 20 minutes after they start their time travel mission. They’re only “gone” for like 10 seconds! They all leave 2023 at the same time to various times and then no matter how long it takes them to complete their mission, they all come back at the same time. So, for instance, Ant-Man comes back earlier with the Mind Stone (Loki’s scepter), and Tony and Cap take an extra day or two to recover the Space Stone, and they all return at the same moment, right after they all left initially. Again, like ten seconds later. They come back and they’re sad that Natasha sacrificed herself on Vormir, and then Smart Hulk brings back all the dusted people from 2018, but to 2023 not retroactively to 2018, because they don’t want to create an alternate reality (because they’re super concerned about that for some reason all of a sudden). And then 2014 Gamora brings Thanos through the time hole and the battle begins. Maybe it’s more than 20 minutes. At the very least, it’s the same day. Boom! Captain Marvel is there. Why didn’t they wait for her in the first place?
OK, so then there’s the big battle. I have no idea why Howard the Duck is there, but I guess he has to be to fulfill Dr. Strange’s prophecy. (????) Whatever, that’s just an Easter (Duck) Egg. Apparently Ant-Man can now be giant man for extended periods of time without falling asleep? Cool.
One of the most annoying scenes in Avengers: Infinity War was when the alien woman told Scarlet Witch that she would die alone and then Black Widow and Black Warrior Lady show up and say “She’s not alone!” Ooooh. Womyn power. This was described by one of the movie’s executive producers in a bonus feature about the Battle of Wakanda as “one of the most powerful moments in the movie.” Well, it wasn’t. It was stupid. So they decided to double-down on stupid in Endgame when Spider-Man hands off the gauntlet to Captain Marvel and says, “I don’t know how you’re going to get through them” (the alien army), and then all the women show up and say, “don’t worry, she’s not alone.” So stupid. So forced, so fake, so agenda-driven. Like, absolutely dumb level.
What else? Thor’s like, oh, I can’t be king anymore because I’m a drunk. I know, I’ll make Valkyrie the Queen, since it’s not like she’s a drunk or anything. 🤦♂️
Why is Peter Parker going back to high school? He just missed the past five years. Was his buddy also dusted that’s why he’s also still in high school? (I guess these questions are probably answered in Far From Home, but I haven’t seen it yet.)
Was Wong dusted? Because the Avengers probably could have used some magicians on their mission, too. But they don’t seem to have had any association with them 2018-2023.
Tony solves time travel in about 15 minutes. Gee, that’s convenient. 🙄
It comes back to time travel being stupid.
Published in Culture
No, I find observing and commenting on human nature fascinating.
Right. And I thought that’s what Smart Hulk said but that scene was so short and fast that maybe I heard it wrong. And then The Ancient One just destroyed that theory, anyway.
By the way, Thanos used the Time Stone to bring Vision back to life. Or something. Ugh. My eyes just went cross eyed.
Let’s get back to the subject: Too many cartoon movies.
Marvel is not a cartoon 🤣
There’s only one dude who got time travel right:
Well unless you died in your attempt. Then your personal time line is done. So on the macro scale as an omniscient observer you can pick what you want. But that is always true, for the audience. From the character perspectives the stakes are real as are the consequences.
I suppose that is true. Black Widow and Vision did not come back.
What about people who were so overcome with grief at the loss of their loved ones that they committed suicide in the meantime? You know that would happen. So they’re gone. And now the people who were gone, who didn’t even know they were gone, mind you, for them there’s no “in between,” but now it’s suddenly five years later and they find out their loved one killed themselves? That’s messed up.
Great points. I never read comic books so I don’t know the answer: was the movie faithful to the comic books on these broad points? Are these failings of the story or failings of the movie?
Well apparently the interpretation of the snap is it killed half of all life not just people. Hence the sound of birds chirping after the unsnap. The environmental consequences of that would be catastrophic. Also imagine that half the planes in flight would go down due to loss of pilots and cars driving on the road. The death toll would be larger than 50%. Also in the Spiderman movie it seems like the unsnap brought people back to where they were when they got dusted. Again that means in mid air, on highways, oceans, etc… so yah thinking it over too hard is problematic.
