Avengers: Endgame

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Just got back trying to collect my thoughts on Endgame. If Avengers Infinity War was in a lot of ways Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Endgame was Antman 3 and that is the good and bad of the film. Infinity War is about these gravitas moments you are supposed to feel each characters death and get blown away by that last 15 minutes. Endgame is different, Endgame is more about fixing the weakest parts of the Universe.



I applaud Disney for not giving away just what Endgame was if Infinity War was about exits, Endgame was about entrances and not the ones you expect. This is one of those films where if you felt nothing in the three hours of the film than you need to move on from the genre.


If I were to rate this film I wouldn't give it five stars or rank it ahead of Infinity War but it's better than Black Panther and Captain Marvel. It fits in well with the high's of Iron Man and Captain America.



I haven't really written any thoughts on this one for a lot of reasons, one of them being that I'm still processing. A lot.

But I think I can safely say, to some extent, that this might not be the best superhero movie ever or the best Marvel movie or even that great a movie - but it's an AMAZING experience. It's not really a movie at all. It's an event. A gathering, a pleasing to the superhero-senses of your inner fanboy. An inevitable and totally acceptable fan service of an era coming to a close and expectably closing the chapters of several characters and storylines of which were almost unavoidable at this point, but also delivering a lively and diverse movie in its own right, that in a way feels like an entire season of a superhero tv-show boiled down to the bare minimum and crammed into 3 short hours of sensual bombardment.

This was so much to take in and it was a wonderful experience at the cinema. As a stand-alone film, this seems impossible to rate, rank or talk about. But as the "season finale" to 21 standalone "episodes" (/movies), Endgame serves the fans and universe well.

With Infinity War being the light version to the following, I haven't quite seen anything like Endgame in the way that it is technically a seperate movie, yet it relies so, so, so much on the entire 11 year universe that came before it. Watching Endgame without having watched a single movie, or very little of, the MCU, you will be confused or at least not appreciating what this can be when watched correctly (as in doing your homework, being prepared, and preferably being a bit of a fan of what has been created over all these years).


I haven't rated this yet and I plan on a second viewing, but for now, I very much loved the experience of seeing Endgame and I think it did what it was supposed to and perhaps even a bit more.



We've gone on holiday by mistake
My current feelings are rated it behind Thor 1,Ragnarok, Iron Man, Avengers 1,Dr Strange, Guardians 1 and Infinity War.
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  1. Winter Soldier
  2. GOTG
  3. Civil War
  4. Ragnarok
  5. Infinity War
  6. Spiderman:Homecoming
  7. Iron Man
  8. GOTG 2
  9. Doctor Strange
  10. Endgame
  11. Avengers
  12. Antman and the Wasp
  13. Black Panther
  14. Captain America
  15. Incredible Hulk
  16. Captain Marvel
  17. Age of Ultron
  18. Iron Man 3
  19. Big Hero Six
  20. Thor
  21. Antman
  22. Thor Dark World
  23. Iron Man 2
I've got it at 10, might put it as high as 8 sometimes a film grows on me with a second viewing like GOTG 2



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I don't think it would be the filmmakers idea to do that way over the top women scene, more like some incompetent leftie exec forcing this upon them.

SPOILERS

It completely takes you out of the immersion of the final battle and forces you to take a huge bite of a progressive sandwich. Your brain doesn't accept the scene either because it's so unlikely that all these women would be in the exact spot on the battlefield with no men present. The women were doing just fine anyways, SW was giving Thanos a hell of a tough time. The scene is a massive miss step in an otherwise great final battle.

The scene in Wakanda with bald Michonne and BWidow vs the female child of Thanos is a great scene and far more grounded in reality.
Speak for yourself, chucklehead. That third-act battle is already a chaotic enough maelstrom set within a comparatively small battlefield that I don't think it's too implausible for the characters to come together just so and none of these supposedly overpowered characters are able to hold Thanos back for long anyway. If anything, it's one of the few things I remember about that third act twenty-four hours after getting out so, y'know, fair trade.
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I would object to the notion that this film had a "third act", I suppose you could draw several arbitrary lines with the story but this was an episodic perhaps even an anthology of sorts. Some of the chapters worked really well while others just worked. Endgame has an almost Tolkien quality to the film where the big battle looked fine but I'm not sure it was the true climax of the film.


