Pow! Bam! Sockko!

Conditions: Sunnily Cold.

Film Review: Avengers: Endgame

"We're in the endgame now", Doctor Strange rasps to Iron Man, as they lay amid the wreckage of their lost battle with Thanos.  We all know what happens then: Thanos wins.  Endgame starts with a bit of a refresher course, but with new footage showing extended reactions to what's already happened.  After what's left of the Avengers (now including Captain Marvel by the way, so hopefully we all did our homework) is reassembled at headquarters a quick reckoning is done.  Tony rages at Steve Rogers about how they couldn't save everyone, and they weren't ready.  Thor pouts in a corner.  Days go by searching for Thanos, until they finally get a reading on some far-off planet.  The team head out.  They find Thanos living a quiet life in a hut.  They attack.  He has no guards, no weapons, and no gauntlet.  Turns out he used it to destroy itself, in order to be sure no one could undo what he did.  So Thor kills him and they slump back off to Earth.  So ends a surprisingly underdone story for the mad titan Thanos, who finally got what he wanted but then didn't think (or didn't care) about how to live in the universe he'd created.  That's basically the end of the first film, and now the second film actually begins.  It's five years later.

There of course was a lot of speculation about how the Avengers were going to fix what Thanos did, and everyone who put their money on time travel gets a prize!  Adding to superheroes and superpowers we now, thanks to Ant Man, have the ability to go back in time.  You'd think there'd be a direct line from there to a re-do of the final battle in Wakanda but not so fast, because Marvel wants to break the rules of time travel.  It has always been that if you could travel back in time you could interfere with the flow of events, that was kind of the point of time travel, but this movie says no, "scientifically" (pfffft) if you travel back in time you're simply visiting/creating a different timeline of events, so it's no point traveling back 5 years.  Instead a time-heist is planned.  Since Thanos destroyed the glove, it's decided to travel back to the various times when they knew where the infinity stones were, steal them and bring them back to the present.  Then they can create a new glove, bring back all the dead people across the universe, and Thanos's plan is defeated.  The Avengers are re-recruited and the plan is put together.

I'm unhappy Marvel want to mess with the established rules of time travel, but in the end it's a fantasy film series and they clearly wanted a mechanism that would allow the various characters to team up and do various hi-jinks by revisiting a lot of the older movies.  Endgame is as much about allowing the characters a final honor lap of their old stomping grounds as it is about stopping Thanos.  So we have a lot of cute scenes of these characters we've gotten to know so well going on one last trip.  It's pretty fun.  It's an indulgent movie but you can't help but figure they've earned it.  Finally after multiple twists and turns, and losing Natalie which was a bit of a shock given how long her character has been in this franchise, the gauntlet is assembled, used, and we have a montage of people coming back into existence after being gone for five years. 

However Endgame cannot end without a fight, and Thanos from the past has found out about the plan, and he is pissed.  He brings his fleet and army through a time hole that evil-Nebula opens up, destroying the Avengers compound and setting up the final battle nicely.  And so battle is met, and we have a final long glorious battle scene as various Avengers team up and combine to take on Thanos's army of disposable monsters and soldiers.  It's all pretty terrific stuff.  Eventually though, the time comes for the Gauntlet to be used again.  Either by Thanos who is simply going to kill everyone in the universe this time, take that you ungrateful bastards, or by the Avengers to take out Thanos and his army.  And after a bit of sleight of hand Tony gets to make the sacrifice.  It works, and Thanos is yet again defeated, but it was to much for Tony and he has a touching death scene.  Further cementing how final the film is, Captain America himself then decides to nip off and live a life in the past with Peggy, meaning he's now an old man.  Hulk has finally found himself, and Thor has given up finally on being a King of Asguard and is going off with the Guardians for some fun. 

And so ends a significant series of interconnecting stories and characters in the Marvel universe over the last eleven odd years.  The Avengers will continue of course, there's so much money to be made there was always going to be a next phase.  Whether it'll be as good as this one will rely on the characters and how they're used, which is always a tricky task.  I have my doubts they can get the same lightning to strike again but there's always a chance the new characters and stories can light things up again.  Four gritted teeth out of five.


- peace out