But this whole thing is solved by the fact that MCU is a fairytale fantasy not Science Fiction. The only real people and consequences are to the characters. Everything else is just background set. And I think judging it as a Star Trek episode would be unfair as a matter of literary critique. It is what it is. Though it can be fun to be unfair.
The reason for that aspect is the need to maintain Tony Stark’s extremely cute daughter. Now she is extremely cute, but it is a lot of extra chaos.
I suppose you can make the argument that the named characters are always the only real people in the story regardless of genre. I suppose further that the background set in some movies is more two dimensional and wooden than it is in other movies.
In this particular case, I might describe it more like a video game: the background might look nice, but there is a pretty strict limit to where your character can go and what your character can do as it operates within a predefined landscape filled with npc’s.
I got out of the Marvel Universe early in the first Iron Man movie — right when Tony Stark goes hippie-stoopid and closes down the “weapons manufacturing division of Stark Industries.” Rolled my eyes at the rest of the movie and never saw another one.
He shouldn’t be wearing armor after that. He should be wearing flowers in his hair.
“I simply snap my fingers and AOE 50% of all the onscreen sprites.” – Thanos, the ’90s video game
Not going to try to change your mind because you’re right.
Which is really sad, because some of the other movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are quite good: Winter Soldier, the 1st Avengers, Ragnarok and Dr. Strange to name a few.
I think the problem is that with most (if not all) of the other MCU movies, they made a movie, then added superheroes. Iron Man is the classic His Girl Friday, with superheroes. Ragnarok is a road trip buddy movie, with superheroes. Winter Soldier is a spy movie, with superheroes. Even Ant-Man was a heist movie, with super powers.
But Endgame was a superhero movie, and so, to borrow from Dorothy Parker, there was no there, there.
I liked it.
Agreed. The first Captain America was one my favorites. With End Game there was too much to really focus on any of the characters.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Look at it this way: if you subscribe to the multiverse hypothesis this all makes perfect sense. There are an infinite number of branching timelines stretching out across the multiverse under which the sum of all probabilities of indeterminate events equal 1. Time travel in this situation is simply jumping into a different timeline.
The Ancient One was correct that taking the Time Stone out of their timeline would create other branching timelines… but perhaps she was simply being coy about the fact that timelines are constantly branching with all probabilistic events. So, whatever.
Endgame is not merely a good movie – it’s a great movie and a far more deserving recipient of “highest grossing film of all time” than the stupid and ham-fisted Avatar. Even having not seen every movie in the MCU you have to think about each of these films essentially as long-form episodes of an anthology series. The character development of Tony Stark is particularly good throughout the course of the 9 movies he appears in – moving from spoiled man-child to loving husband; caring mentor to doting father, willing to sacrifice himself for not only humanity and his own selfish ends, but to save the entire universe from a horrible fate.
Without being blasphemous, it doesn’t take a scholar to notice the parallels to Christ, and a great deal of the movie revolves around what I thought were explicitly Christian themes – many consonant with the Conservative worldview in general. On diplay are the reality of evil, the necessity of war, the bittersweet, tragic nature of life and the nobility of sacrifice. @staugustine – care to comment?
OK, well, a lot happens after that, including a lot of weapons being made by Tony.
So he didn’t really mean it? That changes everything.
It actually did follow naturally. He stopped developing weapons because they ended up in the wrong hands. He subsequently decided that the only right hands were his own, so developed lots of cool stuff for himself.
Part of the watching is gaining the understanding that Tony came to realize his knee-jerk reaction to the situation he found himself in was immature and couldn’t survive contact with the reality of a hostile universe.
He is transformed from the time we first see him (as a playboy with too much money and too little impulse control) into a person who reveres traditional values, loves his family, misses his father and wishes he could be more like him.
But he didn’t make the turn, or even hint that there would be a turn, by the end of the first movie. Thus the second movie got a pass.
If he had would you then complain that he didn’t earn his transformation?
Perhaps this wasn’t the thing for you. If “Masterpiece Theater” is more your speed, comic book movies were unlikely to tickle your fancy, I guess.
The arc converter of history is long but it bends towards Justice League.
Or something.
How many people working for the now-closed Weapons Manufacturing Division got canned when Tony snapped his fingers?
Snapped his fingers? Too easy.
Sitter at the net.
I don’t know for sure, but suspect they didn’t really have the whole MCU 19-plus movie story arc in mind when they made the first Iron Man.