However the film did suffer from moments of pandering and they were certainly distracting.



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No, I'd say this has a pretty obvious three-act structure.

WARNING: "Endgame" spoilers below
1st - surviving Avengers reunite and kill Thanos. Five years pass. Act ends with Ant-Man proposing time heist.
2nd - the time heist itself. Act ends with past Thanos becoming aware of the time heist and planning to steal the stones.
3rd - Thanos's snap is undone, but past Thanos arrives in the present. Battle ensues and concludes with Iron Man's snap/death. Act ends with the aftermath.


Whenever anyone complains about a film "pandering", I definitely have to question why.



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I feel less like I watched this movie and more like I was battered in the face with it, especially the final hour. I really wanted this to be the “amazing” “satisfying” epic the critics were calling it. I was so ready to watch that movie. In the end, while it was immersive and emotional and thrilling, I couldn’t exactly call it satisfying.

There’s plenty of fun, some nice nods to different things, moments that had me awestruck and some devastating emotional moments. I spent pretty much the last half an hour with tears in my eyes for a variety of reasons; any film that can have such an emotional effect has to be worth something. It’s an epic feat to pull off something like this, the culmination of so many other movies, with so many different characters and they almost, almost pull it off.

I think what you get out of this film will depend a lot on which characters you are most interested in and what you want for/from those characters. Some come off better than others.

Here comes the spoilery part:

WARNING: "Endgame" spoilers below

I had three specific fears going into this movie.

My first fear about this movie was that the search for the inevitable reset button to undo the ending of Infinity War would be cheap. And they did much better than expected on this, aiming not to make it so it never happened, but to bring everyone back, five years later. The actual ramifications of this weren’t explored in the movie, but you can imagine the complications. There are stakes, there are consequences. Of course, once you open the can of wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey worms, there’s no putting the lid back on, and the more you think about any of the time travel stuff, the less sense it makes. Especially the ending. But more on that later.

My second fear was that the film would suffer from the lack of the characters erased in the snap. This one was kind of justified, but your mileage may well vary depending on which characters you enjoy. I missed the Guardians, Spiderman, Scarlet Witch, Loki, Bucky… Ant-Man, Hawkeye and Hulk are not as interesting. Some of these characters do get their moment when they come back. Others do not. What Infinity War did well was balancing not only a bigger cast of characters for much of the film, but giving them reasons to be in different places and a whole host of really interesting meet-ups. Endgame just doesn’t have that. They pair up fairly randomly to go on their time heists, and don’t actually interact with each other very much or very effectively while they are there (with the exception of Natasha and Clint, who have a more convincing bond than maybe anyone else in the movie).

My third fear was basically exactly what happened in the end. But more on that later.

The three hour runtime isn’t exactly justified. While I appreciate that they spent some time actually having consequences to the snap, a lot of the ‘let’s round everyone up to go on a time heist’ bit could have been trimmed and tightened up considerably. I’m not sure we needed to see Hulk arriving at the Scottish fishing village all the Asgardians are apparently now living in. There are really good scenes at the start, though, with Clint's family, Iron Man and Nebula and the fight with Thanos. I wasn’t completely sold on the time heist plot. It’s a little messy and inelegant, there are plotholes you could drive a truck (with Hulk on the back) through, and while there are some fun moments (Cap fighting himself, the Hail Hydra lift moment), there was the potential for so much more, sacrificed for the sake of a few characters’ overlong heartwarming chats with their deceased parents which in the end don’t add all that much. I’d have preferred if these encounters had been briefer and more bittersweet. All the revisiting also gets in the way of the film really doing anything new. It’s also not as funny as Infinity War.

It then all ramps up to the conclusion, the final battle, which, while messy, is more like the rollercoaster of a film I was expecting. There are moments which are epic and moments which are ridiculous, just as there always are. The battlefield almost looks more like something from Lord of the Rings than Avengers. The moment with a bruised and battered Captain America standing up to face Thanos alone, then to be joined by an army of the returned gave me goosebumps. Tony Stark’s last stand was a memorable ending. He got a good send off, although I couldn’t help feeling that he and Captain America got each other’s endings, in a way. I actually think they could have stood to kill off a few more characters. Two deaths out of all of them was a surprisingly small price to pay.

Some of the characters are less well served than others. Thor as a slob is kind of funny, but it’s a one-joke joke which drags on far too long. In a fatsuit. Which I think was ill-judged. The tragic-comic interaction between him and the Guardians in Infinity War was pitch-perfect. This time it really isn’t. Natasha and Clint fighting over who gets to die on Vormir was almost heartbreaking (but went on a little too long). Nebula and Gamora get a kind of closure. Some people get a touching battlefield reunion, others don’t . If you’re watching it for any of the Black Panther characters, you might want your money back. Bucky gets a particularly raw deal. He was important enough for Captain America to start a civil war over a couple of movies ago, but his only function in this movie is to approve of Cap’s bad decisions in the end (more on that later). What happened to their ‘to the end of the line’ friendship? And then he gets passed over while Steve gives the shield to Sam. It’s like the writers had no idea what to do with him. I also didn’t feel like Steve and Tony’s antagonism was ever really resolved. It’s set up at the start, but there’s no point at which they actually really resolve it, so I don’t really know why they made a big deal of it at the start.

I liked Captain Marvel in her own movie; she seems to sit a little awkwardly within the Avengers as the writers clearly try to balance making use of her with not having her be too much of a deus ex machina. Their solution to this is to have her absent for most of the film. I do wonder if they could have waited to introduce her… but seeing as she was around in the 90s, the question would always have been why she didn’t turn up for the battle. But speaking of Captain Marvel – where the hell was Goose in this movie? A disappointing no-show, there could have been all kinds of fun with Goose and Rocket.

A word on the ‘women of Marvel line up’ shot, since that seems to be a ‘thing’ – no sillier, really, than any other line up shots they always do. I always wonder why they’re standing in formation when they do those shots. But it does feel like a bit of a diversity crumb in a movie that’s basically about six white guys plus Rhodey and two women (both of whom get killed, even if one is only her past self). A bit like that gay guy at the support group. They’re using that as a way to suggest some kind of diversity credentials while being blatantly too scared to have a gay superhero (even when they had the perfect candidate they just decided to sideline).

OK, now it’s (1200 odd words) later, more on the big, big problem I had with this film. The stupid Source Code ending. The last five minutes or so. Captain America’s ending. I hated it. Really hated it. I had a sinking feeling it was coming from the trailers with him looking at Peggy’s picture. He didn’t even know her that well in the first place. He’s spent the last few movies moving on. She’s dead. He kissed her niece! But now apparently she’s the love of his life. So much so that at the support group for snap survivors at the start he’s just talking about her, not about Bucky or Sam or Wanda or any of the other friends he lost. And he chooses to go and live with her in the past, without telling anyone, abandoning all of his friends. He just decides to settle down (in what, his thirties?), stop fighting, just let Hydra do whatever (including taking over SHIELD and torturing Bucky for 70 years). What about Peggy’s family, are they now erased from history? What about her job? It’s a really odd, regressive conclusion to his character arc when he’d been finding a life for himself in the present, when he’s always been so focused on doing the right thing. He was my favourite character and that ending makes me dislike him.

However little character or emotional sense it makes though, the worst part is that Steve sitting on that bench as an old man in the same timeline makes a complete mockery of everything the film has already told us about time travel. I get that there’s a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required with superpowers and time travel and quantum realms and all the rest, but there’s a limit to that. And deliberately flying in the face of the rules they have set up for it is that limit for me. It comes close to ruining the film for me.


For all the reviews saying the more you are invested in the characters, the more you will get out of it, I feel I would have enjoyed it more if I had been invested a bit less.



Wasn't a fan of the first 2 Avengers at all and thought Infinity War was pretty good. But this movie is on a whole new level of awesomeness with some genuinely touching moments. Ruffalo and Hemsworth are so much fun and RDJ steals the show like a boss. And Captain America's ass is a national treasure indeed. ScarJo, you beauty!😍
That rabbit was annoying though.

I loved every minute of it.



No, I'd say this has a pretty obvious three-act structure.

WARNING: "Endgame" spoilers below
1st - surviving Avengers reunite and kill Thanos. Five years pass. Act ends with Ant-Man proposing time heist.
2nd - the time heist itself. Act ends with past Thanos becoming aware of the time heist and planning to steal the stones.
3rd - Thanos's snap is undone, but past Thanos arrives in the present. Battle ensues and concludes with Iron Man's snap/death. Act ends with the aftermath.


Whenever anyone complains about a film "pandering", I definitely have to question why.

And yet those acts are broken down into smaller acts


WARNING: spoilers below

Act 1 - Tony is rescued from space, reunites with the Avengers
The Avengers confront Thanos and battle him
Five years go by and Tony is happy, Thor is fat, and Cap is in support groups
Act 2 - Antman returns, the group put together the idea of time travel
the group then goes their separate ways and separate missions
Tony and Steve then go further into the past to handle the Pym particle mcguffin
Act 3 - This all just sort of falls apart
-They save humanity
-Thanos attacks them
-The original three fight Thanos and defeat him
- Thanos then decides to bring about a war on Earth
- Everyone that was dead returns in a battle
- Ironman sacrifices himself to kill Thanos and all of his people
- They have a funeral for Iron Man
- Captain America goes back in time to set right the time loop and stays in the past and lives his life
-Thor joins the Guardians of the Galaxy




Now moving onto the pandering stuff
WARNING: spoilers below


Aside from every Captain Marvel scene....because once again I'm sorry you are trying to capture the infinity stones and Danvers has other **** to do...what is that **** who knows.
revisiting the callback scenes

Avengers assembling
Captain America in the elevator
Starlord's entrance



Then you get all the cameos


And then you the Lady Avengers (to a hoot) and the Black Panther crew (to a hoot) both of which are just cringey to me






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And yet those acts are broken down into smaller acts


WARNING: spoilers below

Act 1 - Tony is rescued from space, reunites with the Avengers
The Avengers confront Thanos and battle him
Five years go by and Tony is happy, Thor is fat, and Cap is in support groups
Act 2 - Antman returns, the group put together the idea of time travel
the group then goes their separate ways and separate missions
Tony and Steve then go further into the past to handle the Pym particle mcguffin
Act 3 - This all just sort of falls apart
-They save humanity
-Thanos attacks them
-The original three fight Thanos and defeat him
- Thanos then decides to bring about a war on Earth
- Everyone that was dead returns in a battle
- Ironman sacrifices himself to kill Thanos and all of his people
- They have a funeral for Iron Man
- Captain America goes back in time to set right the time loop and stays in the past and lives his life
-Thor joins the Guardians of the Galaxy

Are those really acts or just narrative developments? Your summary of act three is just listing everything that happens and expecting each incident to count as an act that supposedly makes the whole thing a mess.

Now moving onto the pandering stuff
WARNING: spoilers below


Aside from every Captain Marvel scene....because once again I'm sorry you are trying to capture the infinity stones and Danvers has other **** to do...what is that **** who knows.

I mean, they do point out that the snap has happened throughout the universe and that Carol is caught up trying to deal with that as well as trying to find the stones. Flimsy reason, perhaps, but at least it's there.

revisiting the callback scenes

Avengers assembling
Captain America in the elevator
Starlord's entrance

Then you get all the cameos

And then you the Lady Avengers (to a hoot) and the Black Panther crew (to a hoot) both of which are just cringey to me

I don't know what you expected from this movie




We've gone on holiday by mistake
"I don't know what you expected"

To be allowed to sit back and enjoy the grand finale without having such a silly political scene rammed down our throats.



Are those really acts or just narrative developments? Your summary of act three is just listing everything that happens and expecting each incident to count as an act that supposedly makes the whole thing a mess.

Well in some cases it sort of did, for something to be a narrative development I believe it has to y'know develop through some sort of narrative. What I saw with Endgame was more fan service throwing in almost a dictionary level of plot points.


When you broke it down into a three act structure it seems like that was from the perspective of what you wanted to see. You could easily redraw the lines and tell this from the story of other characters
WARNING: spoilers below
Nebula, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor and Iron Man
while for you it seems like you saw this as a Thanos story. For me the climax of the film might have been at a different point and everything else from that point was a massive epilogue.


I also don't think I would call it a mess...if anything it was almost to sanitary as the film missed that moment where I would feel something.



"""" Hulk Smashhhh."""
  1. Winter Soldier
  2. GOTG
  3. Civil War
  4. Ragnarok
  5. Infinity War
  6. Spiderman:Homecoming
  7. Iron Man
  8. GOTG 2
  9. Doctor Strange
  10. Endgame
  11. Avengers
  12. Antman and the Wasp
  13. Black Panther
  14. Captain America
  15. Incredible Hulk
  16. Captain Marvel
  17. Age of Ultron
  18. Iron Man 3
  19. Big Hero Six
  20. Thor
  21. Antman
  22. Thor Dark World
  23. Iron Man 2
I've got it at 10, might put it as high as 8 sometimes a film grows on me with a second viewing like GOTG 2
Ragarok, Spiderman, and Civil War sucked.
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Welcome to the human race...
"I don't know what you expected"

To be allowed to sit back and enjoy the grand finale without having such a silly political scene rammed down our throats.
Sounds like you're the one who won't allow yourself to do that, though.

Well in some cases it sort of did, for something to be a narrative development I believe it has to y'know develop through some sort of narrative. What I saw with Endgame was more fan service throwing in almost a dictionary level of plot points.


When you broke it down into a three act structure it seems like that was from the perspective of what you wanted to see. You could easily redraw the lines and tell this from the story of other characters
WARNING: spoilers below
Nebula, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor and Iron Man
while for you it seems like you saw this as a Thanos story. For me the climax of the film might have been at a different point and everything else from that point was a massive epilogue.


I also don't think I would call it a mess...if anything it was almost to sanitary as the film missed that moment where I would feel something.
But now you're talking about individual character arcs as opposed to the arc of the overall narrative. If it looks like I treat this as a "Thanos story", it's because he is the antagonist whose actions by and large drive the events of the entire story - does Star Wars become an "Empire story" because they chase down Leia and use the Death Star and look for the droids and launch an attack on Yavin IV? On that note, does it makes sense to view it as a Han Solo movie because we watch him change from self-serving smuggler to last-minute hero over the course of the movie? It's one thing to acknowledge that the characters go on their own journeys (which you'd expect a well-rounded ensemble film to be able to pull off), but that doesn't necessarily mean you can arbitrarily decide that the entire film has to be one person's story, especially not when the whole idea is that it's about the team as a whole rather than any one person.



I think it will be Caps and Iron Mans Swan Song. Im hoping We get some other film with Thor in it. He needs a better moment of victory cause i think Thor has always had limited screen time compared to Cap, Black Widow and Iron Man. Like to see a Guardians and Thor Team Up and Thor 4 or Guardians Characters in Thor 4 as well as Guardians 3. I am hoping there are big movies planned because faze 4 or 5 without something big.


I will be seeing Avengers 4 in 3 hours, I know nothing just feels like Cap and Iron Man will die or there characters will end in the MCU films.



You ready? You look ready.


I want my $12 back Marvel! While we are at it I insist on reimbursement for the last 10 years of tickets, too. One of the lamest films I have seen in a long while. It was not fun or good by any measure. I’ve had dental trips that were more exciting.
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Spoilers

End Game felt very lazy made. The whole soul stone scene with Black Widow was done alot better in Infinity War with Gamora. The whole Captain America scene sucked. It didn't even make sense at all, and was a terrible exit for Chris Evan's.